In the early days of radio, the signals that shot out from station transmitters went into what was then termed the "ether," the invisible and universal medium that carried radio waves through the air to whatever device could receive them. While we don't talk about the "ether" of radio much these days, it's clear that the concept of a universal and transparent transmission medium has not worn out its appeal. The infrastructure that carries much of today's hard-wired Web, for example, is based on Ethernet networking technology, a term that underscores Web technologies as an important analogy to radio's universal capabilities. Better than radio, there are virtually limitless Web "frequencies" - network addresses - that can broadcast on relatively clear Web channels on a global basis, frequencies that can accommodate hundreds of millions of broadcasters simultaneously.

Labels: broadband wireless, FCC, net neutrality, regulations, Web

The world tripped over one another to ooh and aah at the latest version of Apple's iPhone, a somewhat sleeker model with 3G wireless Internet access and a software development toolkit that enables applications to be built for the iPhone that can take advantage of all of it's "new hotness" interface features. Prominent among the new applications at launch is Microsoft Exchange, a shot across the bow to enterprise users equipped with Blackberries and feeling that, well, they're just not as hip as the next sales and busdev guy. Toss in promised interfaces to home appliances and Microsoft's home strategy takes a bit of hit as well.

Also prominent is the new USD 200 domestic price tag, presumably subsidized by AT&T in much the same manner as other mobile phones to promote mass sales and mass usage of AT&T services. Now people wanting to keep up with the tech-leader Joneses down the street can pile on and join the fun. Put these factors all together and you have a highly competitive platform (albeit one that still lacks a keyboard) that makes consumer and enterprise content accessible in mobile markets as never before. That's the good rah-rah news, in any event.

The not-so-good news is that the exclusive deal with AT&T puts pressure on other mobile carriers to come up with their own deals that can compete with AT&T at a price point that's much closer to attainable luxury for most folks. Supporting a plethora of platforms has hindered the ability of applications developers to create software that scales to markets and has drageed down enabling full Web access on 3G networks, hobbling the ability of U.S. carriers to prepare for this inevitable moment of challenge by Apple and AT&T. Instead of focusing intently on content, most mobile carriers have focused too much on the tech of the platform, instead of viewing mobile devices as just another blank screen that can be painted with content from any application.

However, these aggressive moves by Apple and AT&T may be more a preparation for emerging competition. Microsoft or Google or both will benefit from other mobile carriers and device makers trying to create more cost-effective alternatives to the iPhone now that the USD 200 price barrier has been breached. Microsoft is the more likely beneficiary in the short term, but with profitability becoming an issue, especially with the cost of 3G Web services pushing margins down, Google's Android cross-platform operating system is likely to emerge as the platform that allows more profits at lower price points for both mobile device manufacturers and carrier networks. As noted in TheStreet.com recently a preview version of an iPhone-like phone equipped with Andriod offered touch-screen operation, 3G Web access, software development interfaces for applications and many other features which are likely to come in close to iPhone functionality without the content and software licensing baggage that comes along from Apple.

There's no doubt that the iPhone will continue to be the Lexus of Web-enabled phones for a while, but there's also no doubt that the world has been waiting for the Toyota version to show up for a while. Especially in burgeoning markets like China and India, where Apple's licensing strategy is likely to be less appealing, Android-equipped phones that enable integrated Web access and language-independent hardware are more likely to be the global winners in mobile communications. So while the hoopla around the iPhone 3G launch looks hot for today, remember that in the fall we're likely to be talking about a different perspective on its future.

Labels: apple, AT+T, broadband wireless, iPhone

I was telemarketed by a polling company the other night, one of those occasional attempts to figure out what adults listen to on the radio these days. Given my profile the questions were rather quaint. What New York music station do I listen to? (None.) How often do I listen to the radio? (Basically for traffic, occasional news and the ball game.) Do you listen to online music (oh yeah, that and the cable music stations). Mercifully they didn't make me go through a list of artists who I don't listen to anyway, but it was interesting to see that even in the face of more than a decade of online music radio station marketers are asking the same old questions so that they can tweak the same old radio formats again and again.

