Since I last wrote about ShareFile they’ve more squarely moved into the syncing space populated by services such as Dropbox, Syncplicity and other and have introduced synchronization services allowing either one or two way sync between devices. Today’s release see’s them move back to the sharing space a little with a mobile offering.

Essentially the applications include a cut down feature set from ShareFile’s web application. The use case here is to allow users to view and share file’s from a mobile device. The thinking being that mobile devices in general, and tablets in particular, will grow in use and importance over time.

Here’s where I got left feeling a little underwhelmed with what ShareFile is doing however – if the theory goes that people are working more and more on tablet devices, and using their desktops and laptops with decreasing frequency, then surely by extension an application that allows only viewing and sharing of files, and no editing, falls short of what the market really needs. To this criticism, Jesse Lipson, CEO of ShareFile told me that they see the market split into two distinct categories of vendor;

• Visionaries who believe the world will move to the cloud fairly rapidly, and that traditional desktop tools will become more obsolete (box.net falls into this category)
• Pragmatists who believe traditional tools (thinks MS Office and Outlook) will continue to be the default for organizations for the foreseeable future (ShareFile class themselves in here)

Unfortunately this is where I disagree with the thinking behind ShareFile’s strategy. I can accept that there are two distinct classes of people, those who are ties to traditional systems and don’t want to take advantage of this brave new mobile world, and those who want to progress and don’t want to be limited by their software as to what they can, and cannot, do. For this latter class of people – being able to view a file, but not edit it, on their tablet device, is a deal breaker.

I can accept that it need to be deeply rich editing – but a degree of mobile editing is a non-negotiable requirement for a tablet based file sharing app in my view, and in this respect ShareFile is making a mistake.

I’ve not been in the US since December so, prior to my trip next week for Cloud Connect and SXSW, I decided I’d top up my prepay card. I decided (more fool me) to head online to the Pay As You Go Online site where I was invited to register to use the service. So far so good, I entered my mobile number (lucky that I keep paperwork huh?) and then entered the last four digits of my number which had been set as the temporary ID.

I was then taken to a page which, in fantastically circular fashion, told me that a new PIN number had been sent via SMS to my mobile.

Yes… it was sent via SMS to a service that only works within the US.

I figured an operator might be able to reset my PIN so I spent the typical half hour navigating an incredibly annoying AT&T AVR system, only to be told by an operator that, yes, she could reset my PIN, and would SMS it to my mobile.

I can’t believe that I’m the only user of this product from outside the US, after all GoPhone is marketed as a great solution for people spending only some of their time in the US. Why design a system that completely fails for those who it’s actually designed for?

In the end the operator was able to process my transaction, but only after she forced me to give her a fake zip code because, you guessed it, GoPhone only works with those with a US zip code.

I think I need a drink….

Set to auto-sense phones and PDAs, mobile users get a nice svelte experience that is quick and mobile-data light.

Nice!

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.

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!)

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 public investment off. I do think a bit of hard nosed analysis of marginal cost of provision versus marginal benefit is warranted.

Secondly, if you do need that kind of data throughput, you should take Bwooce’s advice …

If you want fast internet access for your business, site your business appropriately. ….. Just as you may choose to live next to an airport, you may choose to live in an area with crap internet coverage

If I may extrapolate this out a little, you may want to even have the position that if fast, large bandwidth internet access is important to you, you should pay for fibre to be connected. The great news is that Telecom’s cabinetisation program will make this more affordable. The way I read it (& again-not an engineer!) Telecom will be laying a lot of ducts & the distance to the Cabinet is going to be a lot shorter… so it should be that the cost of getting Fibre installed will decrease. This position should hold true if you are a business or consumer who wants IP TV.

Having just said Fibre is just one of the solutions it’s fair to say that I also believe that ADSL broadband has a role in our future. For some it is more than adequate. Again, as Bwooce says 24 mbps is plenty for email, internet, video conferencing etc. By that, it addresses the NZI’s ‘Telepresence’ and ‘Remote working’ economic benefits. (as a sidepoint even Cisco’s full monty Telepresence system only requires 15 mbps & that’s way more demanding than a web-cam type approach!) For digital media and other data intensive sectors is ADSL going to be enough? No, see point 1, buy fibre…

Mobile….I caught up with some folks about my previous mobile theory. According to them (the royal them) there area bunch of things you can do on a cell site like sectors, carriers & polarisation which all work to decrease contention, optimise spectrum use and generally make the experience better for the consumer & more economic for the carrier.

Despite popular opinion, ISP economics is important, if they can deliver services cheaper (and make an operating margin), then generally the price to customers will be cheaper, but it’s not all about price. Again, according to ‘them’, doing all these things could allow you to deliver speeds of up to 1 Mbps (maybe more). This speed would definitely improve if high demand users went to fibre. I know 1 Mbps ain’t fantastic against global benchmarks, but again for some it would be a great leap forward and more than suffice. I’m thinking of people on dialup (and there are still nearly 700 000 of those) or old plans (256kbps for instance, again plenty of those). Tom Chignall of Vodafone commented on Rod’s blog

We don’t need a fibre vision – we need a broadband vision which connects the people of this country to each other and to the outside world.…. Our view is that wireless has a major role to play…., The technology is in place today to deliver as good an experience as I get over my Telecom service (resold thro ugh Vodafone!)in Auckland’s central suburbs. Wireless speeds are doubling very soon and we have Telecom and NZ Comms entering the fray with similar technologies.”

