About Mobility

What is the real meaning of competing in the mobile market today?

Well, today it is not about competing for the mobile market… Instead, because the space is still so immature, it’s about competing for its early adopters.

In response to the above question, Tomi Ahonen wrote at ForumOxford:

Good question. My quick take on it…

First, there is the contest on the handsets, rather straight-forward, Nokia vs Samsung vs Moto vs SE vs LG vs the others RIM, Apple etc. This is quite a well-defined market, still growing.

Then there is the contest for the subscriber, network operators and in many markets already also MVNOs, trying to get our connection by contract or pre-paid account. This is an expanding market, where in almost all markets there is a growth in providers (either more license operators or MVNOs or both) but some most advanced markets have gone past the MVNO cycle – Denmark, Hong Kong, Finland – and have now shrinking pool of operators.

Then is the contest in communication traffic, voice and person-to-person SMS mostly, some mobile email (blackberry etc) and a bit of mobile IM Instant Messaging as well. This is quite mature, nearly 100% of subscribers use voice and 74% use SMS.

Then is the value-add services market. This is young. It has some mass market services, voting-for-TV (American Idol style) and ringing tones are pretty well established; but most other parts – videogaming, web surfing, mobile-TV, mobile advertising, mobile banking, m-commerce etc – are in the early stages.

Then finally, there are regional variances. South Korea mobile TV is mainstream already (over a fifth are subscribers). In Japan mobile advertising is mainstream (half of subscribers receive ads). In the Philippines mobile banking is prevalent. In Austria mobile payments are common. Etc.

But these all create conflicting and overlapping concepts of loyalty and churn. Multiple subscriptions for example.

Isn’t Tomi great? Great, accurate description…

ceo

In startups it’s so important to make an impact (Go to Market) early and as efficiently as possible, with the resources at hand, and while following proper software engineering methods. Many companies fail because they never deliver, or simply deliver too late. Timing is everything. It doesn’t have to be perfect. Below are some recommended strategies to follow:

Rule #1: Get to market, now — Per Guy Kawasaki, “Don’t worry be Crappy“:

“Don’t worry, be crappy. An innovator doesn’t worry about shipping an innovative product with elements of crappiness if it’s truly innovative. The first permutation of a innovation is seldom perfect–Macintosh, for example, didn’t have software (thanks to me), a hard disk (it wouldn’t matter with no software anyway), slots, and color. If a company waits–for example, the engineers convince management to add more features–until everything is perfect, it will never ship, and the market will pass it by.”

Well, in reality, you can’t afford to be crappy, but the point is to get to market fast, as early as you can — there is always time to go back and address things.

Delivering early means running pilots or Betas, to learn about the customer, learn about what you produce, and about related business models.

Rule #2: Set proper expectations. Following #1 above (deliver early to market) set the expectations that “this is an early version, work in progress”. Be explicit that the early version is a pilot, or a Beta version. This is very important, especially if you want to convert current Beta customers.

Rule #3: Reflection period. Once you have delivered/hit the market, it is time to look back, reflect. Reflect about the product, the methods or processes used; were these too loose or stringent? Separate enough time for this. Do the design and code reviews you couldn’t do earlier due to go-to-market pressures. It is OK. Developers and QA engineers, talk about what and how to improve the product; this is the time to refactor, refactor, and refactor:

Refactoring is a disciplined technique for restructuring an existing body of code, altering its internal structure without changing its external behavior. Its heart is a series of small behavior preserving transformations. Each transformation (called a ‘refactoring’) does little, but a sequence of transformations can produce a significant restructuring. Since each refactoring is small, it’s less likely to go wrong. The system is also kept fully working after each small refactoring, reducing the chances that a system can get seriously broken during the restructuring.

See the refactoring catalog, maintained by Martin Fowler.

Also, use this time to document (see Wiki below).

Rule #4: Keep track of issues and new feature requests. No need to go over board and spend thousands on issue tracking products. Use a simple issue tracking system, there are many. Trac is a simple but effective one.

Rule #5: Implement an internal Wiki. Trac also has an integrated Wiki. Use the Wiki for your documentation. Document, document, document. Use the reflection time to document. Documentation is that task all developers hate (rather postpone), but a very important s/w engineering life-cycle step it is. Organize the Wiki as you like, perhaps per Tier. When hiring new folks, point them to the Wiki to learn the system.

Rule #6: Use Version Control. Use Subversion, or CVS; use whatever you want, but keep it simple. Tag/branch at major releases. Use version control for your documentation as well. Integrate your Wiki with version control.