I think of this in particular in light of the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's plans to auction off a portion of the radio spectrum for a free nationwide broadband Internet service. While the plan is experiencing a few snags at the moment, it appears that the free broadband network, which will be supported by advertising fees of which the feds will take a proposed cut, is likely to become a reality in the next few years. At that point there will be a fairly universal "ether" out there that will be available for any Web-enabled content for people - and autos - on the go. With that in mind, one wonders why the questions in these phone polls aren't already going:

"If you had a choice as to what content you'd like to hear come over a traditional radio station that coordinated with online services. what would it be?"

"If our digital sideband data services could allow you to purchase music that you're listening to on the radio with one click of a button into your Bluetooth-enabled music player while you're driving via a free broadband network installed in your car radio or mobile device, would that be of interest to you?"

"If our music programming could be tuned automatically to the most favorite music in a category from the Pandora online music service, would you listen to it?"

My apologies to questionnaire designers everywhere, but somehow these are the types of questions that radio executives should be asking their audiences - and themselves.

Labels: broadband wireless, marketing, radio

This year's BookExpo America in Los Angeles featured much of the usual multi-story ballyhoo of years past, with a thinner crowd and thinning expectations for the book industry in general, though with a few bright exceptions. One of these exceptions has been Amazon's Kindle eBook reader, which has become the Pet Rock of the 2008 book industry. Still inscrutable in terms of its limitations (no PDFs, no general Web content) and as awkward as ever, the Kindle is the darling of book-readers on the go who can't afford the space, time or trouble of loading multiple books in their overnight bags and pocketbooks (and yes, one of them might be me when I break my el-cheapo mental barriers).

It's also becoming the darling of traditional media outlets, which have the ability to push print-like materials into a medium that's unbound from print production limits, enabling them to maximize revenues when a title gains its peak value in a very short period of time. AP notes that former White House press secretary Scott McClellan's new book on his experiences in the Bush administration sold out quickly at Amazon in print format but that the book continued to sell briskly in Kindle eBook format, albeit at a lower price. There's some question as to exactly how much Amazon really makes on the book sales themselves (the New York Times claims along with others that Amazon takes a bath on each Kindle book sale), but as Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos noted that the Kindle is still in its developmental phase it's likely that book publishers' existing business models are considered a part of the platform's developmental cost at this point.

Silicon Valley Insider's back-of-the envelope model for Kindle sales noted that if the Kindle business scales as quickly as Apple's iPod/iTunes business scaled it's possible that Amazon could be enjoying more than USD 740 million in combined Kindle device and content sales by 2010. That's highly speculative, especially given that there had been more than a decade of well-established consumption of music via online portals before the iPod came along to become a cool fashion tool for content amongst the young. Book publishers face a far tougher proposition of moving beyond a graying population of book enthusiasts still young enough to value technology as a status symbol towards younger generations that have yet to discover books at all in a big way. A whole generation of college students is now coming of age that has not ever turned a paper page on a regular basis. So Kindle's ability to grow rapidly beyond its early adopters into iPod-like growth is still in question.

That may suit book publishers just fine in the short run, given their need to maintain a pricing structure that covers the 99 percent of their sales still done in print. But now that they have locked themselves into a proprietary DRM-secured format for Kindle content they have in essence handed Amazon the keys to the paper mill for electronic content. Certainly Sony's eBook platform provides a "Brand X" that will generate the illusion of consumer choice in eBook reading, but with the extensive infrastructure and branding of Amazon people wanting to purchase content rapidly for their eInk-displayed content will have but one real choice. If in fact eBook sales rise rapidly enough to push Amazon into a position of dictating book industry pricing, then book industry executives may be wondering why they didn't consider the music industry's death at the hands of iPod's proprietary 99-cent downloads as a lesson to have been studied more carefully.

