Innovative Communications

The HP Way of applied to start-ups, 50 years later

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Tue, 04 May 2010 12:52:00 +0000

My long time at HP has been immensely rewarding but it is time to say goodbye. I had the chance of working alongside many smart and dedicated people, from employees in field offices, engineers in product divisions and scientists at HP Labs . I am proud I help launch at least 6 new businesses that impacted positively the lives of millions. These ranged from geographic expansion in Africa, Europe and Middle-East, developping healthcare, clinical information or telemedicine systems, helping to deploy the first mobile networks and support broadband telecommunication services and in recent years piloting mobile multimedia applications. In recent months I had the chance to meet again former colleagues around the world from all these periods and it is great to reflect on our team contributions.

So, why do I leave ? The answer is that it is for the same reasons I joined and stayed on despite two other career temptations : passion for new ideas and great people. Now, I believe that experience of the HP Way will apply even better to technology start-ups than it can to corporate multinationals. The HP Way was formulated by David Packard in 1957 . He summarized it in an exchange we had the last time we met in 1995 in Geneva :

Claude : it has been an honour for me to work at the Company you founded
Dave : not at all, it has been an honour for me to have employees like you serving at my Company

It was just another practice of the HP Waythat Dave described in his book published the same year. The following quotes are very relevant 50 years later and remain benchmarks for young entrepreneurs :

...an egalitarian, decentralized system that came to be known as 'the HP Way.' The essence of the idea, radical at the time, was that employees' brainpower was the company's most important resource....

... nothing has contributed more than the policy of management by objective. MBO is the antithesis of management by control .... it refers to a system in which overall objectives are stated and agreed upon, and which gives people the flexibility to work in ways they determine best for their own areas or responsibility. It is the philosophy of decentralization in management and the very essence of free enterprise.

In more detail, the HP Way included the following 7 corporate objectives

Profit. To recognize that profit is the best single measure of our contribution to society and the ultimate source of our corporate strength. We should attempt to achieve the maximum profit consistent with our other objectives.
Customers. To strive for continual improvement in the quality, usefulness, and value of the products and services we offer our customers.
Field of Interest. To concentrate our efforts, continually seeking new opportunities for growth but limiting our involvement to fields in which we have capability and can make a contribution.
Growth. To emphasize growth as a measure of strength and a requirement for survival.
To provide employment opportunities for HP people that include the opportunity to share in the company's success, which they help make possible. To provide for them job security based on performance, and to provide the opportunity for personal satisfaction that comes from a sense of accomplishment in their work.
To maintain an organizational environment that fosters individual motivation, initiative and creativity, and a wide latitude of freedom in working toward established objectives and goals.
Citizenship. To meet the obligations of good citizenship by making contributions to the community and to the institutions in our society which generate the environment in which we operate.

I noted earlier my thoughts on Bill Hewlett’s approach to product innovation in a 2008 blog and history details are posted here. There is also a lot to learn from HP's founders bottom-up engineering approach. Not always 1st to market with an idea, but definitely adding added value in price/performance or usability. To discuss this, I intend to invite Chuck House, an HP alumni from these early day to present his new book in my region of Switzerland. And I can't help recall that Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak among others were HP alumni, who learned from these principles and expanded beyond.

So with these lessons from the past, I look forward to my next big thing, a meaningful entrepreneurial activity helping start-ups in Switzerland, on EPFL and beyond as business angel investor and interim management. And I will keep one foot in the mobile communications world as part of my support to Mobile Monday Switzerland.

Surfing the Mobile web, Barcelona

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Fri, 19 Feb 2010 10:00:00 +0000

Surfing on mobile web at MWC2010
One more time I attended the mobile industry annual party. It's been over a decade by now, good time to measure the change since 2000 - most of the promises have been held : subscribers grew 10X, smart phones exceed 50% of shipments, bandwidth is finally there with 3G bundles and first LTE deployments live, mobile web nearly ubiquitous (Ovum estimates : 95% of traffic is data, 60% of which HSPA). Not everybody in the industry was partying tough : Google has entered the game, opening the show while Nokia and HP were quietly exited the main exhibition to organize side parties. Overall, business and climate was cold and rainy in Barcelona this year. In summary :

Money and innovation is moving to applications.
Cloud and web players dominate the battlefield.

Money and innovation is moving to applications.
Innovation could be seen mostly at the edge. I attended the Mobile premier awards (MPA) masterminded by Rudy de Waele where 11 out of 49 start-up nominees were awarded prizes by the 500-audience and official judges. Layar won two awards for their augmented reality platform, Taxipal and PercentMobile won awards from the MoMo community and audience respectively. At the Fira, I spent some time in Hall 7 was re-named App Planet, featuring a start-up App Garage and developer workshops. I supported there a HP Labs project Friendlee nominated for an RCS innovation award. The start-up meeting from Finland and Israel organized by FinnMob and IMA was great. At the forefront of user experiences, augmented reality was demonstrated by 20 start-ups at a showcase organized by Vodafone, and PEREY Research & Consulting. VCs were attending these applications events including Accel Partners (check Rich Wong's pres at MPA) , Endeavour vision, Bluenove, Blumberg Capital, Sofinova Ventures . One VC advised on applications in adjacent industries : "these opportunities will exceed those of LTE infrastructure; find them by following your passion". This view is reflected in the drop of VC investment in traditional telecoms in 2009 : $1.6 billion, down 33% from 2008 and only peanuts were served at start-up parties ;-)
On the operator side, 24 of GSMA members anounced the Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), an open industry platform for mobile app developers to reach a market of 3 billion subscribers. They endorsed standards from the The Joint Innovation Lab (JIL) group created by Asian operators in 2008 including SDK, widgets and BONDI . On the vendor side, Sony Ericsson announced their creation platform for facilitating user generated content.

Cloud and web players dominate the battlefield.

Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s keynote, - timidly read from a script as is if uncertain how to address legacy telco audiences- emphasized “Mobile First” strategy, featuring Flash and speech recognition : "the job here is to create magic" . 60,000 handsets running Android system are shipping/day (20 million this year). One Android device I previewed with Allen Prohitis is HP's Airlife 100 smartbook anouncing a 10" touch screen, Qualcomm's Snapdragon-3G chipset and 12 hours battery - interesting departure from Win7 within the HP Mini family. HTC announced 2 Android handsets : the HTC Legend and HTC Desire.
What was the industry reaction ? Nokia's CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo responded with a partnership with Intel to release Meego, the union of 2 Linux platforms – Intel’s Moblin and Nokia’s Maemo . OPK modestly stating "the MeeGo platform is set to revolutionize computing" but you will have to wait : a baseline in March for Intel Atom and N900 but other devices later in the year.
Which wave should a developer surf on, in the Android, Chrome, Maemo, Windows ocean ? Symbian Foundation just launched Symbian^3 an open source platform and a developer forum. And Microsoft announced its Windows Phone 7, a complete new release. Chip vendors such as ARM, Qualcomm, TI will also edge their alliance bets. I am a fan of BONDI, a smaller initiative for the mobile web which aims at reducing mobile browser fragmentation by releasing W3C-compliant widget APIs as the application run-time for mobile devices. They released version 1.1 at MWC on a number of different O/S including Android. And Opera announced Mini 5 beta is support to Android, complete with newest features that had been late to arrive.

Rich communications in the cloud ?

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 18:00:00 +0000

Informa ‘s rich communications conference was held in November 2009. I joined a panel there, and participated to follow-on meetings of GSMA RCS initiative and developer challenge. My findings :

Standard-based integration is becoming a nice-to have feature as the cloud provides better ways to reach critical mass and ROI.
Several solutions deliver innovation beyond industry standards, to offer the best of both worlds.
New devices such as net-book, internet appliances and social network behavior will drive the evolution of next generation communications.

Standards are only nice-to-have features
No one disputes that interoperability made SMS successful and enabled MMS modest penetration (Graham Trickey of GSMA gave an example : "MMS had 50% growth in USA since interoperability agreements in 2008". The challenge is that since the iPhone launch, and Web.20 web solutions, there is not much demand for applications with limited feature set, coming late. Even in emerging markets, users are impatient and tech-savy. So what is the status of telecom industry standard initiatives :

GSMA has been promoting applications through RCS pilots, and enabling technologies such as OneAPI for networks and OMTP BONDI in handsets.
Why did RCS take 2 years before doing pilots ? The investigation was done in 2007, release 1 published at the end of 2008, release 2 adding the support of net books was published for the market trials in 2009. Trials were done in 6 countries : Italy (TIM ; only 50 internal users although TIM has 30’000 of its mobile community bundle Tribu) , Spain (Telefonica), Portugal (Optimus) , Korea (SKT with Pajama5 ) , France (Bouygues Telecom, Orange, SFR ; with 2 handset manufacturers). RCS release 2 offers content sharing (videos, images during a voice call), messaging (chat) and network address book. But only the release 3 will include social network integration. GSMA is currently chaired by Aude Pichelin and in order to get wider adoption of its approach it has launched the RCS developer challenge , supported by GSMA officers including John Darnbrough.
The technology competition from the Web is huge and many are skeptical about the chances of success of telecom industry standards . Paolo Simoes, from TMN Portugal says bluntly : "RCS delivers the lowest common denominator and lacks any Wow! effect, like previous attempts : Mobile IM, push to talk, ...". Providing another comparion, Roberto Minerva suggested : " developers would prefer the Skype API". My view is that despite rumors of Open source , this is focused on 3rd party scripts and applications to control Skype UI. Alan Quayle provides a summary of challenges in recruiting web developers in his blogs and reports on network APIs. To be fair to RCS, we note that web communication applications are still equally fragmented or often undocumented. And note that web apps still refer to the dial-tone paradigm to describe presence management Twitter, Google Lattitude.
Operators have recognized that cloud-based or “over the top” solutions will dominate operator-led solutions.
Traditional revenue models of operators don’t seem to be valid for new communication services ? Traditional models were based on managed services with subscription and usage fees. Cloud computing, voice services such as GTalk and Skype or social applications like Twitter, Facebook and web social networks have changed the economics. Commenting on this for TMN Portugal, Paolo Simoes commented “SMS and MMS rates are decreasing by 2 digit percentage annually and therefore no business model based on communication usage increase is sustainable; flat rates are going down from 90$ to 20$ and no additional market stimulation is necessary; lastly no monetization of presence is possible when Facebook and MSN status are free”. His advice : “if you cannot beat them [Facebook, Yahoo!, Google,…] join them”. And he sums up his prediction : “ it took 14 years to deploy 3G, 7 years for 3G, it will take less than 4 years for LTE and the move for an all IP application infrastructure – in 2015 China Mobile will acquire Vodafone and the dominant application will be some kind of FaceTube from China ;-)”.

Vodafone appears to have done a similar analysis, promoting Facebook and other cloud social network but adding value added in the form of service aggregation in the Vodafone 360 application. But again, to be fair, the monetization of Twitter and Facebook is equally challenging, and we have witnessed the 75% valuation drop of Skype, despite their phenomenal growth.

Cool applications : innovation and standards
What makes me optimistic is that the applications coming out are nice. There after all may be a smoother transition from telecom 1.0 industry standards to meet mobile Web 2.0 . Here are some examples :

Cross-device social communicator :
Movial Communicator was deployed by Optimus as part of a youth community services branded TAG, a mobile subscription at a flat rate of 10 Euros . Nuno Lopes Gama from Optimus reported that TAG has 100’000 users in the 15-25 years age group and reports good usage of the PC Webphone for voice and SMS . However there has been little demand for VoIP or messaging from the Enterprise sector, as they already have low prices for voice calls and more advanced professional messaging (from Microsoft). Movial has deployed applications with 15 operators on multiple handsets (Symbian, Maemo, Android) and provides integration with music services, social networks (Facebook), UGC sharing ( Flickr, Daily motion) and participated to RCS French trial (with Bouygues). It also offers a hosted services with Haloya .
Smart phone idle screen communications:
SKT Telecom Pajama 5 was launched after SK Telecom measured that 62 % of calls were to less than five numbers ( 29 % of these to one person and 51% to top 3 called parties). The service let’s you designate 4 buddies and adds : expression with wallpapers, animated messages , A-GPS friend finder , feed from SNS sites (Cyworld, Facebook). The service attracted 350,000 youth subscribers in 3 months and is being extended to more participants in 2010 . For the general market, SKT has launched mobile IM interoperability with other operators, growing usage 20X in 2009 ( 60% of subscribers have mobile IM-enabled handsets but 200’000 use it). This project was part of HP’s open innovation programs and included partners like Eluon .
Ambient communications “ :
HP Labs team submitted Friendlee to the RCS innovation challenge as a concept to demonstrate the automatic generation of a social network. Phone contacts are dynamically weighted by user’s mobile communication frequency, duration and location records. It leverages the mobile network intelligence to shows your friends and preferred businesses on a map, highlighting your closest friends or implicit recommendations. The more the user calls or sends SMS to a friend, the higher up he or she will be on the user’s list. And obviously, this can be linked to Facebook and other SNS.

Usage of devices and social applications
What trends will influence the evolution of these services ?

Net books adoption : it is clear that net-books, tablets, photo frames are starting to bring new ideas into the mobile communications space. An estimated 5 million net books were shipped in 2009, a 30% growth rate from 2008. Major manufacturers include Acer, Asus, HP and Samsung ( (the last two entrants growing over 30%). Subsidized prices start around 200$ for models like HP mini 311. This is not yet a big adoption compared to smart phones but net-books are a market catalyst in terms of mobile rich communications functionality.
Mobile social networks : Christine Perey authored two editions of Informa’s mobile social network comprehensive worldwide analysis. They forecast that the users of mobile social networking will grow from 8% at the end of 2008 to 25% by 2013, generating over 6 billion $ by that date (from subscriptions, advertising and transactions) . Another trend is that all web communities are mobilizing and that the functionality is “creeping” in every other application category. Perey research is now researching mobile augmented reality, a particular category that also provides a direction for very elaborate form of group interactions using advanced device capabilities together with cloud computing resources.
Youth market trends : in recent months I have been working with C:Insight on segmentation and ethnographic analysis of emerging mobile markets like India, Africa and South-East markets which could prove market-changers in the domain of rich communications. Some data on mobile youth users :

300 million in China, Taiwan and Hong Kong
219 million in South-East Asia
124 million in Western Europe
146 million users in Latin America
60 million in Central and Southern Africa
Youth users in the US, UK and NL use thier mobile 1.5 hours / day ,
Asian Youth use it 3.5 hours / day.
34% of youth bought their mobile phones only to send SMS.
Teens are sending/receiving 100 SMS messages 3,000 / month.
16 % of youth subscribers have smartphones.
57% of youth in India browsed on their mobile phones

It is interesting to note that even in rural India, users are tech-savy and interested in loading applications. Market-education and communication will be essential to achieve viral marketing . For example campaigns for Vodafone value-added services “ZooZoo” could be as important as the service itself.
Network driven innovation : Diane Meyers authored Infonetics research on RCS market in 2009. She estimates there will be over 1 million subscribers in 2010, 5 M in 2011 and M by 2013, deployed over 3G networks with an IMS core. It is clear that there has been some delays and these estimates are quite tentative. In addition one could question whether IMS or cloud services will become core to RCS, perhaps a mix of the two as my discussions seemed to indicate. Infonetics rightly indicated early on that the operators challenges were not only service interoperability but capability to innovate to grow the market.

