A few years ago I blogged about Microsoft's then-CEO Bill Gates' appearance at the annual Consumer Electronics Show, in which his brand was sharing a good deal of the CES limelight with Google and Yahoo. No longer did the Microsoft brand alone command the attention of tech mavens: it was content and content-oriented features that were carrying the day. While Microsoft still enjoys an enviable position in the marketplace, there is no doubt that its ability to project presumed dominance in consumer and enterprise markets faces many challenges.

Labels: Android, apple, bill gates, computers, electronics, Google, markets, Microsoft, mobile, smart phones, Steve Jobs, taipei

I have looked sometimes with a certain amount of envy at friends who thumb around on their Blackberries, iPhones and other high-power PDAs, but given that Shore uses Google Apps as its core technology for our distributed teamwork it never seemed to make sense to power up on something that could be done from my mobile broadband card on my PC often enough, or, in a pinch, my Motorola RAZR phone. On my recent trip to Bangalore, though, the RAZR went AWOL at a security checkpoint in Delhi (so that's what that PA announcement was about...) which made Skype a pressing necessity until I got home Saturday. On the way home in the car service I poked through my carrier's options for phones and finally settled on the Samsung Rant as the probable replacement.

I had really wanted an Andriod phone, but it's a few months away from making its debut on my carrier's network in official form. Some available hacks of Andriod's open source code to make it work on HTC models was a tempting bleeding-edge option, but I decided that this could wait a few months for the next version of Andriod to make its way into sanctioned models, at which point my son can inherit the Rant when I switch him over from another carrier. Why not an iPhone? Sorry, while I do believe that the App Store sets up a great model for content providers to exploit in mobile markets, I don't believe in forced deals with carriers and the content model for iPhone leaves publishing too much in the old world. l didn't that feel that getting an iPhone would be "walking the talk"about where the content industry needs to go. Android will be here soon enough, and not a moment too soon for publishers who need more affordable and capable mobile platforms to reach broader markets.

In the meantime, the Rant is a pretty capable little content buddy and has the one key feature for which I have been pining in a mobile device: a sizable and well-designed keyboard. Just looking at a Blackberry's miniscule keyboard is enough to send me to the eye doctor for a new prescription; it seems to take way too much focus to make it work. The Rant has a super-comfortable and wide keyboard that lights up nicely, so I can text or email in comfort and actually get out a few coherent sentences if need be without too much bother. It also has a "carousel" of pre-loaded applications which includes Google Maps, Gmail, Google Calendar, Google Notebook and other apps that line up nicely with our needs and work very well on the Rant. It has good multimedia features, including the obligatory talking GPS navigator, EV-DO video playback and a 2 megapixel camera for video and snaps. The browser is weak at best, but as I tend to browse on my PC broadband mostly it's fine enough for in-a-pinch poking about. Not bad for about sixty bucks.

While being able to email and do calendaring more efficiently was certainly a key priority, being able to text efficiently has become a priority for me as well. Now I can Twitter with ease and respond to text messages more efficiently. Trying to do that on the run had been a challenge at best on the RAZR. My one regret is that my carrier continues to make it a total hassle to get contacts on and off my PC and into the calling directory of the phone: artificial scarcity strkes again as a key content ploy. But while awaiting Andriod I can use my Contacts section of Gmail to work around this easily enough - and have less worry about stuff that's not easily extracted from proprietary schemes. In the meantime I get to use a machine that fits in with this year's Outlook 2009 theme: Less is More. My philosophy is that you should never have a machine that you aren't perfectly comfortable losing. So far, mission accomplished.

Labels: mobile, rant, review, samsung, text messaging

Talk about a bad hair day for WSJ tech journalists.

When The Wall Street Journal ran an article today on a Google plan to add "edge caching" servers at key internet service provider facilities, this fairly common practice to accelerate content delivery to audiences via the Web was mangled into a political imbrollio. To wit, their lede:

The celebrated openness of the Internet -- network providers are not supposed to give preferential treatment to any traffic -- is quietly losing powerful defenders.

Google Inc. has approached major cable and phone companies that carry Internet traffic with a proposal to create a fast lane for its own content, according to documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal. Google has traditionally been one of the loudest advocates of equal network access for all content providers.