Fortunately the book industry has the opportunity to adapt to these changes in relative slow motion compared to the music industry's fast-forward realization that Apple had stolen their business model. In doing so book publishers may want to consider how music companies are learning to benefit more from broader artist management services as a supplementary line of business. As noted in The New York Times recently Universal Music Classical Artists Management and Productions has been formed as a unit to produce and profit from live performances of music and artist fan items other than CDs. Thinking of the good fortune my friend David Meerman Scott has had on the speaking circuit in the wake of his runaway hit business book "The New Rules of Marketing and PR" (available as a Kindle book also, of course), how much more could his publisher have profited from his management as a speaker as well as from his imprinted word?

At the same time book publishers are becoming smarter about benefiting from the value of book content in pre-print communities as well. My own relationship with John Wiley & Sons has enabled content from my own forthcoming book "Content Nation" to be posted online and publisher programs such as O'Reilly's Rough Cuts are well into developing pre-print subscription communities for tech book consumers that act more as knowledge exchanges than peeks at books before publication - artist management for art still in the making, if you will. So although there are certainly exposures that publishers face via Amazon's proprietary eBook platform they are already developing more diversified revenue channels to maximize the value of their content.

Future iterations of the Kindle are no doubt going to change the shape of this debate significantly, but for now it's probably good that the intense interest in Kindles from a relatively narrow band of book readers is probably going to grow more slowly than some would think. It opens the possibility that book publishers will be able to develop an approach to eBooks that will open the marketplace to far greater competition amongst technology platform providers - and more opportunities for more ways to package and sell content on eBook platforms.

Although the Kindle itself is proprietary it is using the Sprint telecommunications company's broadband wireless network in the U.S., a strong network with standardized communications technology that could easily accommodate any number of services providing downloads of eBooks and other media. Enabling any media service to provide subscription or on-demand downloads into any device at a cost lower than typical broadband Internet services via such a network might accelerate a market for competitive platforms before Amazon gets to flood the market with cheaper Kindles at a not-so-distant future point in time. Here's hoping that publishers of books and other media jumping in the Kindle bandwagon think carefully about who should be in control of their distribution mechanism before locking themselves into being curators of content proprietary to emerging mobile platforms.

Labels: amazon, broadband wireless, eBooks, kindle, publishers

One of the more extraordinary gaps in the SIIA Information Industry Summit was the almost complete omission of references to mobile platforms. Given the number of executives who were thumbing through their mobile devices at the conference this was more than a little ironic. But the U.S. Federal Communications Commission's auction for soon-to-be-vacated UHF TV frequencies has changed that doubtlessly for next year's summit event. As noted by Reuters the official winner of the bidding battle for the first key frequencies in this radio spectrum is not known yet, but the winner of the war for what will be done with these frequencies is apparently Google.

The FCC had agreed that if bids for these frequencies exceeded USD 4.6 billion they would require the winning bidder to honor open access to those frequencies by any device. That threshold has been reached now in the bidding process. Presuming that the preferred use of these frequencies would be for mobile broadband Web access, this would mean that anyone could use any mobile platform to access the Web instead of having to be locked into a specific device - such as in the iPhone's apparently ill-fated exclusive deal with AT&T for broadband Web access. With an estimated million-plus iPhones having been "unlocked" by consumers to allow them access to other broadband networks the fruitlessness of trying to lock down platforms to carriers or vice versa for Web access is apparent. Assuming that the auction goes through as designed the days of artificial "walled gardens" of mobile content based on exclusive platform deals is likely to fade away fairly quickly.

Does all this mean that Google is going into the telecommunications business? With enormous nation-wide infrastructure in place it's not impossible that Google could go that route. But the likely scenario from my perspective goes thusly: If Google wins the bid, they buy Verizon or Sprint Nextel, abiding by stipulations that it operates as an independent subsidiary. If Verizon wins, they still go out and buy them or make them an offer that they can't refuse to enable their future plans. In any event, the telco remains independent but has a deal with Google that makes mobile available in much the same way that the Web is made available today.