Innovations at ITU Telecom World 09

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Fri, 09 Oct 2009 13:00:00 +0000

ITU's Telecom World 2009, Geneva, October 9
Popular debates at ITU events tend to be policies, regulation, economy. This year the event attracted 18,000 visitors, a modest number due in part to the economy but probably also competition with other telecom trade shows in Europe. Visitors flocked to the Swiss stand, which proved to be one of the show’s most popular, covering 700 m2 on two levels and promoting the region’s excellence by highlighting thirty innovative companies and organizations based there. I went instead to meet friends at start-ups such as :

Axelprod machine to machine mobile communication
AxSionics ID management
Adeya secure mobile communications
id Quantique layer 2 communication encryption
Klewel video content management
Les alchimistes call center interconnection software
Netguardians network and system event management
Sensometrix : biometric security access
Sensorscope mobile weather and environmental monitoring
Osmosys secure mobile messaging and applications
Ozwe interactive multimedia user interfaces
Wisekey information and communications security

Frederic Kaplan co-founder of Ozwe invited me to play with his QB1 machine. I experienced the easy interaction with music with gesture-based interfaces and touch. I proved a poor user of the ball games. Later, with Sid Arora of Mobile Monday Switzerland I participated to a short web cast with our friend Tanguy de Lestré from Mobile Monday Brussels :

Incubating innovation at MIT, 23 September 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 18:00:00 +0000

Lab to market workshop at MIT
The session was led by Wim Sweldens, Vice President Alcatel-Lucent Ventures (ALV). He is also inventor of wavelet compression that led to JPEG2000. ALV is a corporate venture-capital fund for scientists within the Bell Labs. Sven told us the story behind Alcatel's OmniAccess 3500 . It started when an inventor (Dimitrios Stiliadis) submitted the idea to ALV incubation project nicknamed Evros within 2007. The initial idea was a laptop card with a VPN, single-sign-on and WLAN/3G capabilities. But the improvement came from an IT staff who understood how to make it a remote laptop control by adding : battery and OS, remote wipe/lock as well as remote application management. As another example of a "hobby" that turned into a "big" idea he quoted Linus Torvalds posting

Aug 25, 1991 usenet : comp.os.minix
“What would you like to see most in minix?“:
Hello everybody out there using minix — I’m doing a (free) operating system (just a hobby, won’t be big and professional like gnu) ....

Responding to his questions, the audience suggested 10 key points for innovation :

Culture (of innovation)
Failures (entrepreneurship is about risk, failure is a temporary state)
Prototyping (permanent beta : Linus Torwald turned to users to get feedback ),
Customer relevance (unmet needs, as with Kindle launch with Sprint or the whole net neutrality debate : consumers want it)
Scalability (cloud, fast market adoption),
Collaboration (about teams Swelden quoted "who 1st, then what" from Jim Collins, co-author of Built To Last, a study of companies that exceed their industry [success factors include : persistence over many years, right people on board and the wrong people off board before strategy, CEOs from within their own ranks and not from the outside]he says that small teams of A-players is the secret of venture investment).
Marketing (targeting, creating an ecosystem value-chain, no linear go to market process is possible in a Web 2.0 world, you need innovation at every single step including in marketing value chains)
Ideas (protection with patents or better by fast execution),
Strategy (technology + business innovation, Robert Reich in the Future of Success writes "the geek needs a shrink" to understand and opportunity),
Governance and regulation (pay attention to government incentives, regulation particularly in health care or in P2P "over the top" content management)

Commenting this audience list Wim distilled it down to one single element :

People
People have the culture, include customers of innovation, define strategy, ensure collaboration. "If you focus on the people, you will innovate"

Video of Wim Sweldens at Emtech09.

"Innovation = Invention + Commercialization", MIT Entrepreneurship Center
The workshop was kept lively by Kenneth (Ken) Morse, founder of MIT Entrepreneurship Center who made frequent "cold calls" with the audience. Participants contributes the following keywords on innovation : "the guts to try something new and tenacity to stay on ", "passion, relentless listening to customers", "cheaper and better ways to meet needs", "new ways of doing things...and that somebody will pay money for ".

Ken had listed his own success factors for innovation and yes he agreed " they sum up to People"

Attitudes
Passionate behavior
Management talent
Flexibility in small organizations
Product quality and speed to market
Patents and sustainable advantage
Quality investors
Location clusters of excellence

Here are some comments that were exchanged :

Attitude, passion, management (points 1-3)

Regulation is enemy of innovation. He challenged financial controllers with Howard Stevenson's definition of innovation : pursuing an opportunity beyond the resources available today "we'll worry about the money later..."
Be willing to be Unusual/Unconventional, "break the harmony"
As key factor for attitude : parent(s) who are entrepreneurs - "Violate labours laws and get your 8-year old kids involved in your company" and practical, real world experience before, during and after university studies.
You need an “A” Team –“3K” experience (know the market, know people, be known in the market) . But "be ready with equity to give, if they don't want equity, you don't want them".
"Recruit, Support, and Celebrate “Weird” people who are results-oriented, relish change, and have very fast clock speeds".

Organizations (point 4)

Closely held (family owned) businesses are outperforming public companies (that was also the case of IBM and HP as long as founder's families were involved).
Corporate business units are outstanding at incremental improvement (HP laser printer and ink-jet businesses had 20% / year improvement for 20 years).
"Open innovation" is important as described by Henry Chesbrough of UC Berkeley . But Ken"OI is not the only game in town".

About product, speed, patents (points 5-6 )

Our world has the ability to adopt and deploy faster and faster. He showed the technology adoption curves.

You have to decide if your product is going to compete on price (Wallmart )or on innovation (Apple, HP for many years, Goolge) or customer intimacy (IBM, Mc Kinsey,... hotels HP these days)
If you are in a big company do not despair "big pockets but short arms". But you have to challenge your company policy : "Can it embrace high risk ventures?" 6 out of 10 startups projects are shut down ; 1-2 are tremendous successes". Be prepared to change adverse reactions, this is the reason people join big companies.
Ken gave the example of HP who as a corporation invested 1B$ in laser printers and one month later another 1B$ into the competing inkjet. That started as a bet on radical innovation but from then on it was an incremental game. "Continue relentlessly recruit A-players and invest, you will continue to dominate".

Investment and location (points 7-8)

How to get funding ? "The best source of funding is the customer. Don't ask VCs, rather go and meet them to tell them that you are cash positive and growing".
This is also valid if you operate inside a corporation : " the best stage gate is a purchase order. - don't ask the committee, contaminate the process with the voice of the customer".
Clusters of innovation and locations have been analyzed by the Monitor Group.

Overall, the workshop was a teaser for MIT's course on corporate venturing and for the entrepreneurship course Ken teaches in Europe at Delft University of Technology, in Europe. The Center acting Director, Bill Aulet Managing Director, participated in another panel session.

Connected people user experiences, MIT

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Wed, 22 Apr 2009 23:30:00 +0000

Bill Moggridge, Founder IDEO, MIT September 23, 2009
Bill Moggridge's presentation entitled Contexts for design in a connected world was a catalog of examples. He opened it with a statement on design " it is about people, environment and the world in which we live".

He illustrated differences in people with the example of an early mobile payment system at a vending machine in Japan. It showed a user respectful of machines and happy to fiddle and push keypads. Japanese are trained to this during their long commute to work, but they would not talk much. Oppositely, he said Americans would enjoy phone conversations or voice-activated applications while driving their car.

The social environment is changing too : "in the the previous century, we designed things, in the current century we design for health". "Architects were designing buildings and now they design social interaction spaces". And we now look at social impact around the world. For example IDEO designed tools to help design for those "at the bottom of the pyramid" (the less developed world). These tools are available on-line, the work was sponsored by the Gates foundation.

He commented on designing for sustainability: "that used to be about materials but now about it is about designing lifestyles". We looked at a video of Tangible Earth, an interactive digital globe designed by Shin-ichi Takemura to visualize global warming and other changes occurring in real-time or in the future on the planet.

Space, people and prototypes

Space : "you cannot live in a Dilbert's cubicle and cooperate". Ideo's project spaces are informal stickies, photographs dedicated to project. Cafes areas, brainstorms

People : understanding people and insight on potential products. IDEO has summarized 51 methods for analyzing people interactions on a deck of cards. One of them : observation is key
- Look : have teams stay when it is happening, like a fly on the wall
- Ask : foreign correspondents around the world provide 24 hours response
- Try : get people to try prototypes "wear thick glove when using phones in cold weather"

Prototypes, how to build them ?

Shop , build mechanics, build electronic lab

Screen design with Adobe Flash and CS Director

Use even simpler mock-ups

Enact situation with improvised theatrical behavior

The theme of the presentation was very similar to stories in Bill Moggridge's book "Designing interaction" where he introduces 40 case-studies from designers, describing the evolution from inspiration to products.

Cameraphone applications, Zurich

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 17:00:00 +0000

Mobile Monday Switzerland at ETHZ, April 6, 2009
Christine Perey, of Perey Research introduced the subject by explaining that with the installed base of camera phones, voice/SMS are more the only. Some application examples include :

Mobile phone to capture meta-data around images.
Mobile augmented reality (AR) which is the world plus what you want to know about it.
MIT Media Lab SixthSense wearable projection computer project

Juha Laurila from Nokia research center in Lausanne gave an introduction on their work in mobile augmented reality. As a result of camera phones penetration, Nokia is the de-facto largest camera manufacturer in the world. They see it as magic lenses to annotate the view of the world. Sensors such as GPS, compass, accelerometer information to pictures.

One example is 3D vision of Helsinki. Nokia Image Space allows users to upload Geo-tagged photos with a strong community aspect. The technology consists of a mobile client for photo capture/upload and a browser to review experience. Nokia Image Space is one demonstration of tagged photos with a strong community aspect.

Another mobile augmented reality based on image recognition. For example a tourist can get information on public building by taking a picture. It can also help land mark navigation - the same way human use to say : "turn left after the church".

Daniel Wagner from Graz University of Technology showed numerous demos of how a mobile phone can provide a virtual view on the real world. Numerous augmented reality projects have been developed in software on ARM chips and can now be implemented with accelerators on mobile phones. The industry is entering the commercial phase and there is investment for that. The future looks good he says. Some of their demos show the tracking of objects with feature recognition (these include “Invisible Train” and “Virtuoso” projects).

Herbert Bay, CEO of Kooaba
Kooaba helps connect the real world (for example a picture of the ETH building) with the web (a list of landmarks or information sources). The mobile service is available live now with a database of a few million objects (Media covers, cinema posters, landmark buildings, magazine pages are well recognized). Snapping a picture of an object is enough to learn all about it. The system recognizes objects in still pictures and links the user directly to web content or other digital services. Some of the challenges are scalability and implementation on cloud computing resources. Herbert also demonstrated recognition of moving pictures.

Roger Fischer,CEO and co-founder of Kaywa
Roger explained how the initial 2D codes success in Japan (since 2003) is progressing to Europe. In Japan QR codes are pervasive from food to entertainment, transport applications. However, there is still a large fragmentation of code standards, QR codes, Data matrix, Aztec Code, Datamatrix, EZcode, QR Code, Semacode, MaxiCode, Optaretc..
Kaywa is providing solutions and services for campaigns with codes for major brands in Switzerland and across Europe. “DokoDare: Places, People, Me,” is a location-based mobile service based on QR Codes.
Roger gave some examples of adoption of the technologies :
Handset Manufacturers

Nokia : Datamatrix, QR Code
Japanese Handsets/Asus (Taiwan): QR Code
Google Android: QR Code, EAN

Organizations

IATA: QR Code, Datamatrix, Aztec
GS1: EAN, Datamatrix, QR Code
OMA: Datamatrix, QR Code

Mindaugas Stonys, Convision
He gave an insight on development and production launch of mobile products based on BeeTagg honeycomb technology. Here's my own beetag logo on the left. Connvision developed a real-time reader for QR-Codes, BeeTaggs and Datamatrix. He showed applications in the media industry : Aftonbladet is Sweden's largest newspaper, 120'000 Swedish users downloaded the BeeTagg reader in 6 months and 2.8 million know about it). Mindaugas indicated prerequisites for monetization of 2D-code applications :

multi-platform
flexible pricing
branding

For further pointers on mobile AR, check Florian Michahelles blog and video playlist.

MIT's entrepreneurship example, February, 2009

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Mon, 30 Mar 2009 08:54:00 +0000

Massachusetts Institute of Technology February 25 - 26, 2009

A sign of hope during the current financial crisis comes from the recent study from "Entrepreneurial impact: the role of MIT" which analyzes the economic effect of MIT alumni-founded companies and its entrepreneurial ecosystem. The report was supported by Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation wand notes that if the active companies founded by MIT graduates formed an independent nation, their revenues would make that nation at least the 17th-largest economy in the world. and with a less conservative estimate of their annual world sales would equal $2 trillion, producing the equivalent of the 11th-largest economy in the world. Herve Lebret of EPFL has posted comments on this survey.

MIT and EPFL Innovation eco-systems

I wanted to see first hand the impact of soft skills on innovation, such as MIT Venture Mentoring Service, started in 2000 by Sherwin Greenblatt, vice president of the MIT Alumni Association, and former first employee of Amar Bose. I attended a workshop organised by its director Jerome Smith and operations manager Roberta McCarthy,(contact).

"We house a portfolio of activities where academics (faculty, students) interact with the business community (entrepreneurs, investors, managers, lawyers) on a frequent basis.
We work to assure that the business community sees the university as welcoming, easy to interact with, a source of new ideas (and deals) and an opportunity to contribute
Experienced investors (angels, venture capital) brings more than capital : board guidance, executive talent, connections to partners... and is wonderful source of role models and mentors"
Lita Nelsen, head of MIT Technology Licensing Office

The key is the collaboration between professionals.
"a venture is more likely to thrive when an idea, a good business plan and an entrepreneur are matched with proven skills and experience; highly qualified mentors find it compelling and rewarding"

Jerome Smith, co-director MIT VMS

MIT VMS currently counts 140 mentors (56% with an MIT background) mentoring 98 active ventures (582 served to date). I recorded part of a panel discussion where MIT VMS mentors and start-up mentees share their cooperation experience.

Some VMS Mentors :

Kathleen (Kathy) Huber, founder/CxO Pico Innovations, Ohia Networks Silver Beech Networks, IronBridge Networks; consultant at First founders
Stan Bryant, former Admiral, US Naval Academy
Connie Stack, currently co-founder ConRoy Corp.
Jerry Socol, former CEO of 5 companies:Filene’s, J. Baker, Buy-Rite Designs, Brandstamp, Fun Designs; currently consulting at Socol group
Josh Kowitt, founder of founded ResFridge at 18, Collegeboxes, named Top 30 Entrepreneur by Inc., blogs here
Stephen Smith, founder Optas, manager at Dendrite International, Dun and Bradstreet, and Thinking Machines.

... and their VMS mentees - entrepreneurs:

Tom Ricciardelli, founder SelecTech, (manufacturing injection molded products using recycled plastic.)
Ben Vigoda, founder Lyric Semiconductor signal processing computation in CMOS, blogs here
Joshua Feast, founder Cogito Health, speech technology applied to behavioral and mental health research.
Alan ...(MIT'05 chemistry), entrepreneur

... more comments from MIT VMS participants:

Entrepreneurs

Tom Ricciardelli : if you feel confused, reach out; mentors give me guidance I can trust; when I started, they helped me get my head together and distill what was best; you own the decision but confidence from a mentors makes a difference; you get back results from such a great team; the team is great at figuring out what works; they were always positive, al lot of genuine enthusiasm; it brings unexpected results, worth its weight in gold.
Ben Vigoda : mentors are like free sandwiches; they are not all in business for making money; they are my impartial sounding board; mentors give non-judgmental enthusiasm.
Joshua Feast : I felt supported; it helped me to avoid making mistakes; I think of the Lyric Semiconductors all the time, even in the bathroom; I can make 6:00 am calls; there is nothing you can loose
Alan (?) : do it at the ideation phase; they gave me business insight; the network has made a huge difference - almost 100% comes from VMS; they have no vested interest; be honest with them, admit, listen to them; they support you , not the company; it gave me to move forward.

