Do you remember SPECTRE in those James Bond movies and novels?

SPECTRE stands for SPecial Executive for Counter-intelligence, Terrorism, Revenge and Extortion.

Have a look at the Wikipedia article about SPECTRE:

It should be noted that the goal of world domination was only ever stated in You Only Live Twice..

and more

Organizational discipline is notoriously draconian with the penalty for disobedience or failure being death. As quoted by Blofeld on several occasions: “This organization does not tolerate failure”. Furthermore, to heighten the impact of the executions, Blofeld often chooses to focus attention on an innocent member, making it appear his death is imminent, only to suddenly strike down the actual target when that person is off guard.

Well, somehow this reminds me of Apple.

We all know what they have done in the mobile phone market. Since the launch of the iPhone Apple almost killed any other handset in the high end segment, especially for those carrier who use to subsidize their hardware.

If you are a customer walking in an operator store and you find that you can get an iPhone with zero upfront and a two years contract and another high end phone, whichever it is, at the same pricing what do you think you will buy?

Apple is leveraging two critical aspects of their strategy. On one side there is the market that is eager to have their products. People out there want an iPhone. That’s it.

On the other side they have contractual agreements with operators worldwide and operators committed with Apple on volumes that they are obliged to purchase.

The combinations of these two factors are killing high end mobile phone sales for the vast majority of operators.

At the very same time you, as an operator, cannot bring in money from your value added services like music and ringtone sell since they are going into Apple pockets through iTunes.

Yesterday I was kidding with a colleague about the upcoming Mobile World Congress, and I said: “Wouldn’t it be funny if all operators CEO would meet in a room and agree not to buy any more phones from Cupertino?”

It was a provocation and a joke, obviously.

They all have the scars and that would never happen in the real world.

Last week Apple announced the iPad and since then I have read hundreds of posts on the subject, tons of videos and lot of coverage on tv.

It seems that the iPhone story is going to be repeated.

So, is Apple the new SPECTRE?

Well, I would say yes. They definitely want to dominate the mobile world and if you don’t do as they want you will be killed (i.e. taken out of the opportunity to sell their products)

Is there an option for other hardware manufacturers?

I definitely think there is one but there is something they need to understand.

• First: Do not copy.

Every single manufacturer out there has tried to come out with some iPhone killer product in the past years. Everybody has failed. You cannot be like an iPhone. Full stop.
This will be less difficult on a tablet since you do not have many options to work on those kind of devices. They all will be a big display with a bezel.

• Second: Price

Try to place your product at least half the price of the iPad.

• Third: Innovate

Do not try to copy the Apple model. Stay away from everything that will be sold trough iTunes or if you want to pursue the same strategy work with operators to integrate with their billing.

• Fourth: Be fast.

If you will leave six months to Apple on that segment, you will be dead.

I will leave to a future post the description of what I think can be an alternative to the iPad.

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The recent article “Amazon invites developers to come up with Apps for Kindle” led me to some more considerations on the rumored Apple tablet.

Let’s start with a quick recap of what Amazon announced last Thursday:

The Kindle Development Kit enables developers to build active content that leverages Kindle’s unique combination of seamless and invisible 3G wireless delivery over Amazon Whispernet, high-resolution electronic paper display that looks and reads like real paper, and long battery life of seven days with wireless activated. For example, Handmark is building an active Zagat guide featuring their trusted ratings, reviews and more for restaurants in cities around the world, and Sonic Boom is building word games and puzzles.

…

Starting next month, participants in the limited beta will be able to download the Kindle Development Kit, access developer support, test content on Kindle, and submit finished content. Those wait-listed will be invited to participate as space becomes available. The Kindle Development Kit includes sample code, documentation, and the Kindle Simulator, which helps developers build and test their content by simulating the 6-inch Kindle and 9.7-inch Kindle DX on Mac, PC, and Linux desktops.

[via Amazon press release]

This is what almost every single Kindle owner was expecting and it really opens up a world of possibilities for the Kindle.

Going through the press release I think that a few questions arise naturally:

• Who is going to pay for all of the data traffic generated by applications over the 3G network? As of today the traffic generated by the kindle itself may be considered quite low, but when you start playing with great applications the game changes dramatically. From what I have read on the web it seems that an application may not consume more that 100 Kbytes of data per month and that any additional Mbyte will be charged to the developer at 15 cent USD (?!?). More details on that here.
• There will be an application store? We may assume it will be the Amazon Store.
• Will third party application be allowed to charge the customers for additional services as it happen with the Apple in app purchase?
• If the developer will be allowed to sell it’s application which will be the revenue share model?