The same, that is, except for that there will be one particular platform that may be out there to give a new twist to things: Google's. Their Android mobile operating system is apparently headed for hardware under development by Dell, providing a beachhead for unleashing their philosophy of content made accessible to everyone freely - if not always for free. If Google gets clever about how it charges for advertising on Android-equipped phones it's not altogether impossible that today's Web connection charges would go away. The stage would still be open for other mobile devices using different models, but with free Web access via Android-equipped phones they'd be hard-pressed to do so. So long, iPhone/AT&T model.

And, more to the point, so long most of the old telephony model. With services like Skype having developed global free access to telephony-like services - with integrated video and texting to boot - the call is in for hanging up on now-antiquated telephony methods. It is almost beyond imagining in a time in which I can call for minutes on end for free to India or Italy via Skype that I have to pay over USD 50 a month for the honor of trying to figure out whether or not I need to add an area code via my telephone to contact someone in the town next door. Dedicated circuits still have their place, but just as Google showed that "pretty good" search results were enough to revolutionize content monetization so will the "pretty good" Internet telephony that can be delivered via broadband wireless begin to push telephone companies to surrender their woefully inefficient approaches to telephony services.

In doing so Google will have eliminated the one remaining force that could create artificial scarcity restrictions on content distribution. Major media and telephony companies will continue to push in the U.S. for tiered Internet access, but if most content and communications can come in via broadband wireless at a single fee or through an ad-supported feeless model the rationale for tiered access will be hard to justify in the minds of the consumers. This would still leave a lot of room for potential profits for such companies, but perhaps in a different way than they had imagined. Instead of trying to charge boatloads for access to low-tech content sources such as text and low-bandwidth multimedia cable and telephony companies could have a Web tier devoted to products such as high-performance bandwidth for HDTV. As Google figures out how to do these types of new formats more efficiently in an ad-supported bandwidth model the telcos and cable companies would be forced to innovate even more to justfy the value of premium network services based not on artificial scarcity but on highly valuable technologies.

In all of this it's clear that there will continue to be a place at the table for premium content plays in broadband mobile applications: there are some times when a walled garden is actually a pretty nice place to be. But these gardens will be built by the demands of content consumers, not by the fiat of companies wanting to enforce scarcity where it does not need to exist. The world of traditional media outlets wants desperately for this not to happen, but as demonstrated by what consumers wind up doing when they waste time trying to prevent these changes - easily hacked DRM, unlocked iPhones, technology standards that restrict consumer choices rather than increase them - the years of profits gained by resisting appropriate technology innovations rarely outweigh the years of profits gained by embracing them aggressively.

Will all of this come to pass? Probably not - there are so many "moving parts" in the content industry today that Google itself cannot keep up with all of its changing landscape. The changes are likely to come over a decade at least, just as Google's initial rise to power took many hears to accelerate into a quantifiable market force. But with the amount of work that Google has put already into its mobile strategies it may be happening far more quicly than we can imagine. I don't think that I will have a Google-supplied dialtone on my kitchen phone in five years but I think that it's safe to say that by then I will have a hard time remembering when last I picked up my kitchen telephone or paid for a mobile-to-mobile phone call. And, more to the point, I won't be sad that I have to think about it. One can only hope.

Labels: auction, broadband wireless, google FCC, mobile

The image of Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos on the cover of Newsweek clutching his new Kindle as if it were "the new, new thing" is designed to get us thinking that the new portable device from Amazon is going to revolutionize the way that we use books, etc.

In short, it's not.

The article in Newsweek is filled with gushing praise for Bezos' efforts to "revolutionize" book reading as we know it, but little of what it promises requires a Kindle to make it happen. As the article acknowledges eventually:

In 2007, screens are ubiquitous (and less twitchy), and people have been reading everything on them—documents, newspaper stories, magazine articles, blogs—as well as, yes, novels. Not just on big screens, either. A company called DailyLit this year began sending out books—new ones licensed from publishers and classics from authors like Jane Austen—straight to your e-mail IN BOX, in 1000-work chunks.