Mentors

Alec Dingee, mentor : when we started, fast response to needs ensures the best reputation, we soon had 50 applicants; we don't try to judge whether a start up idea is ridiculous or a breakthrough - we educate entrepremenrs when their idea is plausible and they are committed.
Sherwin Greenblatt : we get a moral commitment from participants to give back when they succeed but we have not yet collected funds
Kathy Huber : I felt it was a honor to be admitted to interviews.
Stan Bryant : treat people with respect; treat differently people to get the best out of them; treat them like they want to be treated (rather than the way you want to be treated)
Connie Stack : Steve Smith is phenomenal; I am learning too; people chemistry takes time
Jerry Socol : I try to get at the level of other mentors, the bar is set high; the more you put in the more you get out; be blunt, people are born to be flexible.

Other start ups

We met other MIT start-ups founders an could give them a 1-minute feedback :

Jason Galvain, founder Artaic, custom mosaic art using robotic precision manufacturing.
E la carte, content for touchscreens and mobile tablets in restaurants to order and pay from the table
Istobe Management
Doug Bright, founder, Istobe, customer analysis software for multi-channel retailers
Kim Blair, founder iclub and Motus: sports and gaming motion capture and visualization
Jerome L. Ackerman co-founder Skelscan, MRI technology for diagnosing osteoporosis and other bone diseases.
Josh Kanner, co-founder Vela Systems, mobile construction project management software
VSpace, 3D audio processing for teleconferences, using stereo to locate participants around as in a face to face meeting.
Zac Warren, co-founder Warren Light Craft , light carbon kayaks.

Mobile world congress wrap-up

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:12:00 +0000

Mobile world congress, Barcelona, February 17-19 2009
A few notes on from the biggest mobile communications show of the year.

Innovative start-ups are still coming out
New user experiences in personal communications
Tapas-enabled networking strong as ever

Innovative start-ups at Mobile peer awards
The other side of MWC, at Palau Musica, I sat on a jury panel with other industry colleagues :
Peggy Anne Salz, of MSearch Groove, Carlos Domingo, Telefonica R&D, Ariel Efrati, Venture Investments, James Whatley, from Spinvox. Mobile Peer Awards complements GSMA's Global Mobile Awardsbecause it focuses on early-stage startups and more informal reviews. You save 500 euros but you'll miss Jamie Cullum at the price giving ceremony. Both awards are nice however. We had an interesting debate after hearing pitches from "emerging start-ups" on communications, content, advertising business models and new devices. Here are some comments on our selection :
PopCatcher from Sweden got our jury award: their pitch is that mobiles should get fresh music every day freely and legally. How many of you have downloaded music last week without checking the rights? Well PopCatcher will listen radio for you, record it and split it into songs in your collection automatically. Our jury debated quite a bit whether that would please the record companies and their layers but anyway we liked having a TiVo of radio. Here is their value proposal:

fring from Tel Aviv won the MoMo community award : 500,000 new users per month worldwide deserves an applause. fringsters talk, chat, and interact with online communities (Facebook, Skype®, MSN®, GoogleTalk, Twitter, and Yahoo!) And fring have done operators deals such as 3UK, Mobilcom. That could have been our jury's choice as an "investor", but we decided that our vote would not add so much value to an already existing success.

Unkasoft Advergaming from Madrid won the audience award: they develop in-games advertising on top of popular video games - they really look at advertising from an end-user usability perspective and have business agreements with Microsoft and others; Perhaps the most important was the fun pitch that Jaime Lanchares, founder and CEO did on stage. This could give ideas to other entrepreneurs.
Aradiom from Istanbul, they provide a portfolio of mobile solutions developed using their own application environment - proven with 400K users; but our jury failed to detect the unique differentiation.
Getjar Networks Lithuania: we all love Getjar's appstore with 10,000 free mobile applications and over 20 million downloads per month; but with so many app stores around our jury foresaw some clouds ahead.
Keynetik from Washington DC: they provide motion SDK and applications for accelerometer enabled mobile; the jury had doubt about the success of the business model, but I like the “rock'n scroll" demo they have on done for the N95.

Mobintech A/S from Copenhagen: the company delivers display glasses to watch live Mobile TV; our jury missed a unique mobile proposition and a differentiation with competitors.
Soonr from Silicon Valley: they offer simple, secure cloud computing file management (35 types) across device (including iPhone, PCs and net printers) and networks, targeting SMB in particular; the jury agreed it's a great value but perhaps in risk of commoditisation.
In the start-up category, with a different jury team, Babajob.com took both community and jury awards on the Monday night’s Mobile Peer Awards in Barcelona.
Babjobs.com from Bangalore : is job website and mobile portal dedicated to connecting informal sector workers - cooks, maids, drivers, guards, etc.- and employers to India ; it's great to see applications that encourage development and economy !
GSMA Mobile innovation global awards
Mobile innovation global award competition took place over the year. The winners are :
Cootek, China won the champion title: software keyboard to accelerate typing a super-charged T9
Intivation, Netherlands : solar panel charger on the back of handsets for developing countries
Mobile Nordic, Norway : mobile CLI including directory search, SMS previews
WorldMate, USA a travel itinerary management application with mobile alerts

New user experiences in personal communications
It's not really new but 7 years after MMS launch, the industry tries to deliver platforms from what users want (sharing with friends using phone address book and social network contacts). I liked the [5] user trials feedback presented during the GSMA RCS workshop, the cross-device demo by Victor Donselaar of Movial and Aude Pichelin from Orange who serves as RCS chair and announced some more cross-operators trials. Why would it succeed this time ? RCS has 60 companies involved, mobile IM adoption in BRIC countries exceeds 10%, mobile social networking exceeds 20% in the youth segment. But of course their are challenges : Nokia partnership with Skype, new solutions as Voxmobili' s social address book on Google's Android, Sony Ericsson's silence on RCS handset release dates.

Tapas-enabled networking strong as ever
Yes, I also love Barcelona tapas and side events : Swedish beers was crowded, Bel Chica GoMo News blender party with Benna Roberts full of insider information, Nokia party intimate and I got the chance to meet nice professionals like Sonia Jain of Bluegiga (just after she told "OPK" all about their brand as viewed by young women and certainly we avoided discussing Bluetooth access solutions). And coming-out of the sauna at Hotel 1898 to attend TechCrunchTalk panel on mobile eco-systems featuring Mike Butcher and Peter Vesterbacka was fun. See you next year at the same place...

User experience drives business

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 20:00:00 +0000

User experience design, London December 12th 2009
A generation of engineers as mechanics of the communications industry (building network, 3G, WiFi and smart phones). The new generation are pilots taking the driver seat of the business which is user experience. This phase of innovation requires more psychology than technology. And new players are setting the trend : Apple, Google, Yahoo! They built their DNA around understanding of usage contexts and behaviors and delivering more than visual UI or efficient bandwidth. They offer end to end experiences across multiple touch points. How do they do it ? A few examples gathered during industry workshops in London :

Understand users
Generating persuasive ideas
Compelling user interaction
Delivering the experience

Understanding users

Mirjana Spasojevic runs ethnographic consumer studies for Nokia Research and previously at HP. She keeps asking the : What are people are doing on web? Here are a few answers :

Jeanine : accesses Yellowpages.com from Sprint to find phone numbers and addresses. Why ? it is cheaper than 411 ($1.49)
Fred: Checks and trades stocks at work on his Blackberry. Why ? his company PC is monitored and he doesn’t want his boss to know about it.
Christina : orders pizza while on her way home. Why ?: So that she doesn’t have to talk and waste time
Kim : “I would feel naked without it [my phone].” – Why? he would feel “vulnerable and disappointed about lost opportunities”.
Jonathan : “Should I buy this shirt?” Why ? to get friends advices and make solo activities social.
Josephine : “I text my friends on the tube coming from work.” Why ? a remedy for loneliness.
Nicky “… this was a picture taken of me and my friends, I emailed it to my Sidekick.” Why? as visual reminders of who she is, to reinforce a sense of identity and relationships. This behavior is continuous and ritualistic. There is a compelling emotional link that motivates people. Sending images, choosing an avatar or a login name – these are all acts of presentation and self representation.

Michael von Roeder, head of UE, at Vodafone lists the following methodologies : managed panels, random trials, life tracking, network analysis, user testing, testing with users, ethnographic contextual enquiry, participatory design.

User research tools for real-time collecting, filtering, presenting and sharing the data from usage of the phone are available from The Astonishing Tribe .

Generating persuasive ideas

Kath Straub chief scientist at Human Factors focuses on mobile persuasion. The goal is to understand why users WILL do versus CAN do. They want to do something in their life not on their phone or PC. We need to identify blocks and barriers : they don’t need another toy, are afraid about security, learning effort, wasted time. But they can benefit from handset playing the role of connector, concierge, coach.

Ian Curson, Vodafone: says "it is important to have the whole company thinking about user experience". One challenge is to help users explore new kinds of experiences: “two people going out”, “browsing maps to find the restaurant”. Mobility can be enhanced: “have you seen someone walking while looking at their iPhone?” Sharing evolved when Youth started to expose themselves.

Another example is O2 Cocoon device, designed to match the music sharing brand of O2 Telefonica in UK. Markus Hohl, head of design at O2 has presented the story of the birth and launch of the O2 Cocoon. Here is the first design by Syntes studio. The final product was released 16 month later. But O2 still admits that it is difficult to measure the value of user experience (ROI / ARPU or churn reduction).

Creating compelling user interaction

Terence Warmbier, from, Immersion says that “design loves technology”. Future handsets will incorporate many UI features such as soft keys, motion control, camera interaction, scroll wheels, GPS, NFC communications, biometrics, proximity and light sensor. On haptics, that provides a touch feedback, he says that “output physics rocks!”

The astonishing tribe also deliver s software to create the Wow! effect. Natural interaction (NI) builds on human understanding of space and objects, reduces cognitive load of the user is reduced using approaches such as

Physics engines, textures, gravity ...
V results of actions mimicking natural world,
“Haptics” interface technology via the sense of touch by applying forces, vibrations and/or motions.

One example is the social pond project which offers a visualization of social communications, address book. Another example is Projecto UI which offers a new way of experiencing music.

Lastly the Cube allows users to twist, tap, rotate, shake to enjoy your music on iTunes.

Francis MacDougall, CTO GestureTek focuses on gesture interaction, enabled by optical tracking or accelerometers and sensors. It has been popularized by the Wii. Applications include bowling swing motion or face exploration such as DoCoMo front facing cameras.

Current devices with motion detection include :
Sony Ericsson K850i : image orientation
Sony Ericsson W910i : image orientation, shake control for music, game, camera
Sony Ericsson W580i : Image orientation, shake control, pedometer
Nokia N95 : orientation control
Nokia 5500 : Pedometer
Samsung SCH-S310 : UI control, music, “write a number in the air”
Samsung V603SH : UI control
Apple iPhone : image orientation, shake control
(Source : Gesturetek)

Jefferson Han of Perceptive Pixel multi-touch sensors demos have been seen several million times on the web.

Risto Lahdesmaki from Idean, also involves users and fine-tunes interactions using low tech : he gives users a piece of wood and observes usage, an approach that had been used for the palm pilot.

Delivering the experience
One example of end to end innovation is 3’s Skype mobile, delivering in 2006 a complete value proposition to for social users : calls to Skype anywhere, low price points, reaching out people not in your address book. Carl Taylor, director of applications at Hutchinson Europe explained the choice of a dedicated handset provided users a single click to call or to access to mobile internet services. In 2009, the INQ1 device integrates native applications such as Facebook, Windows Live Messenger, eBay, Last.fm, Skype, Google and Yahoo.

Audacity in communications

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Sun, 09 Nov 2008 20:00:00 +0000

In March 2007 I told Senator Obama how much he was improving America’s image abroad – he replied that greater changes would come with his election -. Indeed most of the world applauded the president-elect and there was fascination on advanced communications that supported his campaign.

This post collects some information on innovative e-politics, infrastructure and policies for communications from this election campaign.

Innovations in e-politics
Internet adoption by Americans to get political information jumped to 40% of (compared to 31% in the 2004 campaign) as reported by a Pew research on a sample of 2,251 adults. Politicians and supporters could gained easy assistance to move on-line from groups like e-politics or the Institute for Politics, Democracy and the Internet. Obama has been called "tech president," as democrats demonstrated better use of technology than republicans or previous presidential candidates as summarized by Sarah Lai Stirland in Wired
The Webwas the dominant media. Chris Hughes blogs about the future of My.BarackObama site. The site has 1.5 million accounts and this community created 35,000 local groups, hosted over 200,000 events.

Online video in particular stormed the stage: 35% of Americans have watched in absolute time (views * video length)around 15 million hours (Obama 14.5 McCain 0.5) including campaign commercials, debates, interviews, and speeches. David Burch of TubeMogul analyzed the value of this channel.

Social networks and blogs were used by up to 49% of online users: on Facebook and MySpace supporters had 3.6 million pages (Obama 3 McCain 0.6)

Mobile communications included SMS and downloaded applications. SMS alerts from short code 62262 (OBAMA) delivered messages such as this one

Less than a week until Election Day on Nov. 4th! Barack needs your help. REPLY to this msg with your 5 digit ZIP CODE for local Obama news and voting info

Barack Obama sent 3 million SMS to supporters to announce Senator Joe Biden choice for vice president (Mobile marketer). Similarly Rock the Vote, encouraged young people (18-29, 18% of electorate) to vote, using text-messaging campaigns to over 100,000 subscribers and called 13’000 on election day. The Obama campaign also set mobile web site at http://obamamobile.mobi or http://m.barackobama.com . The Mobile future coalition has recorded a panel discussing mobile impact of elections.

Online fundraising and advertising
This campaign broke records in both raising and spending money on media. Nearly 10% of internet users donated money online to candidates in 2008, compared to 3% in 2006, according to Pew Research. In 1999, MoveOn has been the pioneer in internet fundraising (MoveOn had 1 million making 370,000 donations totaling $88 million for Obama'08). In total Democrats raised a record-breaking $780 million in contributions from more than 3 million people, many of whom donated through the web. Republicans raised $340 million. [Federal Election Commission, September]

Obama's campaign spent $293 million on TV ads, according to TNS Media Intelligence. In addition $8 million was spent on Google, Yahoo, Facebook, news Web sites, ad networks, and in-game ad firm Massive. McCain spent $132 million on TV ads during the same period. (campaign spending in media was close to $500 million and 50% of the contributions).

Hopes for a better communication infrastructure

Despite the great shift to online campaign, some issues remain. Pew research noted that 60% of online Americans feel that the internet is a megaphone for extreme viewpoints and a source of misinformation. Responding to this rise of media on the Web, along with the decline of public trust, Newstrust recruited an online community of 8’000 news consumers, journalists, educators and students. They launched an election news hunt initiative in July to recommend the best coverage on the presidential elections, using community review tool.

How can the momentum be sustained beyond the campaign, for 40% of the electorate who went on-line? The technology engaged people to participate in volunteer groups and to organize off-line events that could support better government. But will this all stop when the funding and marketing efforts disappear ? The Obama web site promises to create a new level of transparency, accountability and participation for America’s citizens….Obama will appoint the nation’s first Chief Technology Officer (will it be Google’s CEO ?) to ensure that our government and all its agencies have the right infrastructure, policies and services for the 21st century.

About the competitive infrastructure, the programs focuses on net neutrality and spectrum expansion. Net neutrality through federal legislation will allow all applications, services and devices to operate on all access networks. It announces a review of competition in the wireless space and "smarter, more efficient and more imaginative use of spectrum” meaning the 700MHz auctions. Telecom employees had mixed feelings and contributed $3.5 million to Obama versus $4.1 million to McCain.

There are other good intentions to support innovation in communications. Obama's program promises to expand funding of broadband infrastructure to compare with Japan, South Korea and Finland. And Silicon Valley is likely to benefit from an increase of H-1B non-immigrant visas to recruit engineers and scientists. Tech employees seemed pleased and backed Obama in a 5:1 ratio donating $21 million ($1.5 million at the 20 largest Silicon Valley companies).