Google was quick to correct the WSJ's outlook, as noted on their public policy blog and in a subsequent AFP story. Their point:

Despite the hyperbolic tone and confused claims in Monday's Journal story, I want to be perfectly clear about one thing: Google remains strongly committed to the principle of net neutrality, and we will continue to work with policymakers in the years ahead to keep the Internet free and open.

Intellectual property guru and Net Neutrality proponent Lawrence Lessig noted that his take on Google and the political ramifications of this move were a bit off-key in the WSJ article as well:

The article is an indirect effort to gin up a drama about a drama about an alleged shift in Obama's policies about network neutrality. What's the evidence for the shift? That Google allegedly is negotiating for faster service on some network pipes. And that "prominent Internet scholars, some of whom have advised President-elect Barack Obama on technology issues, have softened their views on the subject."

Who are these "Internet scholars"? Me. ...I've not seen anything during the Obama campaign or from the transition to indicate it has shifted its view about network neutrality at all.

With more moving pieces than a Swiss watch in Washington right now, the current political environment surrounding Net Neutrality and other Web access issues during a transition in Washington's power brokers is bound to be subject to as much jockeying and bullying as possible. Today the U.S. Federal Communications Commission canceled a vote on making radio frequencies available that would provide free Internet access as a public utility, bowing to pressures from both industry advocates and politicians. There's a big push for open Web access, but plenty of pressure from all points of view keeping things comfortably in neutral for now.

Net Neutrality and related issues such as public Web wireless frequencies seem to boil down to one basic concept: Don't make audiences pay for artificial scarcity. Carriers are still free to sell "bigger pipes" and better overall service levels, but artificial cartels based on reserving audience-facing Internet bandwidth for private use will only create more challenges for publishers in the long run. If you want to have proof that this is so, just take a look at the balkanized state of mobile service carriers that lassoed content providers for many years into deals for distribution on their private networks. What publishers now confront are scattered and overpriced deals for growing but underperforming mobile markets, even as the carriers now reach for ad revenue shares to sweeten their take.

Proprietary mobile breakthroughs such as the iPhone and the Amazon's Kindle are great for publishers in many ways, but they represent a relatively small share of the potential marketplace for mobile content and ultimately just continue the myth that artificial network scarcity can benefit the publishing industry as a whole. All these devices do is lock publishers in to proprietary networks that are bound to make it harder to reach their audiences cost-effectively.

The truth is that the fastest-evolving, most cost-effective technology changes are best for publishers, making it imperative to enable an environment in which mobile and Web technology providers are not resting on proprietary laurels that hinder the development of Web and mobile markets for publishers. Without these breakthroughs, the audience reach that content producers need to make mobile networks a highly profitable distribution medium is not likely to materialize. Let's keep the future of publishing out of the hands of companies that still can't tell us whether to dial "1", an area code or nothing extra to make a phone call to the next town.
Net Neutrality will ensure that there is a cost-effective, rapidly evolving electronic distribution infrastructure that serves publishers best.

Labels: Dow Jones, Google, lessig, mobile, net neutrality

The mobile phone world was a-twitter with word that Nokia has purchased mobile software maker Symbian and will make the core of its software an open source resource some time later this year via a new Symbian Foundation, with other open-source assets to follow. Engadget notes that the Symbian foundation will include many of the mobile industry's biggest names and will include technology donated from both Nokia and many others, including Motorola, Sony Ericsson and NTT DoCoM. Other members will include Texas Instruments, Vodafone, Samsung, LG, and, interestingly, AT&T, which has had great success as of late with the proprietary Apple iPhone platform.

Clearly the impending launch of Google's open source Andriod mobile platform, delayed in launch until the fall but looming nevertheless, has forced the hand of mobile equipment providers and network operators to consider the potential impact of having their highly proprietary approaches to mobile technologies "googled" away to the demand for more common mobile standards for software to power more content services development. By creating a common core of technologies based on a company with which it's had a long-standing relationship Nokia gets to expand the value of their knowledge of the platform in a way that may transform their business model over time from one of manufacturing to one of enabling systems development. Given the demand for mobile services in developing nations this will enable companies like Nokia to have a hand in those markets without having to bear the full cost of either hardware or software development through the Foundation's partner network.