In other words it's fair to say that the cat has been out of the bag for books on mobile platforms for quite some time and that from a book perspective there's not much new to say about Kindle other than it's another new device for eInk technology and a good way for people to view Amazon-scanned books in a proprietary viewer. Other than that, you're looking at an Apple Newton with built-in wireless that costs $100 more than a comparable eBook reader from Sony.

Ah, but that wireless. Probably the most interesting things that the Kindle can handle have less to do with books and a lot more to do with other content and marketing opportunities via its wireless capabilities. The Kindle will be able to download newsstand content such as newspapers and magazines as well as books via a wireless system that can use both wireless hotspot technology and broadband wireless. While at launch time the downloads are going to be coming from the Amazon online store, there's the potential in this platform to be a device that could interact with "bricks" environments as well as "clicks." When the Newsweek article says:

Amazon has designed the Kindle to operate totally independent of a computer: you can use it to go to the store, browse for books, check out your personalized recommendations, and read reader reviews and post new ones, tapping out the words on a thumb-friendly keyboard. Buying a book with a Kindle is a one-touch process.

it means Amazon's Kindle Store online site. Not exactly Buck Rogers stuff.

But what if instead the Kindle were a device that you could use to point at items in a retail store to learn more about them and then click on the Kindle to enable immediate purchasing of either a physical or virtual version of that item? What if you were reading an interesting eBook at your favorite coffee shop and then picked up a hard copy of it at the counter from their print-on-demand machine while you ordered up your second latte? Or, better yet, if you're in Toys 'R Us you could browse online reviews of toys and games on your Kindle and use in-store electronic purchasing via the Kindle to speed up the checkout process. Given the enormous investment that Amazon has in retailing all kinds of manufactured goods you'd think that they'd focus on how to improve margins across their entire catalog of merchandise via an electronic gadget.

Given the premium price tag for one of these units it's not clear that there's going to be much of any thunder at the cash register for Kindles this holiday season. Consider this a modest step by Amazon to get into the mobile platform business in a way that could position it in a very interesting way over time as an alternative to Microsoft, Apple and Google - a positioning that would make Amazon more attractive as an acquisition target for a publisher-friendly online service. Say, like, Yahoo? With Yahoo's brand-friendly approach to content, it would be a natural fit. So consider Kindle less of a revolution in eBooks and more of an evolution of Amazon towards a marriage that can bring its investors to a new level in the marketplace via acquisition.

Labels: amazon, broadband wireless, eBooks, eInk, kindle, mobile

Google may not always be great at creating products, but they sure do know how to create markets. In introducing its new Android open-source mobile phone platform via the Open Handset Alliance, Google has opened the gates for any and all software developers to develop new applications that can take advantage of Android's capabilities - already impressive in demo form.

This could catapult Andriod into a competitive position with Microsoft and Apple in relatively short time frame for mobile platforms if ambitious developers take up Google's challenge - and Google is making it easier for them to consider that challenge with USD 10 million in prize money for them to consider. The question is, though, will mobile carriers intent on maintaining proprietary control over their platforms to control services be willing to take on such an open platform?

According to Engadget the likely candidate for early adoption of Android for mobile devices in the U.S. is Sprint, which is the American telecoms carrier most aggressive in building out high-bandwidth, long-distance WiMax mobile Intenet infrastructure that could bring the mobile Web to the masses. Engadget speculates that perhaps Google would acquire Sprint to help accelerate WiMax growth, services fueled by Google mobile advertising revenues that might make mobile more affordable or, perhaps, free. Nice thinking, but with so many different communications technologies in play, including the impending action of soon-to-be-former analog television frequencies in the U.S. it's far more likely that Google will be looking towards an alliance with Sprint that would still leave the door open for Android via other carriers.