Many other blogs have been written on this topic. NewsFeedResearcher offers a consolidation of them.

Are magic phones getting closer ?

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 15:44:00 +0000

Advanced technology is like magic said Arthur Clarke, author of the novel 2001 Space Odyssey . This was echoed in Google’s video of young end-user needs. With so many technology innovations in 2008, mobile applications environments may look like magic. Among others : Apple iPhone and Appstore have been the talk of the town, Adobe’s Open screen project should enable more visual experiences (such as Flash in Brew), Google launch of Open Handset Alliance's Android and G1 phone introduces new players in the game, Nokia acquisition of Symbian and its release into the Symbian Foundation consolidates its importance, LiMo compliant devices have been released, lots of developments have occurred in the mobile browser area such as OMTP launched the BONDi project. How can we summarize this for developers of magic communication services ?

In this post I look at 3 levels of mobile software :
1. Mobile operating systems
2. Application execution environments and ODPs
3. Mobile browsers and widgets

To measure progress toward magic in the last 3 years, I also checked Tom Godber 2007 summary and Andreas Constantinou's 2006 report

Commoditization of operating systems
The fragmentation of platforms is the biggest problem for application developers. Ricardo Varella of Yahoo! summarized bluntly his frustration during September’s Mobile Monday London. This seems to consolidate slowly into 4 smartphone OS choices : Symbian, Windows, Linux, Mac OS. And the trend of royalty-free, open source licensing will help unleash more innovation (except on Microsoft platforms). Gartner estimates the following smartphone market share

Symbian 57%
Windows 12%
Linux 8%
Mac OS 3%
Other 20%

Symbian
The Symbian Foundation platform should soon become available under a royalty-free (Eclipse EPL) license. This will leverage the leading market share(200 million handsets, 235 models 5 OEMs, 4 million developers,9000 applications). Different user interfaces variants exist today, and a choice will have to be made in favor of S60 (Nokia, 60 million) but discarding UIQ (Motorola / Sony Ericsson, 6+ models) and MOAP-S (NTT DoCoMo/Fujitsu/Sharp/Mitsubishi). Nokia will also contribute the Qt UI framework from Qt Software (acquired from Trolltech in June. Ari Jaaksi's Blog provides a good discussion of the merit of the Symbian Foundation.

Windows Mobile
Licensable OS without consortium-contribution model, Windows CE kernel source code under shared source licenses. Windows Mobile 6 was released at the 3GSM World Congress 2007 and currently includes : .NET compact framework, ASP.NET mobile (renders markup on different mobile screens), Silverlight for mobile (leverages code for browser-based applications).

Linux
Android has attracted much of the publicity around mobile Linux, putting some of the more experienced suppliers under its shadow. Rich Miner presented Google’s Android and G1 at EmTech08 future of mobile panel in September, one day after the G1 launch : "platforms should be driven by human factors, created by creative software developers, using contemporary tools". Linux aplication platforms include :

Open Handset Alliance (Google's Android)
LiMo foundation has attracted more than 50 members and 23 commercially available phones.
Other linux mobile contributors include
Access
Azingo
Purple Labs leverages 1 billion browsers installed base (acquired from Openwave)
Wind River Systems (acquired MIZI Research)
MontaVista (Mobilinux, platform)
NTT DoCoMo (MOAP-L platform)
Nokia Maemo an open source product since 2005.

Fragmentation of application execution environments

At the AEE level with virtual machines and visual programming differences across devices, operators and other variants. Several suppliers announced this year their own ideas on how cross-devices should be implemented.

J2ME
Java ME is the market leading platform with over 2 billion handsets today and there is innovation announced for 2009 with a mobile edition of JavaFX allowing rich internet applications (RIAs). But device fragmentation remains and J2ME provides multiple configurations of Java virtual machines or profiles, such as the Mobile Information Device Profile (MIDP) 1.0, 2.0, 2.1 (MSA), the Connected Limited Device Configuration (CLDC) 1.0 and 1.1, and the Connected Device Configuration (CDC). Applications need to target a specific profile, as profiles are assembled for a specific configuration and there are multiple implementation of JSR software libraries including :
Mobile User Interface Customization API for Java ME (JSR 258)
CDC 1.1 (JSR 218)
Foundation Profile 1.1 (JSR 219)
Personal Basis Profile 1.1 (JSR 217) JSR.
Some example of platforms include

Esmertec (Jbed JVM technology is implemented on more than 200 million units including Android platforms)
Aplix (JBlend is embedded on over 650 phone models)
XCE (mostly deployed in Asia)
Google Android JVM, called Dalvik, does not support JAD/J2ME directly but the J2ME MIDP RUNNER for SDK 1.0 allow running J2ME applications without code change.

Adobe Flash
Flash is a a clear favourite for designers and developers and is available on more than 500 million handsets (this is Gartner estimates, Adobe forecasts growth to 1 billion by 2009) and is. Adobe made news in May with by announcing the Open Screen Project. Together with 20 companies (excluding Apple, Google, and Microsoft) it will enable Flash and AIR runtime technology to be updated over the air on phones and mobile Internet devices. Adobe also skips licensing fees for devices and opens up the SWF, QVM, FLV/F4V specs (it does not make them open source) with FlashCast protocol and AIR players to follow. This includes the licences for video codec such as ON2, Sorenson, H.264, ACC and Nellymoser. The main benefit for developers is that Adobe supports a community-driven porting of the full platform. Apple iPhone remains an exception, apparently due to processor speed limitation as disclosed by Steve Jobs in March – though Adobe has a version available for iPhone emulators.

Microsoft Silverlight
Silverlight is Microsoft’s answer to Flash, and comes with great developer tools, even if it does not have the design community. Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform, and cross-device plug-in for delivering RIA .NET based media experiences. Microsoft announced Silverlight for mobile will be available initially on Windows Mobile and Nokia S60. Recently at PDC 2008 Microsoft (Amit Chopra and Giorgio Sardo) demonstrated services that play media, handle gestures, animations and web services and leveraging Visual Studio SDK. Earlier in the year, Microsoft (Amit Chopra) announced the mobile plans at MIX 2008.

Qualcomm BREW
BREW (Binary runtime environment for wireless) runs on BREW RTOS with an installed base of 150 million CDMA handsets from 45 manufacturers. This year it added Flash support to the existing UiOne user interface and APIs for C/C++ and Java. It implements a transaction-based shared revenue business models, claiming 1 billion $ earnings by 2500 developers in 2007.

ODPs to hide fragmentation
On-device portals (ODPs) have progressed in recent years, leveraging mobile clients on AEEs or RIA technology, customized for accessing and interacting with content and information. ODPs typically improve visual user interfaces and response time with caching. But they still implement proprietary frameworks and require OTA download to multiple handsets as we wait for more ubiquitous AEEs or the emergence of mobile web technologies. Some examples include :

BlueStreak Technology MachBlue platform with APIs and SDK, for designing mobile multimedia content delivery.
Streamezzo delivers Universal Software Platform for delivering rich media mobile services on clients compatible with Windows Mobile, Symbian, Brew, Java, Linux, Android, and Apple’s proprietary iPhone O/S. It references 50 customers among mobile operators, handset manufacturers.
SurfKitchen is a full ODP suite for content download, Widget configuration, streaming media, event management
Action Engine ODP platform offers usability, strong OTA update and management, and advertising. Clients run on Java, BREW handsets.
Cibenix On-Device Portal (ODP), launched an idle screen-based dashboard for ONE in Austria
Tech Unified mPortal provides ODP clients for J2ME, Symbian

Innovative browsers environment ?
In 2008, the innovation trend converged towards browsers as mobile execution environment. Over 100 million mobile Ajax browsers have been shipped on smartphones like the iPhone and N95. Mobile browser-based applications leverage all fixed web developments such as client-side scripting and presentation : HTML, XHTML (WAP profiles), CSS, JavaScript, XMLHttpRequest (AJAX), JavaScript extensions for handset APIs. This promises to bring the community of 25 million web developers to mobile.

Two early limitations of mobile browsers are starting to be addressed :
- Access to phone features : there are minimal and incompatible implementations of APIs available. OMTP Bondi initiative issued in August draft specifications for standard APIs that will gives a widget or website control of application invocation, camera, call log, location, storage, messaging, PIM, device status, user interaction this is complemented by a framework for stronger policy and security. OMTP expects compatible handsets to be available in 2009.
- Network limitations : REST/XHTML are heavy protocols not optimized for low bandwidth and error-prone radio network. Proxy based browsers (such as Opera Mini, UCWEB, TeaShark) attempt to optimize network traffic using a network-based proxy server to compresses pages and interactions received by a thin client browser.
Browser platform examples include :

S60Webkit a webkit opensource browser ported to Symbian OS release 3 (S60) by Nokia
Opera Mobile 9.5 has been installed on 100 million phones complemented by Opera Mini (proxy based) and Opera and an SDK.
Teleca offers Obigo for Symbian, Windows, Linux complemented by messaging applications
Access offers NetFront mobile browser (300 million installed in embedded devices)
Mozilla mobile Firefox is available for Windows mobile and Linux platforms.
Safari a webkit opensource browser ported to Mac OS X by Apple
UCWEB Technology UCWEB, Version 6 is popular in China with 11 million downloads
TeaShark a free browser

Mobile widgets
Widgets (window gadgets) offer the most innovative application environments for handsets. Defined in W3C widget 1.0 , Widgets are client-side web application for displaying and updating local or remote data, packaged in a way to allow a download and installation on a client machine or device. Widgets typically run as stand alone applications outside of a web browser (on the idle screen or as other applications). Typical examples are accessories (calendar, address book), information services (weather), they are displayed on menus or icons or the idle screen. Widgets are developed using web technology including HTTP 1.1, SVG, XMLHttpRequest, HTML4, ECMAScript, CSS21. John Puterbaugh provides more comments on mobile widgets on his post Some of the popular environments and libraries include :

WidSets mobile runtime for MIDP 2.0 J2ME, SDK (XML, CSS, Helium), by Nokia in 2006
Bluepulse mobile runtime for MIDP 2.0 J2ME
Yahoo! http://mobile.yahoo.com/gallery mobile runtime for Yahoo! Go 3.0, iPhone, Windows Mobile device, Nokia S60, Blueprint SDK (XML, server-side PHP, JavaSscript).
Opera Widgets
Bling Software http://www.blingsoftware.com, AJAX mobile runtime for MIDP 2.0 J2ME and BREW.
Webwag mobile runtime for MIDP 2.0 J2ME, SDK (XML, CSS, Helium), APIs
Zumobi widgets with zoom-space user interface for Windows Mobile and RIM, spun out of Microsoft
Joemoby WidX mobile runtime for MIDP 2.0 J2ME, compliant with the W3C draft specifications
Bicon over 7000 widgets for RSS feeds, Web searches, microbloging, advertising
Mywidz (beta version) mobile widget editor and community services for end-users
Celltop mobile client framework based on widgets, includes personalized content, messaging, unique design of two rotating cells.

Brainstorming at HP Labs Palo Alto, July, 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Thu, 31 Jul 2008 16:30:00 +0000

With a bunch of colleagues we gathered this summer at HP Labs Palo Alto for brainstorming session on the evolution of communications. I reflected on some innovation processes at HP over the years.

Bill Hewlett's and mobile innovation.
Collaborative approaches to service innovation.
Blue ocean ideas for our next step developments

Bill Hewlett's and mobile innovation.
I stepped into Bill Hewlett's preserved office where in 1970 he supported the company's 1st mobile product, the iconic HP 35 calculator designed to fit his shirt pocket. The story was published in HP Journal, in 1972 : project idea in fall 1970, manufacturing in November 1971, 100'000 units sold in 1972 and HP had to print the following statement : "orders for the HP-35 have exceeded expectations to such extent that a waiting list has been established". I met Bill twice in the 80's to discuss medical technology advances and I remember him as a very strong engineer, curious about many different things. His guiding principle was the famous HP Way stated "a deep respect for the individual, a dedication to affordable quality and reliability, a commitment to community responsibility, and a view that the company exists to make technical contributions for the advancement and welfare of humanity." and the operational implementations was called "management by wandering around". Thedesign of the HP 35 included many aspects : mechanics, electronics, and the original "reverse polish notation" that got adepts addicted. The team included France Rode, Thomas Whitney, Chung Tung, Ed Lijenwall, Dave Cochran and I wonder what they would say about today's smart phones.

Collaborative approaches to service innovation.
HP's current approaches include the innovation program office (IPO), modeled after business plan and start-ups competitions. One of the great program sponsors is Phil McKinney, the CTO of HP's personal systems group and the author of the killer innovations podcast .

Some of Phil's views :

"a perfect storm is coming due to fundamental shifts in impact of technology and user experiences. What are the user experiences ? "Always connected " but not today's hotspot, but something insanely simple" and much more smarter devices. About virtual collaboration, the challenge is that the world is flat : China's top 1% student exceed the number of students in the US so the ability to collaborate worldwide becomes critical."

Another great sponsor is Susie Wee, leading a team of immersive user experience designers who produced HP Halo collaboration room that make it cool to to work from our home town with teams in Tokyo, Bristol, Singapore, Grenoble without burning tons of CO2 nor bearing the pain of lengthy audio conferences.

Blue ocean ideas for communications in the coming yearsI repurposed selected ideas from Andrea Constantinou's mobile mega trends to stimulate our discussions :
1. Telecom industry must choose between 2 options : global cloud service delivery (new) or efficient traffic infrastructure (old)
2. Communication services have 2 levels : personalization (new) or commodity mass-market foundation (old) ; a side effect of this is the impact on monetization which now includes advertising (mobile ~ 5B$ in 2008, on-line ~ 24B$ in 2006) in addition to communications.
3. Content services are transformed by social communications : remixing and sharing experiences, across people, services and devices are the new media.
4. Device software and the value is bubbling up : of course the advanced devices are fueling this, IDC says 170 million units will be shipped in 2008, a growth of 40% so you need advanced OS and application environments. The OS level is also flattened despite fragmentation (Nokia's push will keep Symbian 60% market share but Mac OS X, BlackBerry OS, and Windows Mobile will grow faster). So the value "bubbles up : on-device-portals, idle screen applications, active screen applications, user interface frameworks, - web, widget and AJAX runtimes, trans-coding proxies.
5. User experiences rule the business : we all know this - but in a tech-driven industry we did not practice the process transition towards lead -user driven design processes.
6. OpenSource and cloud computing are destroying network enablers : new web service APIs will mean more wholesale access, Open SER, Open IMS , Asterix will make network elements cheaper and more accessible. The opportunity is that as the football field gets flattened, people who run faster on applications will win a share of the new business. HP is got on the way to become #1 IT company worldwide when it dropped it's operating system (for Unix) and processor technology (for a co-development with Intel) assets into the open space.
The blue ocean strategy of Chan Kim and Renee Mauborgne is another way to look at this I have used for several years. Communication industry is in a red ocean, boundaries are defined by spectrum licenses and market share and pricing influenced by regulators. With up to 6 mobile licenses per country, core communication services and network technology become commodity, leading to cutthroat competition turning the red ocean bloody. A blue ocean communication industry, in contrast, would be a yet unknown market space, untainted by competition where demand would be created rather than fought over. Is there such a way to make the competition irrelevant , executing fast at low cost ? So we ran an idea competiton on the topic, generating hundred ideas on the following themes :

Create and capture new demand : play on social networks and user generated content innovations, embedding communication into devices and services where it has not been possible before. My colleague Agnieszka Thonet suggested cool ideas for my fridge. And other colleagues at HP Labs think about networking the dumbest devices in our homes.

Create uncontested market space : help lead users create new user experiences, new devices, vertical applications, allow market entry with speed and surprise. That's what Apple or Facebook did but there's many more markets to be created. My friend Peter Vesterbacka has focused his ConnectedDay social network services on 4-year old children.