If you look at these questions you can easily understand that the answer to these question will define the success of the initiative for Amazon and have already made the success of Apple.

It is quite clear that with these questions on the table the Amazon Kindle SDK is no threat at all to Apple iPhone or whatever Apple will come up with in the next few weeks.

We may also want to consider this SDK announcement from a different perspective. When we hear about a new mobile SDK release we all think to the Apple announcement. We will all be able to create cool applications on a neat device. Maybe what Amazon is trying to do here is to open up the Kindle to a very specific set of applications that will be able to leverage the Kindle peculiarities: e-ink display, battery life, fantastic readability, etc. If you question me about what kind of applications these would be, well, I have no answers right now.

What Amazon has done has also much deeper implications.

While I was visiting CES in Las Vegas I have seen dozens of eBook readers. From the very last Chinese manufacturer to the most important hardware manufacture. I may have be missing something but from none of them I heard the word SDK.

This basically means that the battlefield for eBook readers has rapidly changed. The eBook need to be able to read books but it MUST be open to applications. We are shifting the product to a different use bringing it closer to a tablet device.

Once again Apple has pushed a shift in the industry and Amazon has acknowledged the fact that in order to survive to the upcoming “whatever tablet from Apple” they need to create a complete ecosystem around their product.

With this recent announcements Amazon has started to create an ecosystem and that’s fine. If we compare that ecosystem with Apple we can notice that there are at least two critical elements missing: retail stores and the customer experience in the retail store.

Let’s try another approach and look at Google. They already had a great ecosystem in the cloud but they were missing the hardware. Now they lined up the Nexus 1 mobile phone and they are going to play a very similar game Apple and Amazon will play, or are playing now.

Same is doing Microsoft, even if not directly but with partnerships.

The technology is now there, and it’s going to be cheaper and cheaper (apart from Apple, but that’s a different story). The ecosystems have to be built and not each ecosystem may prove to be stable enough in the long run, but it is now clear that the war is no more on how cool your product is but on how you will be able to attract developers, providing customers with great product and services and making them feel home when they use your device.

The battlefield in now in the User Experience and in the Developers Community.

User Experience. I am convinced that this is the most important thing you should look at while designing your product. As I said, technology is there, but Eser Experience is not there for most vendors out there.

Developers Community. Everybody in the industry will be trying to attract developers on their side. The are lot of one man band out there that develop great and cool products and you want those guys to be on your side in this battle. How do you attract them?

In the first place you may want to make your SDKs as cool and simple as possible. Provide them with all the tools they need: IDEs, emulators, whatever will make the developer life easy. Then try to offer a decent way to market their product in your Application Store, and, finally, show them the money.

A good question to answer would be: what role will have mobile telecommunications operators?

I have my opinion on this, but this will come in another post.

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As you may have noticed there are lot of companies launching dedicated iPhone applications for their businesses. Audi, FCBmobile, CocaCola, just to name afew.

Wouldn’t it be a great idea to build an iPhone application being able to deliver the content of your blog or twitter account? Sure it may be.

Well, in order to do that you need to be able to deal with a little bit of Cocoa and build it by yourself or hire some freelance to do the dirty job for you. In both cases you need time, in the firs case, and you need money, if you choose the second option.

Ok, now you can get your won application for free thanks to the services offered by MotherApp.

What do you need to get the job done?

Very few things:

• your blog RSS URL.
• your twitter screen name.
• a description of your blog.
• a couple of pictures that will be used on the iPhone and on the AppStore.

That’s it!

MotherApp will take care of submitting your application to the AppStore and get it approved by Apple on your behalf.

The most interesting thing is that you can choose to display advertising on your mobile application. In that case the process of application creation, submission and publishing is completely free of charge and you will revenue share 50%/50% the revenues coming out of advertising from your application. When you will reach the 200 USD target you will get paid.

On the other side you may choose to pay 99 USD per year to have your application ad free.

From a technical standpoint there is not a great magic behind this. Actually it is quite simple to automate most of the process but it is definitely a great idea.

The company we site stated that they are going to release the same service on Android, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Symbian during 2010.

[EDIT Friday 22, 2010]

I have noticed that there is also another service offering pretty much the same service. From a very quick it seems that you can get a little bit more customization on your application. The company is called iSites and you may want to check it out.