In the meantime Sprint has much to gain in working aggressively with Google. Slow to the mobile services dance as it grew incompatible network scale via its Nextel acquisition, Sprint needs an edge to catch up with rivals well entrenched with iPhones, Blackberries and other intelligent handsets. In doing so Sprint may be able to catch the next wave of mobile communications focused on both full-screen Web services and advanced messaging capabilities that can leverage WiMax efficiently while other technologies fall into place for even more mobile Web access.

The Zune-sized touch-screen demo unit with a Blackberry-like keyboard that Google's Sergey Brin used to show off Android certainly underscores that Android has the potential to develop features that can run with the current mobile big dogs very quickly - and begin to create a price war between Android-equipped units and currently pricey iPhones and Blackberries that might be just the trick to unlock the chicken-egg equation that seems to have slowed the growth of mobile Web services.

This is a long way of saying that we should expect Android to open up highly affordable Web access via mobile units far more quickly than other platforms are likely to do via telecommunication partners seeking to maintain status quo services pricing. While high-end content services will certainly find a home on Android it's the prospect of reaching people for whom a mobile phone is a necessity and high-speed Internet access via a PC a luxury that content producers and advertisers should consider most important in this rollout of content technologies.

The Web is about to get that much more powerful and affordable via Android-enabled devices and networks - and that much more important to marketers seeking audiences with limited attention spans. Pop in Google's OpenSocial initiative for social media services on top of an Android-enabled device and you have a thoroughly compelling platform for content development that other platform providers are going to be hard-pressed to match soon. Google's definitely in catch-up mode in mobile services but it looks like through Android they might be catching a big break at last.

Labels: Android, broadband wireless, Google, Microsoft, mobile, Sprint, WiMax

While Silicon Valley figure Mark Cuban mutters that the Internet is dead the real concern should be about how United States markets for Web publishing have begun to stagnate in recent years as overseas markets are gaining steam. While broadband Web access is available to about half of U.S. residents according to recent research, nations such as South Korea and Finland have been much more aggressive in pushing for universal access to broadband services., with China coming into its own rapidly. This gap in access is accentuated in mobile markets, where U.S.-based media producers have tied up with various telecommunications companies to license content through mobile carriers' private channels. In focusing on these short-term deals publishers lost momentum towards more widespread access to their content via mobile channels that could have added significantly to their audience base.

The Federal Communications Commission hopes to undo some of this backwardness by creating consumer-friendly rules for the radio frequencies being freed up for broadband wireless Internet access when analog U.S. television signals go off the air in 2009. USA today notes that FCC Chairman Kevin Martin is proposing new rules for this newly auctioned spectrum to use any wireless device to download any mobile broadband application, without restrictions. In other words the new mobile broadband coverage would preclude private deals for the distribution of intellectual property based on networks and mobile devices. Private deals would still be allowed via existing mobile channels, but the generally open framework of the Web would finally be available via mobile devices in the U.S.

This is a very positive move for the publishing industry, one which will accelerate rapidly their ability to reach audiences electronically and to broaden their market reach rapidly. With revenues dwindling rapidly in print publishing for all but the most esoteric or base interests publishers are faced with a widening gap in their top and bottom lines as online markets fail to grow penetration into a full-blown marketplace. Universal mobile broadband access will eliminate the barriers of entry into mobile markets for publishers, enabling them to push more aggressively into many of the lifestyle niches being abandoned in print format in favor of mobile content and to reach less affluent markets that will be able to use mobile devices as their primary Web access point if in-home access is not cost-effective.

It's appropriate that these frequencies being readied for new uses were the original backbone of the broadcast television industry. Just as broadcast television created vast new opportunities for entertainment, information and marketing the new broadband wireless capabilities will enable the U.S. to create a new universal access medium for enabling communications with its citizens. And unlike the broadcast television era the advent of social media will enable people to reach out to one another as well as to merchants and services providers as never before. Broadband wireless access has already enabled this for people in select locations on select networks, but the establishment of broadband wireless Internet access as the common denominator for American communications promises a bright future for all.

Labels: broadband wireless, FCC, fm publishing, government policy, Internet