Make the competition irrelevant : perhaps using the freemium business model where communications is a way to merchandize brick and mortar goods. That's the old #800 idea and perhaps Ebay's rationale for acquiring Skype.

Align the whole system of a company in the pursuit of differentiation and low cost : use cloud services delivering all services to consumers and for enterprise communications. Google's has done a lot to start this but there's plenty more. Can we get beyond OpenID and Opensocial for personal/virtual identity management including open access to presence/cell ID from HLRs within secured levels of privacy ? Could we good beyond Paypal with mobile macro, micro and nanopayment communication tools ? Can we have ubiquitous storage, access and sharing of user content across social networks and devices ?

Asking such questions around us got us plenty of new ideas during these hot summer days. After all these are good times for audacity.

Mobile Europe 2.0, July 4th, Barcelona

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Thu, 10 Jul 2008 14:01:00 +0000

Notes from Mobile Europe 2.0 in Barcelona, a great program prepared by Rudy de Waele, Gregory Gorman, Daniel Applequist, Peter Vesterbacka, Gregory Gorman. Rudy’s wrap-up says it all if you want to skip my in-extenso version.

Key challenges for mobile 2.0 include :
> Leveraging up Web 2.0 faster
> Attracting investors despite hurdles
> Bring together operators and service innovators
> Building on successful business models
> Bringing to market innovative user experiences from start-ups

Catching up with Web 2.0 ?
There seemed to be a bit of frustration in the mobile social media panel that mobile 2.0 is not yet booming. Tommy Ahlers, CEO Zyb (just acquired by Vodafone)advice: simply care about the end-user [experience], avoid filling the screen with ads, fix fundamentals and get services off the ground. Smaller operators are better at doing that and more innovative but he promised to change Vodafone for the better.
Charlie Schick, editor Nokia Conversations recommends to avoid the clash between web services for big screen/keyboard and those mobile on small handsets. No one is going to dominate the other.
Alex Romero, Director Yahoo! thinks it requires tuning the eco-system leaving room for MNOs and other players. And Doug Richards, CEO Trutap summed it up : We are only at the very beginning of the industry, openness will create better user experiences.

Attracting investors ?
Rudy de Waele invited me to join this VC perspective discussion with a corporate venturing view. What’s holding VC investments and IPO’s back ? One issue is the business scalability mentioned by Maximilian Niederhofer from Atlas Venture: the fragmentation is due to the number of devices, he gave the example of Atlas’s investment [32M$ with Partech] in Dailymotion, now 60 million users the web but too difficult to move to mobile. It’s clear that mobile 2.0 does not compete with web 2.0 investment opportunities. Imma Martinez, from Stradbroke advisors was very vocal about the channel friction issues such as revenue share agreements, low flat-rate data offerings, 9-12 months to negotiate carrier agreements, a view shared by the panel. In her blog, she refers to mobile services “corrida de toros” (bullfight).

I proposed a more balanced view between short-term business improvement with longer-term innovations opportunities. At this moment, corporate funding, M&A or simply business deals may be appropriate to mobile 2.0. This is because mobile 2.0 can immediately enhance today’s Telco or enterprise “brick and mortar” services which have a sound business model. A good example in the conference was Dial2Do that combine voice service monetization with web 2.0 services (see below). I mentioned the business model of mobilizing HP Snapfish, photo sharing offering 9c print in partnership with 12’000 outlets and used by 50 million on-line users in 20 countries storing 2 billion photos. Another example would be mobilizing publishing with readers social network services complementing on-demand order and printing industry enabled by HP’s Indigo printers. Around the consumer electronics and content businesses, there is value in adding connectivity to the various home devices, for example mobilizing the exchange of play lists and on-line content preferences.
At the same time, looking into the 3-5 years future, I foresee great opportunities for VC-funded breakthrough innovations that will exploit LTE bandwidth, new video processing capabilities and enhanced devices. This is where there is a need for innovative start-ups and the VC exits should be plentiful.

Understanding operators ?
The operator panel discussion exposed the misunderstanding between mobile start-ups and mobile operators. Mobile start-up innovation and users expect a fully open and cheap playground; in contrast operators focus on CAPEX/OPEX optimization to monetize scarce mobile broadband resources. Anastassia Lauterbach, EVP Strategy, T-Mobile International explained these issues clearly but bluntly : P2P mobile data is 38% of traffic (YouTube alone is 17%), with less < 200€ data revenues. Applying Moore’s law, the flat-fee business model does not scale : 5-year CAPEX required is 70B€ in Germany [~300€ /subscriber/year]. She also mentioned the impact across the value chain that supports mobile 2.0 : network > platforms > middleware > customer care and service. The subsequent debate with the audience was heated and inconclusive (despite Raimo van der Klein and Gregory Gorman’s moderation attempts). I would have suggested at least a differentiation of mobile 2.0 services based on their real-time bandwidth requirement and alternate access points such as Femtocells and WiMax for video streaming.

Among other good comments, Martin Duval, CEO Bluenove and director Orange start-up program was positive on opening-up and offering flat-fee data services to bring ad-funded content services and rather than cannibalizing. Under the motto "together we can more" Orange wants to educate start-ups to develop mutually beneficial business cases. He also referred to Orange’s opening-up to Nokia Ovi. Gian Paolo Balboni, head of innovation Telecom Italia mentioned innovation by providing access to network assets through web middleware services. Unai Iturburu, head of Vodafone Spain R&D indicated that we need better industry alignment to combine web and mobile services and quoted Vodafone’s Betavine.

Already a successful business !
The open business models panel showed 5 successes ranging from off-deck, MVNO and on-deck approaches.
Chris Liu, of Fjord gave the example of Flirtomatik business model of “ego-services”. They have 120M PV/month, selling digital flowers and kisses. He referred to the challenged of supporting handsets.
Leif Fågelstedt, COO Blyk explained how they monetize their “understanding of users”. The 7th media is less about content than it is about context” . Blyck's 900 campaigns resulted in 29% response rate (up to 60% in some targeted campaigns). Most are “conversations” such as SMS > SMS response > MMS > WAP menu. He says the MVNO business model is a win-win for the operators and not cannibalizing as it brings new revenues from advertising, they are expanding in Europe in the fall. Blyck’s emphasis is on personal communications but there is room for expanding into content and social networking. But right now you can’t solve the handset fragmentation issue so it’s too early.
Ilja Laurs, founder Getjar sees it as an off-deck community of downloaders with an enormous diversity (10K applications, 200K download/month, example: flashlight replacing lighters in discos, battery drainer , Opera Mini 7M dl). For him, mobile billing is a nightmare so advertising sponsoring is a better solution. Ray Anderson, founder Bango said they combine off-deck and on-deck and see MNOs opening-up. Laurence Aderemi, from Admob now serves 3 billion ads/month 100% off-deck.

Awards winners and next wave
The team assembled a great line-up of start-ups. We met them the previous day at ESADE where they gave a VC-pitch. I’ve classified them in 3 themes because of my particular interest but presentations were grouped by financing stage.

Personalization, social networks
• Zipipop : they have invented “intention broadcasting” for your social life, casual meetings among friends and even for your “sex life”. It is a really cool user interface, a la T9 for broadcasting “Let’s meet for coffee at this place”. I enjoyed discussing with Helene Auramo, Zipipop CEO their monetization ideas and suggested “intentional advertising” like “the cook is in a really good mood at this place”. Viral marketing by SMS invites. Richard von Kaufmann gave an excellent pitch and had the T-shirt with the best logo Zipi-fish. *** Best Early Stage Start-up.
• Rummble, is a location-aware social networking for discovery of events and recommendations, with micro-blogging.*** They won an award.
• Aka-aki, proximity-aware networking. Personalize, on the go, share emotions and content, lifestyle; cross-media, location-based advertising. I like the fact that it gathers contacts along the way, kind of an active address-book. They have an excellent video pitch and I had posted about them earlier.
• Shout'em, mobile social media : White-labeled Twitter-like service, launched as Zrikka in Croatia, (200K subscribers) they also have a photo sharing site. Their ambition is to support Symbian, iPhone and Android handsets.
• YouLynx, mobile social media with geo-tagged upload/download and IM/VoIP. They address the PC/mobile convergence and synchronize address book, communications, content on both devices. On-portal deployment at O2, Vodafone, Telefonica, America Moviles, Orange, Airtel, DoCoMo . Presentatin by Jorge Gonzalez
• Taptu , mobile social-aware search Stefan Butlin, Taptu CTO, presented
• Mobiluck , mobile location based IM, chat and social networking. MobiLuck helps you share your location, spot friends nearby, and meet interesting people and places along the way!
• Nimbuzz, Free IM, txt, PC calls, mobile VOIP in progress. Client for 22 brands/500 models. Great functionality with Skype, Gtalk, AIM, Windows Live messenger, Yahoo!Jabber, Myspace, Facebook.
• Palringo, mobile IM client for sharing text, photos, and voice IMs with groups or individuals.

Multimedia user interfaces
• Dial2do, a great application that uses voice to connect to web 2.0 services. It goes beyond traditional unified messaging (e.g. SpinnVox) or voice activated dialing and let’s you Twitter or Facebook in addition. Other services include : Jaiku, Tumblr, Jajah, Zimbra, etc… And voice allows immediately monetization. The US market seems ready for this : 60% of wireless calls while driving 87 min/day. Their go to market includes packaging in retail with Plantronic, Jabra and other plastic telephony appliances. Ivan McDonald , the CEO has a very convincing pitch. ***They won an award.
• Kooaba,is a revloutionalry cool image search engine that fits perfectly with cameraphone capabilities. “Shoot a picture of a record cover and get the music” kind of experience. Herbert Bay is an alumni of ETH Zurich.
• Via mobility, they developed a mobile widget execution platform to leverage the 150K widgets on the web and adapt them to 100K phones. You get your customized idle screen for notification and contents. This was presented by Serge Crebassa. This is important if your bet is that widgets are the way to innovate without handset fragmentation issues. The core skills of the company is in the embedded AEE and again this is critical.
• Clicmobile: Alex Kummerman, CEO presented a really impressive visual city guide with celebrities launched for Louis Vuiton, walk with celebrities for 12 € in Shanghai, Beijing. The foundation is a social network but it’s really the user interface and the quality of content that attracted my attention
• ViiF, video enabled mobile entertainment : Most of the service is via download, but the services can be tried out by video call 22557 in Germany, easy to customize with a web interface. They have revenue-sharing agreement with content providers. A welcomed competitor to iTunes video.
• Secufone, developing specific user interfaces for iPhone for safety/security applications. They transition from a custom-handsets business for elderly people and security firms. A good example of business cases from focusing on user experience within a niche.
• Mippin mobilizing web by adapting sites. This blog can be viewed there.

Monetization with advertizing• Unkasoft, mobile sponsored gaming : Repurposing mobile games catalogues for advertising campaigns e.g. Pepsi Max (a game of saccharin vs. sugar) Contact : Jaume Lanchares

Telecom magazine webinar on IMS, June 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Tue, 17 Jun 2008 19:30:00 +0000

I contributed to a Webinar on IMS for wireline/wireless networks , June 12 , 2008

Is there light at the end of the IMS tunnel ?
I joined a panel to discuss IMS approaches to deliver rich communications. These days, the industry has become skeptical of telecom standardization’s ability to support cool services, especially with the competing wave of web and device innovations. But our moderator Stephane Teral, from Infonetics Research compared 2011 market of 8B$ VoIP infrastructure (migration of PSTN to VoIP is becoming mainstream) and 1B$ on IMS, (a significant ramp-up). I commented that perhaps it’s unfair to compare IMS and web 2.0 because the requirements have changed since the original specifications to connect voice devices and not to connect people with services.

But what if we were asked to develop IMS 2.0 today using the best of IT architectures ?

I think we would certainly come up with an open user profile, such as HSS GUP and content streaming control. I gave the example that HP OpenCall's IMS/HSS developments for user profiling can be extended to enhance group communications with a web 2.0 flavor. Also on the panel, Dan Bantukul from Tekelek explained that IMS is not about killer services but a framework for deploying IP services independently from media, network access and transport. It should be an incremental evolution rather than a greenfield deployment. He stressed the pivotal role of session management (CSCF) and SIP Proxy (RFC 3261) . Another panelist, Adam Stein, from MuDynamics talked about roll-out processes and avoiding problems and pain points before they occur. He mentioned the complex and symbiotic behavior of the many (>20 software and hardware) IMS components and methodology necessary to test the system as a whole. End to end testing and QoS validation is a necessary ingredient to any standard-based multi-vendor and distributed deployment.

Can IMS support visual experiences on consumer devices ?
I said yes, but enhancements are required on IMS/MRF (such as HP's OCMP) to support video streaming and trans-coding across mobile, PC and IPTV. It’s more about content adaptation and visual interaction. This triggered questions from the audience on session support across multiple home appliances such as IPTV and phones. I wished I was more familiar with the work of Oliver Friedrich, et al, at Fraunhofer FOKUS who have published about their IPTV IMS client implementation at IEEE NOMS 2008 and illustrated here. The user experience include See-what-I-see to enables buddies to switch to the channel I am watching, caller-ID-on-TV and VoD stream paused during calls. I referenced other pre-IMS and IMS case studies in Germany showing the convergence with soft phones (Vodafone's IP Phone Pro), handsets (Visual mailbox) and web mashup (Fraunhoffer Fokus OpenIMS project).

Mobile web 2.0 summit, June 2008, London

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Sun, 15 Jun 2008 22:00:00 +0000

Questions of the day at mobile web 2.0, 11th June London :

Finding monetization in the next phase of mobile web services,
Innovation in user experiences
New technologies

Monetization of mobile web is small
At the end of the day, the money around mobile web is still small compared to the substantial revenues of mobile voice and messaging. Perhaps 30 B$ content and 3 B$ advertising compared to over 600B$ voice, SMS and data access. But you can’t milk a calf and the business will grow.

Tony Fish, CEO, AMF Ventures & Author, “Mobile Web 2.0” presented the opportunity in monetizing the mobile digital footprint (user profile and behavior ). The new world focuses on the [UGC] creation side and posting mobile content to the web. Advertising revenues complement value-added service charging models. This is a transition from the old world mobile industry focused on consumption, centered on payment for services, applications and content. But thee new world will not wipe the old word it will improve it.

The monetization opportunities coming from uniqueness of mobile :
Mobile payment, complementing credit cards and cash ; in the old world you get back services and content.
Mobile footprint : (data follows you all the time leading to accurate digital footprint, advanced personalization, beyond identity protected by AAA (bank and credit card details), location) ;. in the new world you give your footprint to the community and get in return reputation, enhanced search algorithms and results; the ownership of this meta-data is a new battle ground.

Nick E. Heller, Strategic Partnerships, Media & Publishing, Google. He also sees mobile advertising complementing overall advertising with unique features :
Location remains the top unique selling proposition, despite the fact that this is a 10-years old idea.
Usage pattern : 8:00 (commute), 12:00 (lunch) and most important 22:00 (bed time).
Device interaction : primarly SMS (CPM) today – evolving to web searches (CPC) and user interaction (CPA) using cameras such as Android scan (taking pictures of barcodes to trigger searches).
User authentication was one aspect when discussing privacy protection, safe search, personalized advertising (context sensitive)

Stéphanie Hospital, VP Marketing, Orange online advertising : said the priority is to establish basic metrics for mobile advertising and expand the main inventories in WAP banners and messaging. Current CPM/CPC rates are not significant at this stage. Experimentation with video or interaction (with Adidas to win tickets in France) shows the future potential for branding campaigns and later we will improve at user profiling.