But more importantly for the content industry this puts at least as much pressure on providers Microsoft, Palm, Apple and Research in Motion to recognize that there is ever more pressure on proprietary operating system solutions to justify their ways. With speed wireless broadband network services opening up the Web to mobile devices the ability to deliver platform-specific content services will become icing on the cake for those who want new status toys but for the bread-and-butter corprorate worker or mobile entrepreneurs and family members it may take more than just a few proprietary services and a delightful interface to keep people locked into a proprietary platform. For content suppliers looking for new "choke points" via proprietary platforms the short-term news via suppliers like Microsoft, RIM and Apple looks good, but the picture over the horizon is likely to look vastly different in less than a year. Be it via the Symbian Foundation or Android platforms, publishers need to stop looking again and again for new ways to activate old business models via mobile platforms and look far more aggressively at how they will survive and thrive in a world enabled with open and universal access to Web-enabled content sources.

Labels: Android, AT+T, Google, mobile, nokia, open source, RIM

At a business meeting recently I encountered an Amazon Kindle device in the hands of a prosperous executive eager to show off his new gizmo. It was...pretty much what I had expected. Its eInk display technology makes for an easy-on-the-eyes reading surface, through not super-bright, and the monochrome display has all the charm of an under-engineered Apple Newton. But the device as a whole impresses one as more easy to handle than photographs would imply, with a nifty little sidebar LED display blipping away as pages load to give it that Star Trek feel for those folks who need to be reminded that this is a neat-o device. The keyboard is about as bad as I had expected, but given the Blackberry era that we're living in most people who are already mobile fanatics will probably find it to be plenty easy and familiar enough for the rare times that it will come into use.

Amazon's recent acquisition of spoken word distributor Audible for a hefty USD 300 million price tag underscores that Amazon is only at the very beginning of its journey into mobile content platforms. As it is there are a fair number of publications available already on Kindles, but in spite of its still waiting-list-only sales status after a rousing round of Christmas holiday sales it's not clear that we're seeing the beginning of a stampede to Kindles any time soon with its hefty price tag and slow production schedule. This makes it harder for Kindle enthusiasts to turn their love for the device into sales any time soon. That's probably just as well, given that more beefy functionality is required in the device to make it more universally appealing. It's a bit reminiscent of when U.S. Robotics first introduced the Palm Pilot, a trendy device that sparked the PDA fad but one that lacked a keyboard, a factor that opened the door for more traditional input interfaces from Microsoft and RIM's Blackberry.

While an intense media blitz and Jeff Bezos' personal commitment to the product launch helped to kick Kindle into a well-hyped introduction, I sense that my take from last Fall is still pretty much on track. Kindle is largely an effort by Amazon to go to the "King Gillette" model of making sure that there is a nifty handle (read: mobile platform) on which to sell razor blades regularly. It works for Steve Jobs over at Apple, the thinking goes not doubt, so why shouldn't Amazon have its own content device-cum-captive content channel? Well, why not indeed - at least for now. Kindle will help Amazon to cater to publishers trying to find new walled gardens for their content in an increasingly open digital world, but at the end of the day the value in content is not just in one-time sales but in being able to build a relationship with a content brand or author over time in whatever context an audiences desires that relationship. Kindle will do very well for publishers still in the "we publish things" business but for those who are beginning to realize that they are in the business of providing valuable experiences to audiences Kindle may turn out to be a platform that's more of an experimental bridge to a more interactive and profitable future.

Labels: amazon, eBooks, eInk, kindle, mobile

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

UPDATE: Google's launch of the codenamed "Maka-Maka" project will take place Thursday, details at TechCrunch.] With Silicon Valley sprouting more Hawaiian-esque words for social media products than a Trader Vic's menu it's only appropriate that Google should be betting large on a social media with a new project code-named Maka-Maka. As detailed by TechCrunch Maka-Maka is an effort to bring social media capabilities and other Google content applications to any Web platform and application rather than trying to create just another standalone portal. To some degree this may seem like sloppy seconds after having lost a bidding war for Facebook to Microsoft, especially as Google's own Orkut social media portal has barely dented U.S. markets. But there may be some strengths to Google's methods if they can get them rolled out in a timely fashion.