Rule #7: Establish a build process. Start simple, but eventually do automated daily builds; use Continuous Integration.

Rule #8: Test, test, test… Start simple, but eventually move to automated testing. Performance, stress, concurrent testing are of great importance.

Rule #9: Use popular open source projects and frameworks. Nothing beats the already adopted and fully tested projects. In addition, as my good friend Edmund says, “what good does it bring the customers to re-invent already proven frameworks?

Rule #10: Start simple, grow as needed, try to anticipate: people, processes, functionality, complexity.

ceo

There are a number of threads going on in the blogosphere about Twitter and its business model… Or I should say, the fact that Twitter it has NO business model (still).

Interestingly others are building applications on top of Twitter, i.e. the parasites (such as Twitterrific) who do have business models and charge users.

Interesting…

You know, operational-wise, running Twitter ain’t cheap! There are recurring costs and per-message costs to support the messaging piece alone, not to mention the hosting and broadband itself…

So what should Twitter do?

• Charge for access to the platform itself (i.e. the APIs)? Yes, once an application built on top of the Twitter platform reaches certain volume and/or a revenue threshold.
• Use adverts? Yes. Use Social-based adverts? Wait, Facebook tried that and it failed due to privacy concerns.
• Create vertical Twitter-based applications for specific types of social applications? I believe this should be considered carefully.
• Charge for up sells for new and exciting features. Maybe. There are a handful of features regarding group management, visibility, etc. that Twitter should have by now.
• Find a buyer? Definitely.

As I have written before, Mobile Social Software is one of those things people/users love to have and use, but don’t want to pay for it… it’s like Wi-Fi!

Related to this see:

• Twitter’s Business Model
• Is Twitter F’ed?

ceo

The mobile youth market… should a company's go to market strategy rely on such target alone? Should the youth market be considered at all?

Xen wrote a very good article on the mobile youth market titled Special: A Sneak Peak at the mobileYouth report 2007, where she interviews Savka Andic, Research Associate at the Wireless World Forum, who is also the co-author of the mobileYouth 2006 report.

On a different perspective, Ajit believes that Mobile Youth is a fundamentally flawed strategy! for the Mobile Web.

My take on the topic of the mobile youth market in general is as follows:

• They are early adopters
• They expose a very strong social behavior, today mainly via texting
• They expose a very content-oriented consumption (and sharing) behavior

The mobile application market today is predominantly driven by:

• Early adopters (still)
• Content (search, ring-tones, photos, feeds, texting, and of course voice!, etc.)
• Social (communication and sharing with others, via voice, texting, twitters, texting again, and more texting, communities, friends, etc.)

If I were to draw a Venn diagram between the mobile youth and the mobile application market today, you would see that the intersection between mobile and youth is practical, and is real, and should be in everyone strategy today, especially if your mobile application has social elements in it. In 10 years, things will be different (maybe), and everyone will be mobile (maybe).

The mobile youth is about quick and “dirty” or Q&D communication or usage (OK, I just made up that acronym); this is “dirty” as in that it doesn't have to necessarily be pretty, but it has to be functional, and reliable and simple to use/follow. This is in part why the mobile web, or other type of application platform is not really predominant within the mobile youth as texting is. Latency and flow does matter; being one click away does matter.

There is so much to explore when it comes to new ways for communication, don't you agree? We truly are just starting… pretty exciting…

The mobile youth market is perfect for testing your mobile content-and-social-oriented application.

ceo

Click to enlarge

…every time you sell anything (expensive) to anyone, the buyer will have “buyer's remorse“…

You want this remorse to only occur after the deal is closed –
you don't want to end with a case of premature remorse, which will
kill your deal.

This is why you must minimize the length of this “window of opportunity” …close the deal today; extending this window, even one an extra day, can translate to premature buyer's remorse.

ceo

While talking to my daughter earlier today, I realized how a bad user experience could ruin a product and/or brand across generations, and decades.

In our case, it was about a car maker. Around 10 months ago I bought a new Jeep Grand Cherokee. The vehicle has been an OK-kind of car, it is pretty solid and I can drive it on tough terrains, but its gas consumption is not that great, and a number of “miscellaneous” issues have popped up, for example, the A/C going bad, as well as window and door-handle issues. Enough issues to get my daughter's attention. To make the story short, she, who is 10 years old, asked me if I would ever again buy a Jeep (BTW, this conversation came out of the blue). I hesitated in answering, and I responded that I was not sure. But when I asked her the same question, she responded with a definite no.