Paul Goode from m:metrics confirmed the success of SMS advertising campaigns with 50% of EU and 20% of US subscribers having received messages. He estimated mobile media audience being 25% of all EU5+US subscribers (~ 106 million, > 6% growth) with a >3X greater usage by the 10% smart phone users (~ 37 million, 0% growth). The biggest growth is seen in social networks, used by ~ 4% of subscriber spending 1:30 hours/month on facebook.com or myspace.com, ranked in the top 5 visited sites. US now leads over Europe in mobile media consumption and web access : Americans spend 4:30 hours/month browsing, British spend 2:25 hour/month. Demographics show 45% of 28-30 year old with the biggest usage of mobile content. On the topic of smart phones he noted that N95 outsold iPhone 1:2, the iPhone being bought by those who can afford it.
Innovative user experiences
More than the money, the passion of both users and developers alike seems to fuel the development of new user experiences, whether for self-expression, social networking and the holy grail of location-enhanced services.

Carl Taylor, Director of applications and services, Hutchison Whampoa Europe : stated the priority is to improve the interaction between users, devices and content to make the experience more relevant. This involves more psychology than technology and aims at enabling consumer peer review and viral marketing. [ Carl has been an advocate of applying semantic web mark-up such as W3C Powder to ensure better relevance ]. Hutchison has made the 3 mobile broadband offer attractive to consumers and had the courage to launch Skype phone at £12 / month. They see premium content and advertising business model expanding, provided there is tuning of the delivery value-chain across operators and content providers.

Christian Lindholm, Partner and Director, Fjord : he told the story how he came late at Radisson Edwardian May Fair Hotel because his search for london mayfair hotel brought 400 results on mobile Google Maps excluding the right one. In this user experience, “places” are different than “street addresses”. He joked that London black cabs is the best LBS system because they have contextual and semantic information.

Matt Jones, Co-Founder and Lead Designer, Dopplr.com
Commenting further on looking LBS user experiences he said he liked the topic because it's so difficult and bad things can happen. Dopplr is about describing interesting parts of places and the social aspect of places. For this you may want to increase fuzziness rather than accuracy of the location.

Anja Kielman, Founder aka-aki demonstrated their innovative social service piloted in Berlin, uses bluetooth to alerts users with similar profiles logged within 20m in bars, shops and crowds. Anja says it’s designed to take your social network to the street and create connections in the real world. The web version has all the standard features like profiles, friends and messaging. The mobile version is a small Java application that you can send to friends, one connected phone can serve as a hub for the other, therefore reducing the cost of data connections.

New technologies
Virtual and real devices are also fueling innovation.

Anders Elleby, Swisscom Participation : innovative services can be launched with devices such as the Ogo2 devices adopted by (~100’000?) Swiss teenagers who can connect to MSN IM, call and now browse the web. Also mentioned, Starfruit virtual phone booth in Second Life allows SMS and offering flowers to the real world. In general MNO can innovate with network enablers (for all access networks), device applications (despite the fragmentation of platforms) and overall services, rather than focusing at declining premium content revenues.

Thomas van der Zijden, VP of Marketing for Polymer Vision: presented the “Readius” a pocket sized reader with a 5" rollable display and 3.5G connectivity. Readius uses organic materials in all elements of the display and can be rolled.

Mobile youth marketing, London, May 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Sat, 03 May 2008 19:00:00 +0000

Thanks to Josh Dhaliwal, of Mobile Youth I was invited to the workout in London, May 2 2008. Graham Brown, CEO of Mobile Youth who wrote about the 7 challenges of mobile marketing proposed 3 challenges of mobile youth marketing for this workout :

Charging : from free-content to new business models
Relevance : user profiling allowing intimacy and privacy,
Trust : social dialogue between brands and consumers

Monetizing free-content with new business models
Mobile Youth marketing is about winning the heart and mind of the youth and content, music for example is a great way to succeed. It’s one reason iPod brand is such a reference. We talked about brand that fell such as Levi’s ® (from 50% market share in 1996 down to 9%) as they lost their sexy / rebellious shrink-to-fit image [yet they launched an award-winning mobile campaign promoting user-remixed ringtones and 501 jeans in 2005]. What’s the business case for free content and capped data plans ?
Music : some great examples of the free economy. Fans downloaded Radiohead’s new album Rainbows at the prices they wanted, 38% paid a total rumored to amount 9M$. Similarly, Prince's album Planet Earth was released as a freebie but the 21 London concerts sold out for 23M$. Gerd Leonhard calls this the “tap water music” vs. “bottled music” and published 3-years blog history : Music 2.0. Damien Saunders, head of music at Vodafone agreed there were lots of opportunity to monetize mobile music. But he made the point that it is about creating user experiences with lead users and rather than promoting content with advertising which is counter-productive.
Video : there was less buzz on mobile video but Rhys McLachlan of Mediacom reminded us that youth still consume 3 hours/month of TV. Other panelists saw a smaller opportunity there. [yet 3 UK had 600’000 subscribers downloading 6 million video clips sponsored by advertising and announced a sponsored music video service – and 32 million have been downloaded on 3’s SeeMeTV and O2’s LookAtMe!, from 60,000 user-generated submissions].
Graphics : an order of magnitude of mobile entertainment revenue was given by Tal Dagan, from Comverse (ring tones 10B$, ring-back tones 5B$, graphics 3B$, other 0.5B$) [I attempted to complete the picture with other publicly available figures from MEF(25B$), IDC (highest revenue from ringtones, ringback tones, mobile television and video services, 2011 forecast of 40B$), Portio Research (music 9B$, games 3B$, video 1 B$, others 17B$)]

By comparison, eMarketer estimates mobile advertising at 2.8B$ [growing to 19.1 B$ by 2012 ]. As an example beyond ringtones, Comverse’s Klonies is a solution to push avatars during call establishment (J2ME client software) instead of the CLI / phone address-book user interfaces.

User profiling driving relevance and protecting privacy
My presentation in the user profiling panel triggered lively discussions. : how far should we drive user behavior analysis and targeting ? I explained the potential for dynamic profiling with network information : your phone address book is your social graph, call and location history, presence and device information are additional dynamic profile information’s typically available in databases such as HLR/HSS, XDMS etc… And dynamic device detection can help adapt to the preferred format and channel.

On the pro side, user profiling serves both advertisers and users. Jupiter surveys that 50% of 16-25 year old youth are happy to be targeted by advertising in exchange for free content and Blyk’s 100’000 subscribers are a testimony of this. Jack Wallington of the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) representing over 86% of online advertising in the United States, gave views on the normalization of the mobile advertising profile data and related metrics.

On the opposite side privacy protection is key to maintain trust with consumers. The audience recalled the controversy around Facebook’s social advertising and Beacon Facebook Ads, an engine for sharing profiles with advertisers that lead to 50’000 users joining the MoveOn.org group until explicit permission and opt-out was enforced. On the privacy issue, IAB best practices include the opt-in opt-out facilities to give control to the user. In addition strong authentication profile should assist in enforcing child safety, such as mobile operators code of practices brokered by the European Commission to prevent bullying [15% of under 16] , access to pornographic [ #1 destination is adult, peak usage time 9pm-11pm] and violent content, and inappropriate use of camera phones and location services. I was asked about authentication mechanisms beyond USIM and passwords – my belief is that only biometric (fingerprint, face recognition) authentication can properly identify a child using a device. A related issue is SPAM which affects 80% users with 23 billion messages/year.

Matthew Snyder, now CEO of the consulting company ADO strategies has a great experience in this mobile advertising industry and provided some comments on how advanced profiling can practically be implemented with multi-channel ad-serving platforms. From the discussion I attempted to list some of the main aggregators and players in this new industry.

Nokia’s media network (Nokia’s ad Business led to the acquisition of Enpocket in 2007, a mobile campaign management with multi-modal SMS, MMS, WAP, and video delivery with analytics).
Google’s Adwords for mobile
DoubleClick Mobile (works with ad networks to deliver combination ads, road blocked ads and jump pages)
Microsoft’s subsidiary Screentonic (early leader in mobile ad serving technology for European operators)
AOL’s Platform-A Advertising.com , Quigo (content-targeted advertising), Tacoda(behavioral targeting), Adtech (online ad-serving), buy.at and Third Screen Media (platform and mobile advertising network)
Admob (home of evangelist Russell, co-author of MobHappy)
Amobee(dynamic ad insertion in multiple channels : videos, music, messaging, games, WAP)

Trusted social dialogue between brands and consumers
Can mobile social networks enhance customer relationships ? The question was debated in the panel led by Ged Caroll from Waggener Edstrom and blogger who said that customer insight can be obtained with a mix mobile marketing and traditional PR+advertising. He’s a professional advocate of blogging for marketing as he explained in a video.

Helen Keegan, from Beep Marketing raised thie issue that as of today, those who master "the black art of communication and persuasion" at major brands cannot justify the ROI of mobile marketing. How much do Brands really benefit from this ? Truth and honesty are universal values that consumers recognize said Ed Homes from Haygarth. You have to decode the responses and non-responses of customers, for example in Twitter feeds. That’s the value of on-line community moderators such as Dominic Sparke’s company Tempero which also provide information tagging. Looking for successes, everybody agreed on Japan’s mobile social networks :

Moba-ge-town by Dena [statistics : 10M mobile users, 65% 0-19, 28% 20’s, 18 B PV/month, members earn virtual Moba-Gold from watching ads, FY07 sales of 15B¥ ~ 144M$] and
Mixi [statistics : 14M users, 63% early 20’s, 22 hours/month, 20’000 advertisers, mixi mobile advertising since 2006, 8B PV/month at 0.05¥ on mobile out of 13B total, at 0.1¥, FY07 sales of 10B¥ ~ 96M$]

I commented on this in last blog . For further reading, Helen edited Tanla Mobile’s excellent guide that you can download here, she blogs on mobile marketing and runs Swedish Beers mobile gathering.

3G services in Japan, April 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Sun, 27 Apr 2008 07:56:00 +0000

Cherry blossom in in Sapporo and Tokyo, April 14-21, revisiting my comments 2 years ago.

Growing mobile content services and networks
Mobile commerce and advertising are growing
Mobile video is still emerging
From 3G to 4G leadership

Growing mobile content services and networks
User generated content and messaging are the top usage : 25% of subscribers send more than 5 messages/day, and 10% more than 10, according to Impress. DoCoMo’s Decomail, service is popular with teenagers who use sites such as Decotomo.jp, Disney to offer purchase messaging personalization content. Social networking is growing : 10 million users (50% of teenagers, 35% of 20-30 year old) generate 20 billion PV/month on Dena’s Mobagetown, which offers free browser flash games, social networking and 10,000 digital items. 1.7 million users (25% of teenagers, 39% of 20-30 year old) generate 93 million PV/day on KDDI’s mikle.jp mobile community with 11 user generated content categories such as gaming (#3), love (#10) etc.

Internet providers have established strong partnerships with mobile operators : Web searches rank 3rd among the most popular mobile data services , behind e-mail and news. Google Search appears directly on the top screen of KKDDI and DoCoMo users with the banner enhanced by Google. Google also develops mobile applications with NTT DoCoMo, sharing behavioral mobile search data and splitting advertising revenues. Yahoo! Mobile , owned by Softbank is the country’s most popular Web portal with 18 million mobile subscribers and gets 4 billion PV/month. 14 million users (out of 82 million) access the internet exclusively from their mobile phone according to Impress R&D.

One additional driver has been the 9:1 on-deck revenue share for content providers. NTT DoComo’s i-Mode menu still drives 5 billion PV/month.

Mobile commerce and advertising have doubled
Mobile commerce is used by 36% of Japanese users and estimated ARPU of 300$ exceeds mobile content revenues according to Impress and Infinita. NTT DoCoMo provides Rakutenchi mobile auctions on the i-menu and Softbank offers Yahoo! Shopping and Auctions. For mobile payment , 30% of handsets support the Sony Felica RFID chip for contact less transactions at train and plane gates and with more than 70 commercial retailers.

Mobile advertising revenues doubled since 2006 to 620 M$ (62.1 ¥B) and 25% of Japanese companies use it . This is still only 10% of on-line advertising spending at 4.4B$ (443 B¥) and 1% of total advertising, according to Dentsu communication institute. Typical banner rates are 5’000-10’000$/week for 2-20 million PV and there is a large choice of options between these. Mobile advertising was the topic of the MoMo Tokyo meeting on April 21st at Google’s offices in Shibuya . An example of mobile online community using Mobile Adsense is mikle.jp. They have 129 million PV/month and 2.3 million users/month.

Mobile video is maturing
Mobile broadcasting branded “1seg” was introduced in Japan in 2006 and now reaches 25 million subscribers in Japan can receive broadcast TV on mobile , with a data link for mobile information or advertising. Check 1 seg on YouTube.
On the user generated video content, one service is My Tube from a mobile service provider called Key Life that provides video sharing aggregation ( from You Tube, Google Video, Ameba vision, Dailymotion), with a specific focus on for Japanese content. And there is a very small usage of video calling for similar video bloging experiences. In general, video calling quality was very good and international calls worked very well.

My Japanese colleagues showed demos of video convergence across TV screens, PCs and mobile handsets with the related issues of video adaptation and service control.

From 3G to 4G leadership
Japans counts over 90 million 3G subscribers (+30 million since 2006) according to Impress R&D :
25 million have usage-based contracts
38 million have flat rate contracts
25 million use 3.5G HSxPA

Throughout my visit I was impressed by the high quality of coverage, even in-building. Last month, NTT DoCoMo announced the result of their 3G long term evolution (LTE) tests in Yokosuka, south of Tokyo. They achieved downlink transmission at 250Mbps using a multiple input multiple output (MIMO) with a 4-antenna base station using the full 20MHz bandwidth (specifying 300 Mbps peak ) . They advertise this as “Super G” and talk about a first network roll out in 2010. Mobile gaming and mobile TV applications will be enhanced through the introduction of LTE, benefiting from < 10ms latency and high peak-rates. 70 million 4G subscribers are forecasted by 2013 (Europe 30 million, Asia Pacific 21 millions and North America 17 million) according to Informa.

Evolution of service infrastructure
In a panel in Sapporo we discussed service infrastructure, together with George Mc Gregor, VP of services at HP OpenCall, Dr. Suphachet Phermphoonwatanasuk, from AIS in Thailand , Martin Gutberlet, VP Research at Gartner. Gartner’s view of the top mobile business opportunities includes : mobile TV 40 B$, mobile music 31 B$, mobile broadband 28 B$, mobile advertising 14 B$. AIS discussed their target architecture to combine voice, music and video services using VXML and SIP application servers on 2G and 3G networks. In a following talk in Tokyo, I demonstrated mobile instant communications, video blogging and the use of web technology such as WSDL network APIs, JSR309 Java APIs, and SMIL) to provide interfaces to networks and create interactive video services.

Subscriber statistics update

DoCoMo 53.4 million
KDDI 30.2 million, slight decrease due to phase-out of Tu-Ka
Softbank 18.8 million, growing

3G evolution in Egypt, April 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Sun, 13 Apr 2008 18:00:00 +0000

I visited Dubai, April 13th for a meeting with executives from a mobile operator and review 3G multimedia services evolution in Egypt. The country may become as famous for its 3G deployment in emerging markets as for its pyramids .

The pyramids will oversee 70 million subscribers
Egypt is the largest emerging mobile market in the Arab-speaking world with 73 million inhabitants and a strong potential for growth. Mobile was launched in 1999 and penetration now exceeds 42% (probably <30 M subscribers due to multi SIMs) and is forecasted to double( estimate 68 million subscribers) in next 5 years as 3G brings cheaper voice services in the country . Compared to other countries in Middle-East / North Africa, Egypt has the highest annual growth at 170% but third lowest mobile penetration after Lebanon and Syria but may rise to the levels of Algeria, Morocco, Tunisia with similar GDP per capita. The other growth opportunity is in the fixed network development currently at 15% tele-density and 10.5% internet access. (Egypt ‘s 17 Gbps internet backbone access was disrupted in January 2008 by cuts in submarine cables.) As broadband wireless is an access option, the regulator introduced consultations on WiMax and issued 3G licenses .

