Tag Archive for ‘mobile’ at diversity.net.nz

Tag Archive for 'mobile'

The battle royal will be mobile.

Published by The Unreasonablemen on June 26, 2008 in Design, IT and Strategy. 0 Comments

A guest post from the Unreasonablemen.net

The announcement yesterday about Nokia’s acquisition of the rest of Symbian clearly draws the battle lines for a new age of competition. To me this strengthens my view about Google’s Android play.

For those who suffer from Nick Carr’s internet driven attention disorder, I basically said that Android is Goggle’s play to stay relevant in an increasingly mobile world. Currently Google can’t serve up Adwords to (my) mobile browser and given the growth in sales and increasing power of PDAs and micro computers this will be a big problem for them.

There has been a bunch written about Nokia’s acquisition but here are the titbits that I’ve used to support my theory and the title for this post.

Firstly let’s just talk about scale. I mention it briefly in the Android post, and for more on scale (different industry), I go into more detail here. Richard McManus of R/WW has a great graph showing market share of handset OS players. Check it out. Android is nowhere, Apple is a minnow, Microsoft and RIM are clear challengers. But look at the Symbian share! They are already the dominant player. They get all those scale benefits. They do have their challenges to address though.

Nat at Radar O’Reilly has picked up on the fact that both Android and Symbian have chosen to license the OS in a way that is both open source and allows them to build future monetisation revenues based on proprietary technology.

Proprietary competitive hardware and software can be put into any Android or Nokia phone at the appropriate level of the stack.

This is proprietary component critical for both. I’d be guessing as to what they’ll do, but I can tell you why. Both Nokia and Google need replacement revenue streams to start coming to fruition.

The ‘open’ component is also critical. At this time, the only thing Symbian appears to be lacking is a good developer community. As Microsoft has proven again and again, you need developers to really make a platform stick. Nokia urgently needs to get everyone developing on its platform. Hell - replicate the Apple play if you have too, just do it.

In his analysis of this move Om Malik looks at the disruption that is going on in the handset world. It’s a good analysis, but a little narrow for my liking, there is more than one industry involved here. The gem from it that is the part that I think is highly relevant to my platform theory.

[discussing handset makers] “The PC industry went through a similar gut-wrenching change …. The biggest prize went, unsurprisingly, to platform owner Microsoft — which didn’t merely sell an OS, but relentlessly wooed developers to write applications for its platform to make it more useful.”

In the battle to be the most relevant mobile platform, the vendors could do a lot worse than learn from Microsoft’s successes and failures.

We are heading toward a mobile future. Handsets are cheaper, do more and are more functional. More people have them! The mobile data networks of today are able to support our growing data requirements and speed demands. Many nations who bypassed computers and even PSTN telephony are embracing mobile technology, which means a bigger market pool available to the winner. This is also directly threatening to some really big companies futures - Google, Microsoft, Apple for instance. Make no mistake, whoever wins this battle will win big. For that reason there will be a massive scrap afoot in this space.

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Let’s see if mobile is really the mass market way of the future

Published by Ben Kepes on June 16, 2008 in Business, Efficiency, IT, New Zealand, Society and Strategy. 2 Comments

News that TradeMe, New Zealand’s answer to Ebay (and biggest single traffic generator in NZ) is going mobile.

While others claim that the iPhone heralds a revolution, and that mobile web browsing will be the mass market game-changer, I’m not so sure.

While TradeMe brought the Internet to Ma and Pa Kiwi, it remains to be seen whether TradeMe mobile will be similarly revolutionary.

Notwithstanding that it’s great to see TradeMe get mobile (bugs notwithstanding!)

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No One solution

Published by The Unreasonablemen on April 9, 2008 in Economic Development, IT, New Zealand, Society, Strategy and nzwc. 2 Comments

Last week I wrote the post “Isn’t the answer mobile?” which created a great deal of interest, commentary & thought provoking questions. Thanks to those who commented, some of what you wrote provides the basis for this post, as well as comments on Rod Drury’s blog post about FibreCo.

I guess the best starting point is to say last weeks post should have been titled “Isn’t PART of the answer mobile”. It’s clear from both these posts that mobile technology alone won’t suffice, but equally importantly neither will fibre. The FibreCo idea is audacious, and the vision both compelling and energising (which I suspect is the major goal behind it), however it does have a few weaknesses. I’m not here to throw stones at it, because I love that at least someone has provided some constructive solutions to our fast internet conundrum, what follows is my own attempt at conceiving some more.

In my opinion FTTP (key being P not H) (editors note - FTTP is Fibre to the Premises, as oposed to fibre to the Home) is only needed by a small (but hopefully growing) group of businesses. Not everyone needs a raging torrent of internet access, just like not everyone needs Mac trucks, PDA’s, high definition printers or computers at all. Hand in hand with this, I must also admit that I’m not sold on the 1:1 causality that goes with the belief that ubiquitous fast, cheap internet access will drive economic benefits. I don’t see massive queues of ‘weightless businesses” just waiting for fibre, I also don’t see all the other fundamentals (like wages, taxes and support) being addressed to drive the weightless economy. Maybe it’s chicken & egg, but I’m not convinced. Simon Arnold also asks if you need ubiquity in his comment on Rod’s blog”

But if you go back and look at the source of the benefits being claimed by NZI that make up the $2.7-4.4 billion per year (see here) most are able to be captured with much lower than the 75% penertration they are justifying the need for

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