So we are talking here about two back-to-back generations who will have reservations when considering a specific product or brand; for decades to come… That just blew my mind off, and how important is to bring to market a solid-enough product… Companies with deep pockets can use their cash to help buy time, but a new company won't have that luxury.

…because a bad user experience can span generations and decades, it is a very serious thing to address, it matters. A bad user experience is like it is traveling through a wormhole, and come back to hunt you for years as if it happened yesterday; not only can kill a specific product, but a whole brand, and company.

ceo

[Image:
Generations, a bronze sculpture by Ann LaRose of three generations.

On his blog, Seth Godin asks himself “Why hasn't the whole cell phone industry exploded?“. While Seth's believes it is because "we've been trying to solve the wrong problem.", that is not the true reason…

The problem is twofold – from the technology perspective, the technological capabilities aren't where they could have been by now, and from the end-user perspective, there are no enough compelling services.

And these problems are rooted at the “network (over) control” by the carriers that results in a pretty much closed system. And this control results in slow adoption and deployment of new technologies, and in the “carrier's inner circle”, which is hard to get into. And the end result of all this is lack of compelling services for end-users. One thing leads to another…

There are thousands of very smart developers and product people out there, but not everyone can bootstrap themselves, or go raise and initial $300K-$500K to create an initial demo or product, and get into the "inner circle".

Many years ago I realized that the carrier's network concerns are really historical, and have to do with how the networks have evolved – it all is a direct result of network “overloading” – offering new data capabilities on top of the voice services over the same network, which raises concerns about voice service disruption. Those concerns makes the carriers restrict the kind of services what can be done on their networks. This is in contrast to the Internet in the 80s and 90s and today, that was and is pretty much open, and there were NO restrictions to innovation AND on deploying such innovation. Deployment of technology and services over the carrier's wireless networks have been VERY slow due the aforementioned concerns, including the deployment of the solution to these
problems, the 3G+ networks, have been very slow as well…

We are now getting closer to true 3G, and the added bandwidth will help address some of the carrier's concerns, and we will see new services coming out – I've no doubt. But I am afraid that unfortunately we will continue to see the “carrier inner circle” for the time being, meaning the number people and companies with ideas that get in are fewer, thus the number of great ideas and services that could come out will be less than it could be.

So mobile does have a problem. And the problem is not innovation, or the entrepreneurs, or product people, but the problem is the closed network, the over controlled network, the "carrier's inner circle", that results in slow adoption and minimal services… At this rate, it could be another 5 years until we see a more open and neutral network, but I am afraid it will never be as open as the Internet.

Can product marketing folks help here? Yes, the carrier's product marketing folks can push to open the network, and do developer campaigns such as sponsoring developers, as Russell Buckley writes in his blog, and to push innovation and control to the “edge of the network”, while keeping differentiation, similarly to how the Internet has evolved – it is possible.

Things will get better – I just want them to get better in my lifetime

ceo

[Via MobHappy]

Nokia has published their test criteria for J2ME and Symbian applications… It is good to go over these, and keep them handy. These documents will tell you about allowed content, power consumption, UI, interactions, and other requirements that your application must meet if you want to work directly with Nokia — passing the Nokia testing criteria is a requirement to get access to the Nokia sales channels (i.e. having your application pre-installed on the handset, or included in the device sales package CD-ROM, or in the Nokia Web sites or catalogs):

• Nokia Test Criteria For J2ME Applications
  
  – these tests are in addition to The Java Verified program's Unified Testing Criteria.

• Nokia Test Criteria For Symbian C++ Applications
  
  – these tests are in addition to the Symbian Signed test criteria.
• Testing Checklist For Symbian C++ Applications
  

Don't even bother trying to get certified if your application uses or depicts:

• Excessive violence and gratuitous depiction of violence against humans/animals (e.g., no suicidal bombers, killing of innocent or outsider humans)
• Depictions of pornography or pedophilic imagery
• Drinking of alcohol
• Substance misuse including drugs and drug taking
• Smoking
• Overuse of swearing
• Racism
• Overtly political messages, e.g., terrorism, generic battle/fight between the races, slavery/slave trade are not OK, contentious political/global events in historical context, e.g., Battle Field 1942 is OK
• Religious imagery, unless in real-life context
• Gambling using real money
• Promotions of criminality, criminal actions (depiction of criminal activity, where the player is the perpetrator of the crime)
• Material targeted and marketed solely at young children
• Nokia, e.g., name or logo (except if explicitly agreed upon with Nokia)

ceo