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One of the most discussed trends at CES 2010 was the Tablet PC.

Every single hardware manufacturer I have met there has announced or will announce a Tablet PC in the near future.

From an industry point of view, tablets are not new to the market. They have been sitting there for such a long time with very low market success due to several factors. First of all they have always been expensive, bulky, almost unusable a with a very very small battery life.

Apple is rumored to announce a tablet PC by the end of January, and yesterday a France Telecom/Orange told the interviewer that this may be a reality for their customers (Read and watch a video on this on Techcrunch).

For the very first time the whole industry has not reacted to a product release but to a rumor. It would be very funny to hear Steve Jobs saying: “One last thing… I am sure that you heard about Apple releasing a tablet PC, well, we were kidding.”.

It seems that the whole industry does not want to go through the pain they suffered from iPhone announcements in the past. They want to be ready for whatever the Apple tablet will be. I hope they will be able to.

Ok, this is interpretation that is more close to sci-fi than to a real business case.

The real thing is that now the technology is there for this kind of products.

In the first place there are faster enough chipset out there to make good products and make full use of big displays. We can now design slim and light tablets compared to what we were able to do in the past. A huge variety of local area connectivity and wide area connectivity is available from the same chipset. Battery life can be brought to a satisfying level up to 10-12 hours and the price may be low enough to compete in the consumer space.

Last but not least, Operating Systems. There is a huge choice of operating systems available for use with this kind of devices. Windows Mobile, Android, Linux and so many other. Processors are fast enough to cope with the needs of these guys.

Android seems to be the preferred choice of most of the companies out there. It seems a good choice to me even if I think that Google may want to push Chrome OS for these devices. Unfortunately we will not be able to see Chrome OS before Q4 next year, maybe a little bit early and that’s too far for a product that a vendor may be willing to release now.

It is quite clear to everybody that the success of this product will not be hardware, but software, user experience and usability. None of those operating systems are at the same level in this regard as shown by Apple on the iPhone. There is a lot of work to do.

The stylus is definitely dead. This is a matter of fact. If you look at the iPhone it is quite clear that the ability to use the device with your fingers, and in a very effective way, is key to the device success. For the time being there is no one out there, apart from Apple, that has been able to deliver such usability at the same level of refinement.

I think that releasing such a product without a good and usable operating system and a great service proposition, whatever it will be (e.g. multimedia content, e-books), is going to be a failure.

It is quite clear to everybody that Apple has great usability, great content in iTunes and seems perfectly fit to make a success out of this products. For all of the others it will be the old usual catch up.

If you want to have an idea of what was announced at CES 2010 in Las Vegas the guys at digitaltrends.com have come out with a fantastic post on the subject.

The photo in this post if from nDevilTV.

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This is the presentation I gave a few weeks ago at the UXconference 2009.

There were a lot of great presentation and it was a fantastic event that I hope to attend again in 2010.

As I usually do the presentation need some details in order to be better understood. Below you will find some comments on the slides.

Slide 3 – 4

Mobile Social Networks were born at the very same time Martin Cooper from Motorola placed the first mobile call back in 1973. When we decided that mobile phones had to have a contacts applications we can say that mobile social networks were born.

Slide 5 – 7

30 years later 3 launched the first UMTS commercial network in Europe with the NEC E606 and Motorola A835 mobile phone.

Slide 8 – 9

The original sin. We, as operators, have been blind to the fact that the contact application could be the foundation of the mobile social network.

Slide 10 – 11

Actually we can observe a transition from SMS (Short Message Service) to SSM (Short Status Message). This is definitely a quantum leap. (By the way, we should be a little be scared of this as operators )

Slide 12 – 17

Usually on Social Networks we can share plenty of content and, while in mobility, most of that can be associated with positioning information from GPS and network assisted services.

Slide 18

We will need to rethink the whole User Experience of Social Networks in mobility

Slide 19

This a process that need to take in consideration the End to End architecture that we, as operators, provide to our users. This the only way where we can provide value and avoid the “bit pipe” nightmare.

Slide 20

How can we do this?

Slide 21

Let user consume Social Networks from his contacts applications. Aggregate everything in there and do no place plenty of single applications into the mobile phone.

Slide 22

Aggregate conversations. We are all parts of several social networks and most of the time they do not overlap too much. Usually when I post something to Twitter it gets automatically reposted on Facebook, Friendfeed, etc.. On each of those place a conversation starts but I have no option, today, to look at those conversations from a single point of view on my phone.