I agree with Tom’s major points , we need a vision that connects NZ to the world in the most appropriate way for them. I think this vision means when you buy a fast internet plan, you are going to have to make some choices based on your particular needs. If you are one of those companies or people feeling massively restrained by ADSL (financially, gaming wise, IP TV wise) then you are in one camp. If you get on the internet to ‘get the email’ like my mum, dial or mobile technology might be fine for you. The reality is though, whatever you choose, you should be aware that you are going to pay for it ….. there are no free rides. To me this is the crux of the issue for NZ . Just look at the links above, price isn’t the impediment (we’re cheaper than the OECD average), fast speeds are available, so why so many dial and low speed plans? No need for them?

For all those who did comment and weren’t referenced, your input did help, again many thanks.

There’s been a fair amount of debate about how NZ gets better faster broadband. This isn’t a simple proposition and much of it has been made even more complex because of politicalisation, poor press leading to general acceptance that Telecom New Zealand is ‘bad’ (just look at the sensationalist title to this), ignorance and a real clouding of issues.

So lets separate out the issues. Jim Donovan provides a nice synopsis of the issues as Rod Drury sees them. In my opinion there are a lot of issues tied up even in this.

Firstly can we accept the fact that Telecom is a public company and as such will try its best to make a profit for its shareholders, (which incidentally includes just about everyone in NZ with a managed fund, the point being you are doing yourselves out of your retirement dosh!). The implications of this are that they are legally obliged to invest their shareholders money to get the best return possible…which may not always be what people think is ‘good’ for the country as a whole.

Having multiple international trade routes is different from national data speeds. It’s a damn good idea and should just happen ala Google.

Next, lets address national data speeds. There’s a lot of apples with pears comparisons with other nations out there. These nations don’t have our population levels or distribution, so doing this isn’t that valuable. Benchmarks are good, but how about making them meaningful (as opposed to a political weapon).

Lets look at broadband. Everyone is talking about fast ‘broadband’, but what they really mean is fast internet connectivity – give me the webpage I want faster, upload my stuff faster…. Semantic, but important difference.

Broadband in common use means an ADSL connection. ADSL is effectively compressed data travelling down the same copper as you use for a phone line. Broadband in other countries means other things like cable, Fibre and other technologies. The whole broadband thing became quite topical when the government noticed that people might be pointing the finger at them for our slow movement down the OECD averages for income and wealth. They also noted that the countries moving up that list had higher penetration of faster internet technologies than us and viola, it became an election issue.

If we take a stick to Telecom, make them the bad guy people won’t point at us anymore. This conveniently neglected other things like company tax, RnD, incentives and funding for start ups, tax breaks for international tech companies etc. Anyways, the end result was that in a knee jerk reaction to get the monkey off its back Telecom agreed to invest in its fixed line business to the tune of $1.4bn. The point of this investment is to shorten the loop between the point where the core network (fibre) stops and the copper (last 2km – the bit to your home) starts. This shortening reduces the distance impact and will provide greater speeds (10mbps) to the home and …. no one will be happy with the result. It still won’t be fast enough (here for religious screaming from the left, here for business impact).

This type of disappointment will mean more Telecom bashing, closely followed by the realisation that the loop distance needs to be reduced to about 800m. That means more cabinets (I’m told 3 times as many, and another $700mill). And get this, this additional investment will only give data speeds of up to 20mbps… more disappointment !!! Which gets you to the point where you realise you need Fibre to the home. I heard that the last time Telecom looked at that it was going to cost circa $10bn to deliver. So that’s just not going to happen (as Paul Reynolds has already said).

Or, you try a different approach.

Think about the world we live in, most people have telephones they carry around with them, notebook sales outstrip desktops, pda’s, ipods, WiFi in the home… its all about untethering the cable…or simply being mobile. Why then are we trying to solve the issue with redundant technology when the requirement is just for fast internet speeds.

Here’s my hypothesis. The network you think of as mobile, isn’t really mobile. It’s a fixed backhaul network with cell towers attached at the end to deliver the last mile. If you think about it, its identical to your home WiFi network and we love those!

Why then don’t we leverage the fibre to the cabinet programme, turn all those cabinets into a cell site and start thinking about fast mobile data technologies like LTE. I know its not a ratified standard (others are though and they are quite quick!), but it is already demo’d as doing 150mbps. That’s 15 times what cabinetisation is going to deliver to the home…. Isn’t it about fast internet, not copper or fibre. I know there is a pricing issue, but scale will bring that down….

Thoughts?