End of duopoly : usage up, tariffs down
Competition has increased throughout the Middle-East with 3 mobile operators per country in Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan. In Egypt, Orascom and Vodafone, controlled the market until 2007 when a new license was awarded to Etisalat. This resulted in a 50% cut in prices to 0.35 LE/min and a decline of ARPU from 15$ (82 EGP) in 2005 to10$ (58 EGP) in 2007. Mobinil and VFE blended ARPU fell by 20% and 12% respectively but low tariffs increased minutes of use to by 15% to MoU to .Again in April 2008, Mobinil announced new price cuts. We expect the operators will have to cut costs by sharing of investments in infrastructure or introducing MVNO retail channels. In addition, the fixed-line monopoly of Egypt Telecom is challenged by the regulator (NTRA) auction of second fixed-line license auction in June 2008. Etisalat and Orascom are possible candidates for this license. Egypt is also introducing number portability using infrastructure from Giza Systems and Telcordia

The following players operate in Egypt :

Orascom Telecom Holding (Mobinil)
48% market share
16 M + (Alohat per-second billing prepaid subscribers)
GSM 900Mhz, 1800Mhz and 1900Mhz, WCDMA 5MHz spectrum
Naguib Sawiris is the well known chairman and CEO of Orascom Telecom.

Vodafone Egypt Telecommunications
42% market share
14 M subscribers
GSM 900Mhz, 1800Mhz and 1900Mhz, WCDMA 5MHz spectrum

Etisalat Misr
10% market share (plans to capture 30% market in next 5 years)
2.0 M subscribers (3.5 M estimate mid 1008)
GSM 900Mhz, 1800Mhz and WCDMA 5MHz spectrum
Ericsson – based 3G HSxPA network covering major cities including Cairo, Alexandria, Zagazig, Tanta, Sharm el Sheikh, Luxor.

Telecom Egypt
Fixed : 11.2 M lines, penetration level < 15%,nhousehold penetration ~ 75%, ARPL ~10$
TE Data ADSL : 0.45 M subscribers (141% growth in 2007)
Internet 0.4 M subscribers (290 M minutes monthly usage, VoIP is illegal for consumers but it legal for corporate accounts through ISPs.)
Telecom Egypt owns 45% of Vodafone Egypt

3G internet + content for early adopters
Vodafone Egypt and Mobinil acquired a 3G license at a cost of 610 M$ each, 20% of Etisalat Misr 2G + 3G license cost. Like in other emerging markets, 3G business case in Egypt includes expansion of the voice capacity, internet access and new entertainment services.

3.5G allows internet access in the marekt underserved by Telekom Egypt (only 0.4 million ADSL subscribers). Already 24% of Egypt’s subscribers use their mobile to browse the internet according to Maktoob Research. Vodafone 3G offering for the for the enterprise sector includes “ mobile connect “ USB modem allowing a browsing and file exchange.

Early adopters are moving on to 3G data services and operators are promoting to high ARPU subscribers to compensate 2G ARPU decline. For an example of the interest by early adopters, check the blog of Tarek Ghazali in Cairo who hosted the carnaval of mobilists in Egypt

Vodafone launched its 3G in the youth segment with video calling, mobile TV (1¢/min or 2.5$/month for 5 hours), and music downloads. Kamera's Egyptian subsidiary SweGypt provides a suite of mobile TV channels, including the Arabic news channel ShortCut, the sports channel SportCall and the entertainment channel WOW! TV. Kamera will also deliver highlights from the EURO2008 football championship. But only 12% of Egyptians are comfortable with the idea of watching live television on their mobiles, based on Maktoob Research market survey. Here is one of Vodafone's adds for 3G video calls.

Mobile advertising is also emerging : Vodafone launched the "Please Call Me" message which comprise a link to video ads or IVR announcements. 52% of subscribers say they are interested in receiving advertisements on their mobiles according to Maktoob Research. And mobile communities are also on the growth path : Vodafone Egypt has launched a student competition to stimulate development of social networking and entertainment services .

Telecom convergence, Bled, Slovenia, April 3, 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 14:58:00 +0000

Sintesio project is an NGN interoperability test bed. I gave a presentation at their last workshop on fixed mobile convergence.

Fixed-mobile convergence on the hype cycle
Sylvain Fabre research director at Gartner presented the technology cycle, with an update on unified communications, devices and broadband. Gartner hype cycles illustrate maturity of technologies in 5 phases:

Technology trigger : breakthrough, product launch including femtocells, 4G LTE standards
Peak of inflated expectations = over-enthusiasm and unrealistic expectations. For example fixed mobile convergence, LAN/WAN/ roaming, 802.16e WiMAX, PBX integration, IMS.
Trough of disillusionment = users abandon the technology : IPTV, Mobile TV streaming, location-based services,
Slope of enlightenment = users experiment to understand applications. For example unified communications moving fast, voice over WLAN and WiFi, FTTx, MPLS.
Plateau of productivity - benefits widely accepted, stable technology: WiFi 802.11a-b-g,

Unified communications disillusions
Enterprises are adopting unified communications but not anymore for cost reduction. FMC replaces fixed line voice calls, but augment cost from usage and devices. Users keep complementary fixed and mobile devices. Enterprises look for TCO, including benefits of collaboration not partial savings of an FMC implementation. The move threatens PBX manufacturers (Siemens, Avaya, Nortel), IT vendors (Microsoft, IBM and Cisco), and could drive new opportunities for Web 2.0 (Yahoo, MSN, Google, AOL).

High-end devices enlightenment
85% of handsets will be Web-capable by 2011 (90% in Europe). Handsets will support touch screens and HD video in 2008. The top 5 manufacturers have 80% market share. Note the Nokia focus on applications and services. Users will have 2 devices from notebooks, ultramobile PC (UMC) <1kg are emerging, tablets (no mass adoption), PDAs, smartphones (consumers devices creeping in enterprises, e.g. iPhone)

Mobile broadband trigger
Bandwith/latency evolution towards ubiquitous 10Mbit/10ms:
3G WCDMA 0.5 Mbps - 150 ms
HSDPA 1 Mbps /100 ms (European coverage is > 90% in 2008)
LTE and 802.16 100 Mbps /10 ms (Verizon and DoCoMo trial results)
Femtocells for SOHO from vendors such as Ubiquisys, Ip.access , Alcatel-Lucent BSR
Alternatives for corporate in-building : distributed antenna systems, Wi-Fi, Unlicensed mobile access (UMA) handsets (now named generic access network GAN),

Applications requirements are covered :
Download of 2.5GB : 4340 min on 1G, 744 min on 2G, 42 min on 3G, 8 min on 4G.
What is the 4G business case when 3G is challenged ?
Flat rate data is inevitable for service providers and backhaul investments are important. BBC iPlayer is a nightmare for UK ISPs .
[iPlayer, a TV archive of last 7 days, is 3% of internet traffic in UK and cost of upgrading networks is estimated at £831 million].
]

FMC with softphones: video and SIM authentication
Mobitel showed their implementation of FMC with two softphone services presented by Rudolf Sušnik and Klemen Albreht of Mobitel

Videotelephony (m:komunikator)

using SIP phone-to-mobile, SIP phone-to- SIP phone evolution to video conferencing. Implementation challenges include : trans-coding of video.

VoIP roaming (m:contact)

USB stick with SIM authentication, client and drivers, PIN code. The VoIP service features single identity, mobile phone and soft phone sequential ringing, messaging (SMS, MMS, IM planed), Voice call continuity. Users gets a unique SIM identity on mobile and PC softphones, a unique bill with worldwide roaming at domestic price. Mobile operators reach extends to the ineternet and brings better service development features at lower OPEX. Implementation challenges include :
firewalls (resolves with session border controller), IN for paralell call alerting, number presentation, voicemail/SMS/MMS integration.

FMC with softphones : location enablement

We got a demo of location-enabled softphones with little brother, presented by Andrej Kos, from University of Ljubljana’s telecommunications laboratory This is a real-time location presence system. Location within 10-20m is acquired from USB Bluetooth dongles on laptops and low cost WiFi router Openwrt. Scan frequency is 10-60 second capturing signal strength, device name and MAC implemented

The presence is displayed on a web communicator/portal. Click to talk is implemented with SOAP request to Parlay X gateway interfacing a PBX. Microsoft Exchange integration is also used.

Presence information is published according to PIDF [RFC3863] and rich extensions [RFC4480]. This includes : personal (info), social (mood), location (coordinates, GeoPriv privacy preferences)

Presence protocols include : SIP-simple, XMPP Google Talk, Jabber, Parlay X Web API, XCAP rules and buddy lists

Future of internet Bled, Slovenia, April 2, 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Wed, 02 Apr 2008 14:00:00 +0000

EU’s search for the future of internet
In Bled, I reviewed the declaration of an EU R&D workshop on the future internet. Slovenia has the presidency of EU and hosted a group of EU FP7 projects there. EU budgeted €9.1 billion for ICT research for the FP7 and the projects attending the Bled workshop represented €400 million of that. Not surprisingly they declared themselves in favor of internet collaborative R&D actions. The past internet grew out of public research (DARPA, CERN) and it appropriate to assist policy makers encourage innovation. The debates covered : network , internet, media, security, enterprise (internet of things).I looked at presentations from the [public] telecom sector.

Connected home is a 50 years-old idea
Future scenarios such as the connected home are quite old ideas, argued David Kennedy,Eurescom director, showing a 1956 illustration from Fred McNabb.To make this a reality, Internet evolution should enable these communicating objects :
Multifunction handsets (keys, navigation, wallet, communications hub)
Sensors (ambience, context adaptive)
Intelligent content : (select the best display, digital rights attached to viewer for all devices)

Telecom operators will morph into on-line services
Antonio Manzalini from Telecom Italia Telecom Italia (TILAB) does not surprise anybody by stating that IP reduces the required network transport and access elements (that’s defacto fixed mobile convergence) and simplify application development (service development). This suggest to me that network service providers transform themselves into on-line value added services providers with new business models. He calls this model Telco 3.0.

Future users are far from Bled
For both Internet an the mobile communication industry, the new internet users are from the rest of the world as illustrated in these statsitics.

3D visualization with Irwin Sobel, Palo Alto, March 20, 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 07:00:00 +0000

15 years of progress in 3D imaging
Someone who influenced my own interest in multimedia innovations over the last 15 years is Irwin Sobel, a senior researcher at HP Labs. Irwin should enjoy retirement since a few years but he carries-on working on his passions, attempting to be what he calls the good conscience of research projects he contributes to at HP Labs or follows at Stanford University. He has always been kind enough to give me small tutorials and I also learnt from discussions with him an approach of research, mixing detailed analysis of problems over several years with a pinch of stubbornness or rebellion. What's constant with these projects is that they seems luxurious and far-out initially, but given Moore's law and progress in algorithms and peripheral, they appear reasonable 5 years later and commonplace 5 years later.

From 3D medical imaging
On my last visit, we strolled on the grounds of Stanford Medical University and recalled our first project in 1992. I had initiated an eclectic stream of research covering tele-radiology, web-based medical records and the emerging field of image management (or picture archiving systems ; PACS). Irwin and my friend Dr. Davide Caramella at the University of Pisa convinced me to add a 3D project. This included a 1-year sabbatical of Irwin at HP’s center in Pisa, to investigate visualization system to facilitate surgical-planning using multi-modal magnetic resonance imaging (MRI). MRI measurements generate 3 images (T1, T2 and Proton Density) and false-color technique allows the visualization of a composite image. The results were shown in 1993 at RSNA and allowed holographic-like virtual explorations of a 3D thorax with cardiac MRI scans. Students from Francesco Beltrame at the University of Genoa helped develop the software on HP's most powerful RISC-processor. RSNA 93, was also important as we participated to the launch of the 1st medical imaging standard, DICOM with interoperability with 20 medical imaging vendors . But from that year I remember mostly project reviews in Pisa under the natural colors of Tuscany.

To telepresence and collaboration
More recently I followed his work on immersive visualization. In 2002 he showed me Coliseum, a teleconferencing system, involving 5 cameras, that rendered arbitrary-perspective views of participants giving the illusion of interacting in a common space. In 2005 I met him at a meeting of the AMI project, investigating multi-party interaction. (I commented on later results of AMI in February). At my next visit to Palo Alto, I sat in an early prototype of the Halo collaboration studio that HP was developing with DreamWorks. I looked at the video processing equipment, mostly professional TV equipment, probably the influence of DreamWorks. The challenges of telepresence ranged from accurate calibration of screens and cameras to improving eye contact feeling. .Irwin is still working on this last problem using 3D video cameras that allow perform 3D facial extraction that can then be oriented towards the video conference participant.

Having fun with immersive game boys
In 2007, Irwin worked on photometric and geometric calibration for the Panoply project, an immersive visualization using stereo projection on a concave screen that covers the field of view. The demo featured a F1 racing simulation game played from a car seat, steering wheel, stick shift, and pedals with major force feedback on the steering wheel and acceleration vibrations on the seat. It's so immersive I was quite stressed and, like most beginners I experienced the off-track flying experience serveral times !

Mobile Rules! San Jose, March 19, 20008

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 23:25:00 +0000

Nokia 's innovation award dinner was at the San Jose City Hall Rotunda. They had winners in categories such as business plans, technologies, applications from entrepreneurs around the world .

Music social communities :
I was with MyStrands, winner of the multimedia category. The Social Player enables users to discover and play music, meet people with similar musical tastes. The MP3 player supports Symbian 3.

Location-based communities
Infotainment catefory winner Earthcomber is an navigation software that relies on communities to let users specify exact types of information and plot them on a map. Users join or create groups that let them share or discover spots.

Focus on beter user intefaces :

I also liked a 3D user interface demo from Virginia Tech.

Mobile multimedia winner was : kannuu search technology uses partial word completion with joystick or touch screen interactions with exponential search algorithm.

User interface winner was : Tiki'labs 6 keys is a simplified user interface that relies on just six keys to deliver full messaging and communication capabilities.

I met Peter Vesterbacka of Mobile Mondays at the event. Other sponsors of Mobile Rules! 08 are obviously Nokia Growth Partners and included Accel, Advanced Technology Ventures, BlueRun Ventures, CMEA Ventures, FinNode, IDEO, Nexit, , Orange, Palo Alto Software, SINA, SK Telecom International, SVASE, Swisscom, Vision Capital and ZEF Solutions. Media and Community sponsors included GigaOM, LIVEdigitally, Mobile Game Developer Magazine, Red Herring, Teknopreneur Indonesia, Stirr and VentureBeat.

Spring VON.x, San Jose, March 18-20, 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Thu, 20 Mar 2008 17:00:00 +0000

Here are my takeaways from Spring VON.x

Spring time for personal video

Green light for video conferencing

Fall of network and VoIP infrastructure

Spring time for personal video
Quite a few proof points that personal video will blossom. Jeff’s social network panel was broadcasted live by Robert Scoble from his N95, check the blog or video show.

Jonathan Christensen, is Skype's GM for audio and video, says 30% of their calls include video. He defines Skype users as a tightly clustered community, not an open social network like Facebook where the signal to noise ration is too high, you get too much and you don’t know all of your friends. Skype uses On2´s TrueMotion VP7 video codec that offers profiles including Simple (for low datarates on inexpensive processors) and Advanced (for datarates under 200 Kbps).

Brad Hunstable, co-founder Ustream.tv has 250’000 registered users of their interactive micro broadcasting. There is no time restriction on length of streaming sessions. Brad says it’s a trillion channel world now and he was born in a 3 channel world! The generation of teens is thinking this is as simple as SMS and there will be mass market soon. .Kyte TV going after celebrity models will get there drag the rest of the video players in.