Slide 23 – 24

Let the backend to the dirty job. We have to remember that the vast majority of our customer base does not have an iPhone or a Smartphone. We can aggregate content on the server side and deliver result to a very thin client application on the mobile phone.

We can also think to add push as a premium service to our customers.

Slide 25

Most of the new mobile phones are now touch devices and we need to rethink at usability forgetting what we were used to do with the classic rocker interaction. There are new ways to browse and consume content.

Slide 26

If we aggregate data on the server side we can also discover connections for our customers. At the end of the day we can think at the mobile phone number as a very good proxy to OpenId in mobility (apart from any privacy considerations)

Slide 27

We must allow the end user to consume the content directly from the contacts applications. If one of my contacts posts a photo or a video I do not want to exit the application, launch the browser, wait, and then relaunch the contacts application again.

Slide 28

We can use the phone short range communication system (bluetooth, near field communication, etc) to broadcast our social identity. If we want to, obviously.

Yeah, I know… that was quite fast. If you want to discuss about that just drop me a line.

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“Your application is Ready for Sale”

Mobile 3TV - App Store

This was the subject of the message I received from Apple on Friday 4th. The Mobile 3TV was approved by Apple and was available for download from the Italian Apple Store.

This was great news for us. We had announced the future availability of this to our customer some time ago and everybody was waiting for this to be released.  Well, it was an instant success. In less than two days the Mobile 3TV application was in the first position in the Top 25 free application list on the Italian AppStore.

That sounds great, doesn’t it?

Well, as you can imagine there were some issues.

I was pretty much sure that we would have had those volumes in downloads and since it is a tv streaming application we were expecting high load on our backend. That was true and the first three days we had issues in delivering the service to our customers.

There was no way to avoid this. Clearly you could have add capacity on the backend to cope with the incredibly high volume of streaming sessions but would that have made any sense? Frankly I do not think so. After a few days everything is running smoothly and everybody is happy with his Mobile 3TV application.

On the other side we received an average two stars review on AppStore because the application was not able to connect in the first few days. Users were frustrated and I was frustrated too.

As I said in the first sentence Apple just informs you that your application in on the AppStore. From your side, as a developer, you do not have any mean to limit the download of your application or just decide when it has to made available to your customers. Also Apple does not say anything about approval time… it just happens (or not). Even if you are an operator you are treated just like any other one man band developer (btw, I think this is correct). If I had to give a suggestion to Apple I would introduce an additional switch in iTunes connect in order to let the developer decide when the application has to be made available on the AppStore.

I can also add that the description of the application is absolutely critical. It is probably one of the most important part of the publishing process, apart from getting your application approved obviously.

Being an operator we were very lucky in getting visibility on the AppStore. All of our customers were waiting for this application to be released and so it instantly jumped on top of the charts. I understand this is not the case for most developers.

When we designed our application we tried to keep it as simple as possible. We have thought that people would just want to watch TV on their iPhone without any fancy UI stuff around the gorgeous iPhone screen. That was the main principle. Let the user go straight to the channel and watch TV.

On the other side we wanted to find an innovative way to let the user switch channel.

This is what we came out with:

When you touch the screen that small circle fades in, it is centered on the point where you touched the screen and from there you can easily qui zap from channel to channel or read the Electronic Program Guide.

That’s all the interface we provided. Quick and simple.

I have to thank all of my team for this great implementation and also our great partner beeweeb that has done a great job in the design and implementation phase. Well, the shakezapping feature that allows you to change channel simply shaking your iPhone is their idea (kudos Filippo!).

I think we have learnt something from this application launch.

I have spent a few time reading reviews on iTunes store and actually if you are an Apple Developer you know very well that by no mean you can alter or drive reviews. They are just sitting there and you can just read them.

I always think that we cannot make everybody happy with our product and services but I was a little bit frustrated reading some reviews. Actually being called a thief in not how I would describe my work in here. I can accept any criticism, and those who know me know that this is definitely true, but there is always a proper way to do it.

At the end of the day I would say I am not 100% satisfied with what happened during the launch but I am quite happy with it.

Oh, and there may a surprise anytime soon… stay tuned.

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In the past months my team has worked on a new touch based mobile phone called MD Touch.

It is now in the stores.

MD Touch

I am quite happy of what we were able to deliver in such little time.

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We launched this in the past and I did not notice it was reviewed!