The general Maka-Maka concept is to use social media as the principle platform from which one accesses other Google applications and which in turn can be embedded on other media platforms, in essence turning any Google application or other application into a social media-enabled application, complete with Google's own library of widgets already enabled through the iGoogle personalized interface. Add in Google's contextual ad capabilities and there's the potential for a new type of universal distribted platform for consuming content that puts social contexts at its focal point. Instead of locking people into a particular portal Google provides a trusted login, core functionality and the ability to embed a common framework for conversational content anywhere.

Then again, it could turn out to be what it seems to be at first glance: an after-the-fact attempt to pull together on a patchwork basis a very disparate group of Google applications that were never constructed with social media in mind. Facebook has its own ideas for a social media operating system as well, mind you, but at least it would start with a viable community built around bona-fide relationships at the center of its capabilities rather than having to wish that network into being.

But there's one key aspect to Google's gambit that may help it to propel its plans for Maka-Maka forward more quickly than may be envisioned at first: mobile markets. With a strong mobile platform about to be launched and powerful content and applications built off of Google Maps that are naturals for social networking there's every reason to think that Maka-Maka may be first and foremost the gateway into mobile social media that can bridge together voice conversations, messaging, email ecommerce and user-generated content far more rapidly than any other mobile provider. With Facebook under Microsoft's wing there's going to be an already established mobile platform on which Facebook's network of users could be deployed rapidly, so this is going to be a race with many dimensions - many of which could just as easily favor Microsoft's increasingly savvy online strategy.

Much of this will become more clear over the next few weeks as Google reveals more about both its mobile capabilities as well as its social media plans, but expect the initial announcements about Maka-Maka to be underwhelming until Google's mobile plans become more explicit. Once those kick in Maka-Maka may just turn out to be a very interesting way for the world to carry on its conversations in more online and mobile venues than any other provider - if it can finally manage to draw a critical mass of audience share for its social media efforts. Google's efforts to date don't augur well for that likelihood, but as Google seeks to open up mobile markets to more universal and cross-network access it may yet get the upper hand on truly universal social media.

Labels: facebook, Google, maka-maka, mobile, Social Media

I've been waiting so long for eBooks to take off that it's begining to feel like a scene from a comedy sketch or an existential play, but current sales trends offer some moderate optimism that the medium may be building steam. While USD 8 million for eBooks sales in July is still a rounding error for the book trade as a whole it's double what it was a year ago, and showing strong movement towards cracking USD 100 million in eBook sales next year. Helping along eBooks will be improving players such as Sony's new PRS-505 platform, which Engadget indicates is
now available at a USD 299 sticker price.

The 505 features improved paper-like image resolution from eInk technology and perhaps most importantly a USB port to allow uploads and downloads between the reader and one's PC - at last simplifying the process to snatching content off the Web and transferrring it to the reader. That content can include MP3 files, but with ultra-low power consumption - you could go weeks between needing extra juice for this unit - the main appeal is to the monochrome text world of readers.

Yet for all of the niceties added to this improved model it's still a far cry away from what is likely to be adopted as a mass-market device for book consumption. One significant barrier remains the price point - with communications companies subsidizing the cost of mobile phones heavily to promote usage, why hasn't the book industry considered the same for devices that would promote eBook growth? The answer comes in part from the tradition of booksellers working with balkanized networks of distributors - they're comfortable with retailers who want to lock in their own comfy margins with book products, each with their own quirks and formats.

In the process of helping their vendors remain proprietary, though, the industry is slipping away rapidly from any real opportunities for eBooks to take off in a big way any time soon. Amazon's Kindle platform, slated for a launch (of sorts) this month, will do hardly better than Sony in making people love yet another device to clutter their world - and in fact may do worse, given the device's positively retro look: think of a cross between an IBM PCjr and an early Star Trek Tricorder. Then again, for those attached to print perhaps this is flashy enough.

The real problem with eBook readers lies with their inability to provide any sort of useful reading experience beyond simple book pages. With Adobe PDFs still the widely used standard for premium eBook materials, too many publishers are trying to format information with print-like rendition in mind and leaving eBook readers to try to figure out how to scroll through or otherwise make sense of materials not well adapted for the relatively low resolution of eBook displays. There's a long ways to go before we can even begin to think of this medium as truly "electronic paper."