Loic Le Meur, CEO Seesmic says that video conversation will be huge and asynchronous. Seesmic adds video to online communication such as IM, SMS, email, video. Users record on the website, upload or link to a video posted on a SNS and broadcast via Twitter. Seesmic API allows plugins / widgets: Wordpress, Netvibes, Firefox, Jabber, Shozu mobile clients. He says the community has requested 100’000 features request. Loic.tv, includes a video show on the company.

Ramu Sunkara, CEO Qick.com provides handset software to stream live videos from Nokia S60 to the Web. Qik is integrated with Twitter, seesmic, mogulus, blogger, mobuzz.tv, Justin.tv, YouTube and currently in alfa test. Ramu says it’s a new era form of communication that is happening and 1 billion people take this for granted. Video quality goes up and up and up, andyou should expect new features, just as ICQ or Apple II came out of nowhere 30 years ago. VON.x was streamed live on Qik.

Matt Gore , Vice President of Marketing, Paltalk presented in the online video and social media panel. They manage the long tail of video-enabled chat rooms, inter-operates with ICQ and AIM, adding live video calls. Typically there are 500 simultaneous users / rooms with the top reaching 2500 users. in categories such as music romance sport. They report 4 million active users , 1.1 million log-ins/day and 15% of users turning on theirweb-cams. They offer a freemium (free+premium) business model.

Kathryn Jones, Produce/co-founder, Synchronis.tv also presented in the online video and social media panel. In 2007, she produced “35” a 10 episodes drama streamed live on Ustream.tv from 3 cameras and earlier “Question of the Week 30 episodes podcast seen by 500'000 viewers . She talked about online video + social media : the community is there to sustain the show : I know the people that watch the same show as I do . She says that the idea that video has to follow up Hollywood rules will disappear. YouTube has been a backslash to Hollywood where every actor needed 5 plastic surgeries. “ I used used to put make-up before turning the web cam, I don’t do it anymore” .

Green light for video conferencing

I presented video collaboration attempting to cover integration issues from handsets, laptops, telepresence and beyond. Telephony published a cover page article on telepresence. Telephony lists vendors of 500 rooms worldwide and comments on the contribution to make corporations greener by reducing carbon-emissions, even if by a negligible factor.

| View | Upload your own

On the panel with me was Joan Vandermate of Polycom and we agreed that we should walk the talk and in a next trade show install some of these telepresence rooms in exhibition booths rather than have employees, although these are not usually those flying the corporate jet. Her presentation was focused on the interoperability with unified communication server and Polycom had just announced integration with Microsoft’s Office Communications Server . We all agreed that fragmentation of standards for integrating directory and communication services would inhibit the pervasive use of video.

HP’s telepresence started in 2005 when DreamWorks Animation tried to links teams of animators in northern and southern California, then in Bristol. You obviously needed a “Dream” system to convince visualization professionals and the engineering constraints were quality and experience, not cost. When I first sat in one of the prototype rooms, even having worked around video for 15 years, I was amazed at the feeling you get from a 50 inch screen with home cinema quality and dedicated OC-3 (MPEG 2 1280x720 at 30 fps and CD-audio). While I was presenting HP was announcing Halo’s new 2/4-seater model designed to operate with one of the 150 or so existing Halo studios, at 25% of the original price. The beauty for me is to know that this is all using a video software pipeline running on a commodity server (HP DL380), the same one our team had used for entry-level videoconferencing on mobile phones or PCs. So in less than 2 years we have convergence of video conferencing technology from the low-end to the top. But of course my talks expanded on the convergence issues (even with software implementations), from signaling across protocols, SIP/IMS, H.323, H.320, H.324M and the challenge of trans-coding from MPEG2, H.263, H.264 etc…

Ofer Shapiro, from Vidyo gave a good overview of H.264 scalable video coding as a substitute for trans-coding gateways and even network-based multi-conferencing units. It is clearly the right technology direction asend-points are getting enough processing power, ultimately the network will only route the video stream on QoS networks and the end-points will perform the video adaptation. But that may take some time before we have a cross-industry agreed profile.

Fall of network and VoIP infrastructure
It’s more Fall than Spring for developers and providers of network-centric voice services. It’s more Fall than Spring for developers and providers of network-centric voice services. One sign was that the biggest exhibits at VON were edge services developers on Open Source such as Asterix and OpenSER . Another illustration was the discussions in the Telco 1-2-3 panel.

Martine Lapierre, VP at Alcatel-Lucent summarized this: Growth opportunities are no more telecom-centric, since the on-line and content players will provide network access freely. The stock market drives this further : audiences valuations exceed networks, therefore intangible services are eating the tangible businesses. For telecom operators, they need to move to businesses adjacent to telecoms. Questioned about mobile data opportunities she says : data at 20$/month is not sustainable when WIMAX will be offered free. There will remain a market for low cost transport at low margins : even with a very high demand, volume multiplied by zero equals zeros. The same is true for the equipment manufacturers that will scale-down with network simplification from 100 elements to 5.

Among the adjacent business opportunities, she listed : home networking, industry and public enterprises, advertising and commerce. If you own the home you own the customer, she says. This means content sharing, home management, and multi-screen services. In terms of equipment they focus on broadband gateways and femtocells but also content delivery networks for caching content. For enterprise service development she mentions exposing network features using web APIs such as BT 21CN. For advertising and commerce advertisement insertion capabilities in triple play messaging and video. And she mentioned mobile terminal m-payment

My colleague Gary Iosbaker, HP OpenCall, CTO Americas, was also on the panel.
He is more positive and states that change can mean opportunities such as : personalized rich content, instant communications and FMC services adapted not transplanted from the internet to mobile. He sees two barriers to creativity : one is the focus on network access rather than services, the other one is the risk aversion, carrier having been focused instead on 99.999% QoS and pre-defined ROIs. We have to lower the cost of experimentation, allow new service features and make it acceptable to fail. His view is that the killer app is speed and innovation. And as a developer he stresses the need to expose the information model and APIs of the underlying infrastructure. Where is the data ? I need to access to enablers and APIs I need a programming model. There is value in a global approach such as IMS, but it has barely moved forward it takes forever to progress anything thru standards. We need to allow 100s to write widgets and even service creation environments can be a hindrance because we cannot foresee all the requirements .

Another answer to innovation came from the social network panelist who admired :
Facebook : for the strength of vision to make sure experience is safe for users to open their information to others .
Mark Canter of Broadband Mechanics for articulating the need for distributed social end-to-end and for providing their social web software

Mobile world Congress 2008, Barcelona 13-16 February 2008

noreply@blogger.com (Claude Florin) — Wed, 20 Feb 2008 13:00:00 +0000

The round-up of the show
Summary from a hula-hoop party you cannot afford to miss with clips from the blogosphere :

. Telecoms industry is hot as ever,
. Mobile broadband happens fast,
. Voice, video and services move to the web,
. Browser-based multimedia devices create demand,
. Mobile industry loves content more than ever

Telecoms is as hot as ever, despite a colder weather in Barcelona
With Victor Donselaar, Movial Applications at Nokia party
There is optimism this year : the industry is rich despite what we hear, there are still enough revenues to keep operators healthy. Encouraging to see 55,000 visitors (+3,000 from last year) as we were told fearing downturn in the telecom industry. Big deals also : on Valentine’s day Robert Murdoch made a dating approach to Yahoo! Microsoft acquired Danger, they did not put a value but rumors was that they paid 500M$ to get a mobile X-box (200% the investments of VCs). Numbers and quality of parties wer also up. Nokia in the harbor wins for the music, Sofinova in the monastery for the good ideas , Accel Partners for the architecture, Ramblas Digital for the best event survivors and. Mobile Jam and Mobile Sunday & Mondays for the best side-events. And if you prefer the large crowds at the fair so much, you could stayed in Hall 6, for an official opening party.

Advance of the mobile broadband bit pipe
There is acceleration of 3.5G deployments with 174 HSDPA implementations worldwide. Vodafone announced HSDPA+ with 42Mb/s download. Nortel announced an LTE joint-venture with Alcatel-Lucent and demonstrated a LTE base station prototype and Ericsson announced trials. China Mobile and Vodafone also announced LTE trials. LTE demo equipment shrunk from computer racks last year to board-size and specifications of 700 Mb/s were advanced. At the conference, ETSI warned not to repeat the 3G-UMTS over-selling roll-out too early as ITU has not yet started the 4G process.

WiMAX was pushed by Intel and Cisco, with somewhat more modest claims on range and speed as last year. There were activities to stimulate the eco-system but there little demand of market traction, except for Sprint roll-out. WiMAX vs. LTE could give operators a difficult CAPEX decisions in 2009.

Voice, video and beyond : change fast !
With the network becoming a fat but dumb pipe, the dramatic change of business models was highlighted by Softbank mobile CEO Masayoshi Son’s keynote. He claimed that 2008 is the year of the internet machine. The main message is that it is not about voice anymore and all about data services. Softbank sacrificed voice ARPU by offering free VoIP services to all subscribers. Japan 3.5G and smart-phone adoption makes it possible to provide richer content. Softbank alliance Yahoo! is a good model of the MNO of the future. They have a networked base business and add personalized value to Yahoo!

Inaki Amate, GM at Fjord creating delicious user experiences

Also at the at the awards ceremony, Yahoo! was given the award for the best mobile infotainment. My friends at Fjord and bit-side were delighted as they have contributed to Yahoo! Go 3.0 service development. Judges' comments: “Easy to use, made-for-mobile video service that’s fun, free and fantastic. Sure fire winner amongst the mobile video fans.“

Christine Perey was there, introducing Informa’s report on the emergence of mobile social networks . The report estimates mobile social networking to exceed 50 million, 2.3% of mobile users. By 2012, there could be between 12.5% and 23% penetration. Mobile SNS revenues exceeded 3 B$ in 2007 and forecasted to grow to 30 B$ by 2012 (including all business models).
Jed Stremel, Director of mobile, Facebook announced the launch of their mobile service by Vodafone in 8 countries, using Intercasting client. They already have 6 million mobile users, generating 500, 000 PV/month (growing to 1 million). Facebook positions itself as social utility best for linguistic or geographic communities since it can be extended with open APIs . For example they have 3 million users in Turkey, a version in Spanish and French.

Bebo presented their mobile versions on Orange UK, O2 Ireland using client software from Newbay and Intercasting. Overall Bebo have 40 million on-line users averaging 40 minute usage / day. Users want mobile flat rate data plans and tariffs are still too expensive for mass usage, especially SMS-push at mobile SNS volumes. Jordy Mont-Renaud, mobile developer at Bebo , proposes different positioning for various services :

Facebook = be yourself , MySpace = be someone, Bebo = in-between

Yahoo! presented a way to aggregate multiple network from the client side, a solution our HP team considered enhancing with a network adress book.
Yahoo! Go for Mobile 2.0 at the keynote session

Talk of mobile adverting was big. There are several forecasts of mobile advertising revenues by 2011 : 11 B$ (Informa), 14B$ (Strategy Analytics) and 19B$ (ABI Research). Pekka Ala-Pietila, CEO of Blyk was at the Sofinova party. He would not tell me subscribers numbers as they are not yet public. Rumors went from 250,000 to 1 million. I bloged on the launch last September. But there are over 100 advertisers and the CTR of 47% is a proof of the sound business model. Blyl confirmed expansion plans of the advertiser-sponsored model in EMEA during 2008. They have over 60 employees and some of the key staff was at the congress.

In his Telecom TV interview, Sebastiano Tevarotto of HP commented that there is an intuition that the Google model is going to impact the industry within 2 years or 5 years.
Mobile networks operators have to be selective about the value-add to convince customers to stay or come . Even the bit pipe business model is interesting as long as you have the right business model and not the aspiration to be a big brand.

In a keynote on ubiquitous networks John Chambers of Cisco also stressed that services move away from personalization to collaboration
"It’s not about You but about US. It’s about video not voice, and not just the services but the content. And it is not about devices but about the network architecture " (as you would expect from Cisco ! )

Cisco demos of video conference accross networks
For HP OpenCall, our team was presenting mobile group communications with video conferencing across networks. We used a client from Movial, who also introduced a social communicator and Jabber presence and IM servers. Our seamless transition from the handset video to the PC web-cam as you moved from one device to another was cool . We also had a nice demo of using SOA/SDP to interface your mobile services to Web 2.0 social networks like Facebook.

IMS was largely absent from the network services demos. But I noted Kris Patel, CTO of Kodiak Networks presenting their implementation of OMA converged messaging (CPM). It features an IMS SIP user agent in a web browser, SIP secure interfaces, CPM clients on handsets, inter-working with voice calls . With this implementation, Kodiak requires a carrier hosted infrastructure. Kris Patel argued that a convergent platform was beneficial because users are context aware and will change channels for different social communication needs.

From i- to G- phones replacing OS by browsers
If the mobile broadband is happening it is not so much because of the mobile 2.0 or video services but simply because of the gadgets ! In Hall 8, four out of the largest manufacturers released new handsets as they were trying to catch-up with iPhone the interface, the operating system and the functions. Motorola claimed they made all announcements at CES. MultiMedia Intelligence forecasted that multimedia phones will grow from 20 million units in 2007 to 250 million in 2011. Vodafone CEO Arun Sarin acknowledged that Apple had raised the bar for the industry with the launch of the iPhone last June. But he also stressed the need for a rationalization of operating systems : 30-40 OS are too many , we need not one but much less : Linux/Android or Symbian.

Arun Sarin, Chief Executive Officer, Vodafone

Goggle’s Android early movers NEC, TI, Qualcomm of were demonstrating different stacks to crowds of visitors. Texas Instruments has its development platform running OMAP 3430 CPU at 600 Mhz. NEC / Wind River were also showing a prototype running on a Medity2 at 500 MHz with a browser. Both were 2G radio. The Open Mobile Alliance talks no more about an operating system but a developer community democracy. Google does not want proprietary that would lock the application level. And multiple handsets were announced for 2008/2009.

HTC Android phone prototype, scheduled for H2/2008

Nokia launched four multimedia phones including the N78, N96, 6210 and 6220. all of which have HSDPA, GPS, Maps 2.0 and geotagging. But CEO Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo had a trick in his pocket for his keynote. Called "remade," the new phone is actually made entirely of recyclable materials like cans and tires, it clearly targets planet-conscious customers.

"This is one cool phone"
Symbian S60 demos included : touch user interface, sensor technologies, Web runtime and Flash Lite runtime evolution with Service APIs, development platform (Open C evolution, C++, Python)

Nokia Symbian S60 touch screen demo

On the Windows Mobile front, Sony Ericsson's unveiled the SE XPERIA X1 smartphone running 6.1 and featuring a WVGA touchscreen display with 5 megapixel camera.

Mobile renews it’s love affair with movies.
Hollywood Robert Redford and producer Isabella Rosselini were presenting the awards at the National Palace. Is the mobile industry so attracted by entertainment that it will remain a content pipe ? Redford’s appearance as Sundance festival founder seemed a bit disconnected from the surrounding attendants.
Robert Redford : “What am I suppose to say here ?”

But the message was : forget cinema and HD, think mobile. Sundance commissioned independent filmmakers to come up with 3-5 minutes films of 3 to 5 minutes (3MB) and offered them 20,000$ for the production. And Isabella Rosselini announced 5 short movies : “Green Porn” illustrating sex life of insects shown in Mobile movies in Hall 7.
I attended the dinner with myvaves who won the best mobile video service award.
Rajeev Raman, CEO and Susan Cashen, VP Marketing of mywaves

Their free advertiser-sponsored mobile video service has 4.5 million visitors monthly with average viewing times of 25 minutes per session and 400,000 channels of premium, private and user-generated videos on WCDMA, and CDMA2000 phones running Palm, Windows Mobile, Symbian and RIM based phones. mywaves team comes from Yahoo!, Napster, Danger, Palm and TiVo.

Still, there were doubts in the congress whether Mobile TV is the killer app. Nielsen said that mobile operators are not able to keep subscriber after 2 ½ months while another study claimed that 25% of users watch it daily.