I still remember we all had a great time designing this, and thanks to Lavinia, Guido, Mauro, and Adam!

Momo Design MD-300H from higui on Vimeo.

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These are some interesting links I would like to share.

• Icones.pro, la plus grande collection d'images PNG et d'icônes –
• 50 Useful Tools and Generators for Easy CSS Development : Speckyboy Design Magazine –
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• 500 Internal Server Error – 500 Internal Server Error
• The 50 Best Premium WordPress Themes – Nice collection of premium wordpress themese
• 40 High-quality and Free Icon Sets – A nice collection of free icons set

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Just to be clear from the beginning: I am definitely a big fan of Android Devices.

Android

I have played a lot with the first G1 device, went through the HTC Magic and I am now playing with a Samsung Galaxy device.

Anyway I think that all of the vendors out there are missing a huge opportunity.

We all understand, hopefully, the mobile phones market dynamics. When the G1 hit the market I was thinking that HTC was putting a milestone. We have been the very first company to deliver a commercial Android device to the market. I am fine with that and I understand why it has to be done.

Was the G1 a good device? It was because it was the first device with Android. It wasn’t because of materials that looked cheap compared to other HTC devices on the market at the same time (e.g. HTC Diadmond, jut to name one).

Since then I have seen every single mobile phone manufacturer on the planet planning Android devices to be launched, sooner or later.

Did they introduce something new on those devices?

This is the sad part of the story: the answer is no.

They basically took a vanilla version of Android and started building their device around that. They have great support from chipsets manufacturers, they have the OS and that’s all they need to bring and Android device to the market.

The main point I want to make is: you have an open operating system that you may customize as much as you want and you deliver the standard implementation to the market?

HTC hit the milestone to bring the fist Android device to the market and it should be time to bring something different.

Android devices are not going to be cheap, at least in the next six month. They need quite a lot of processing power and this is going to cost money. If handset manufacturer will not focus on innovating around Android we will see the usual fight for low prices with no innovation.

At this point in time I think we can say that Android is still a big missed opportunity.

On the bright side I think there are plenty of opportunities for third parties company to deliver innovative Android User Interfaces and applications.

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This is the speech I gave yesterday at the ExperienceCamp09 in Milan.

I had a wonderful time and I wish to thank Luca Mascaro, Nicola Mattina and Stefano Mizzella for being such great hosts.

Guys, see you next time!

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Sometimes I happen to miss something relevant.

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I have been working into Innovation for a long time and part of my day job was trying to understand which side use our customers could make of the technology, product or service I was analyzing.

iPhone Baby Monitor

One of the golden rules is that users are always more creative than you. They will always find different ways to make an effective user of your technology, product or service. Sometimes the way you product is used is very far from your original concept.

Take Twitter as an example. The service was launched to allow the user to answer a simple question: “What are you doing?”.

Over time Twitter has evolved and now you can check if your plant needs water, you can monitor stocks, you can be alerted of calendar events or you can even unlock doors with a simple twit. I am sure that Twitter creators were not thinking about these applications when they conceived the service.

Yesterday night I was browsing the Apple application store and found an interesting application: Baby Monitor.

This is the description of the application coming from the developer web site:

Monitor your sleeping baby with this iPhone app. Simply place the iPhone near your sleeping baby, if it detects noise, it places a phone call to the number of your choice, you can then listen in for activity from your baby.

Isn’t this cool? Yes it is.

Ok. Let’s have a closer look at the application description:

• Place the iPhone near your sleeping baby. This is the original use of the application. The first thought I had is that I can place the iPhone in a meeting room, anywhere in my house, or in a bag that someone can bring with him.
• It detects noise and place a phone call. This means that I can receive a call whenever someone starts a conversation in the meeting room, or answer a phone call in the living room and so on.
• You can then listen in for activity from your baby. I can listen to conversations happening in any of the places I have described before.

We can now rephrase the original sentence:

Monitor your subject with this device. Simply place the device near the subject you want to monitor, if it detects noise, it places a phone call to the number of your choice, you can then listen in for activity from your subject.

Isn’t this the perfect description of a spy device?

As you can see this application was original built to help parents monitor their child when you are traveling but it can also be used for more nasty activities. I am pretty much sure that developers has were never thinking about this nasty applications.

Something you may want to consider when thinking about your next iPhone application.

Actually from a quick investigation I did the very same kind of application is available for almost any open Operating System mobile phone.

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