Mobile devices such as phones are the real portable eBook and eMagazine platform of choice, but even here displays can disappoint. I was watching an iPhone enthusiast demonstrate recently how "easy" it was to read a magazine through the slick new device - a magazine that was formatted for print reading and utterly unnavigable on the tiny iPhone screen. Publishers born of the print world just cannot, cannot give up the notion that print-formatted materials will work great on anything that's smaller than their original format.

With all this said, there may be a niche for eBook readers amongst people who want to make sure that they have something to grab when their mobile phone needs a recharge. In the meantime eBooks are thriving on phones and in online venues where printable formatting is considered a plus. eBooks will do particularly well as materials that can encourage previewing a title that someone would like to consider for on-demand printing. But still, even at this highly developed stage in the electronic publishing era, it's hard for most publishers and technologist to think of books as anything other than a relic that will be accomodated reluctantly by new technologies. This leaves plenty of room for people to reinvent what a book really is - but that's for another post, perhaps.

Labels: downloads, eBooks, mobile, Sony

You have your choice of horror stories to choose from as AT+T sends out its first service bills for Web access via Apple's iPhones. USA Today covers an active text messager who had her 300-page bill delivered in a box (YouTube video below) while a design consultant who got socked with roaming charges for Web access had to cough up USD 5,000 to settle his everyday use of the mobile web. The culprit in both instances is message units, with AT&T's by-the-byte metering making single-page Web downloads as much as USD 20 per page or more in some instances. With rates like this one can only wonder what mobile Web carriers would have in mind if they decided to start adding on fees for high-traffic Web sites as some of them are proposing for general Web access.

While AT&T dismisses these as extreme examples of billing charges the fact of the matter is that it's indicative of how little phone carriers have come in accepting what creates value in content access today. We have had more than a decade of flat-rate Internet access services and increasing use of free or flat-rate telephony to accelerate the growth of electronic publishing but still the major carriers want to play by the old rules - to the long-term detriment of publishers. The most likely consequence of this early application of inflexible metered billing is to heighten the appeal of proposals before the U.S. Federal Communications Commission to make new frequencies available for broadband wireless access more open to competition and transparent access to content and supporting services.

The same threats to revenues faced by publishers as telecommunications companies try to impose tariffs on land-line Internet access are already in place in a mobile marketplace that will represent an increasingly significant portion of publisher revenues - if we can get beyond USD 20-per-page Web downloads. AT&T's clumsy handling of billing may back-handedly do publishers a great favor by letting them see both the promise of a device like the iPhone and the inordinate restrictions for its use to access the Web. Publishers know already that print revenues will no longer fill the bottom line as before: it's time for publishers to push aggressively in the U.S. Congress for a more open, flat-rate approach to mobile Web access that will help them to build online revenues as quickly as possible and to promote more accessible and profitable mobile services that will help them to do that more effectively.

Labels: apple, AT+T, iPhone, mobile, Monetization

Kudos to David Pogue at The New York Times for a great review of the new iPhone from Apple. David's general view is that the appliance lives up to its hype, but he points out a number of key shortcomings, such as inferior text input (keys appears on the flat glass display), downright awkward phone call initiation, the need to ship it back to Apple after a year or so to get the battery replaced (a la iPod) and inferior network performance from AT&T. But while the iPhone may turn out to be the worst of both worlds for people already attuned to sophisticated mobile devices such as Blackberries (no coincidence that the splash ad for this article was for their new sleek model) the key to the iPhone's appeal centers around its ability to be a content-serving device like no other. GPS-keyed maps make the device a traveler's godsend for navigating unfamiliar territories and coming up with nearby services. The intuitive interface enables a user to shift to Web content seamlessly in a full-featured browser that comes with a very affordable (USD 20/month) internet access plan that may yet knock the legs out from underneath many an online content deal.

Ah, but with limitations there, as well. Flash and Java are not enabled in the browser, so the tons 0f online video and animated content available online is out of bounds. Of course there's video and audio from the iTunes store, which is most probably the point: after years of platform ju-jitsu from Microsoft to frustrate publishers it's Apple's turn to make it that much harder to come up with a platform-independent distribution strategy. But common file formats such as PDF, Word and Excel are accessible via iPhone so it will at least be useful for serious reading to some degree. And unless you're in an AT&T wireless hotspot broadband performance isn't going to be an option in most instances.

I think of the iPhone as a very portable Microsoft Surface - an appliance that is ahead of many technologies' ability to sustain a very compelling product vision but that nevertheless gets people jazzed about the possibilities of a new way of looking at computing. Unlike Microsoft's table-bound Surface, though, the iPhone is perfect for a younger, mobile generation not interested in plunking down thousands of dollars for a major piece of...furniture? But iPhone's most important impact on the content marketplace is likely to be its ability to create demand for broadband wireless on a mass scale, demand that's likely to fire up competition from other wireless carriers to deliver both more coverage and more effectively enabled interfaces to the Web. AT&T wins this round for Web access, but what will happen when Verizon enables YouTube access? Consider this iPhone debut the launch of the real mobile Web - with some frenetic developments yet to come.

Labels: iPhone, mobile, Technology, Trends

The Guardian notes the release of EMI's first album distributed in a high-quality MP3 format without DRM controls, a policy that EMI will apply to all releases except for music from the Beatles' catalog. Individual tracks will be available for USD 30 cents more than the Apple FairPlay DRM-encoded tracks, though CNET News notes that EMI will continue to make tracks available via FairPlay and will not offer upgrades to people who already own FairPlay content. An entire album goes for GBP 7.99 - that's about USD 16, a typical going price. In sum EMI did the math and realized that there was a fairly specific and predictable amount of revenue loss that could be expected through online piracy and decided that the gain from increased exposure made non-DRM encoded content a cost-effective alternative.

More importantly it gives EMI the ability to move its marketing beyond Apple's iPod and eliminate the artificial stranglehold that proprietary DRM had placed on its online distribution strategies. EMI is now free to manage its sales through whatever channels it sees fit - and in doing so open up more contextual points of contact with the purchasing public. This move is not likely to dent sales of the popular iPod any time soon but with more music being consumed on mobile phones and other trend-setting devices a platform-agnostic approach to content distribution will allow EMI to keep their content in the ears and minds of their audiences more easily - and increase their ability to keep its popularity flowing regardless of the platforms that users opt for.

If there was a DRM scheme that was future-proof and non-proprietary it may have been otherwise but for now EMI has decided to adapt to the economics of users managing their content the way that they'd like to. And in the end that's a good thing for both EMI and their audiences if it makes their content more popular and usable. Hopefully music producers develop more enhanced packaging for their content that adds value to the underlying product and to their knowledge of how it is used and distributed. But until that can be done in a standards-based format the music industry appears to be ready to use existing standards as a way to reach audiences as efficiently as possible.

Labels: EMI, intellectual property, mobile, Trends

MediaPost reports on a new Netpop report on the U.S. broadband marketplace which highlights an interesting factoid: only five percent of Web users considered to be "innovators" use mobile devices to access Web content services. Sending email is the top use, underscoring mobile devices being used as messaging platforms, content use lags far behind. One of the main reasons cited for lower use? Price. None of this is terribly surprising given real-world experiences but it does underscore the need for content providers to consider whether the content licensing deals that they have struck with many of today's mobile providers haven't stymied overall mobile content growth. The stepchild in mobile access to date has been broadband wireless services, which are subject to telecommunications carriers trying to build tiered pricing into these services - which will likely slow adoption of these services.

With a looming gap between print and online revenues many publishers are concentrating full-bore on the move to online platforms to try to shore up margins. But as print continues its decline at a decreasingly ungentle rate publishers' horizons must turn to broadband wireless services more aggressively. Apple's upcoming iPhone features a full-screen browser to make online services more consumable via mobile devices, a trend that is likely to increase demand for mobile content - if the price is right. Publishers need to step up their lobbying efforts in Washington to ensure that cost-effective broadband wireless access can come online as quickly as possible to ensure that mobile users can stay connected to the services that are most likely to help publishers supplement declining print revenues with the medium that is most likely to become the default "reading on the go" medium.

Labels: broadband, lobbying, MediaPost, mobile, Netpop, Research, Trends