It’s because consistency is the enemy of innovation.

All mobile phone makers use some element of a platform: a chipset, low level drivers, an operating system and a set of applications. Bits can be swapped in and out but that’s where you start. If the project leader wants to do something radically different it’s bound by the scope of the platform.

At Samsung this doesn’t matter. If doing something cool, like using a new display technology requires a different driver chipset that can be handled. If the phone needs to be super slim and that means new connectors and batteries then the end justifies the means. To get all this new stuff working the teams are small and hothoused. They work exceptionally hard in isolation. The result is lots of interesting innovation but that isn’t spread across the range of phones. If you are an application provider the idea that you’ve sold your software to Samsung might feel like the road to success but as there are about 300 phones a year developed at Samsung and only about 25 make the mainstream the odds of the one with your cool (or should that be cuil? [ www.cuil.com ] )  application being found on the shelf are slim. You should also expect that there is another Samsung team working on a very similar phone with your direct rival. Samsung is the floozy of the mobile phone world and will jump into bed with any partner to see who is the most fertile. It’s a fast process, idea to phone on the shelves in nine months.

It also means that there is no such thing as a standard Samsung charger or battery.
Nokia is at the other end of the scale. It’s committed not just to S40 and S60 but to chipsets – and not just individual suppliers like TI but to specific chips. A project will be expected to use a PCB form a list of existing designs, one of a short list of batteries, a given screen. All of this reduces cost, and development time but also reduces innovation. Nokia is rarely first with any new technology.

Indeed the commitment to components means there is an almost Soviet long term plan. Nokia will look seven years into the future to see what it thinks people will want and then plan the steps to get there, starting with what can be made now and working along the path. Even with this streamlined approach Nokia takes a year to go from idea to a phone in the shops.

This meant that in 2002 when clamshell phones where the hot thing it took Nokia a couple of years to react. Nokia launched some pretty average clams in 2004 by which time Razr thin was the thing to have. Again it took a long while to catch up.
But things are different this year. We are just about to see the 5300 Tube. The mid-range phone with a touch screen.  A radical reversal for Nokia which has always opposed two-handed phones. Lots of new components and new software. It’s a reaction to the success of the iPhone and it has only taken a year. That includes the time Nokia must have waited to see the reaction to the iPhone.

We’ve also seen Nokia move from a single charger to multiple, not necessarily a good things and we can expect less commitment to individual component suppliers.

This new found freedom might make Nokia phones a little more expensive but its just the thing they need to do if they want to hold on to their market share.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here.

Links

If you think features in phones have gone too far you are not the only one

Who in their right mind would sell their business to Motorola?

The BBC has a pretty good grip on technology. They might make some odd decisions from time to time but then they are driven by an odd mix of public good and commerce. Which of these is behind the decision to provide content over 3G?

First phones, particularly first smartphones are usually late, so while the Nuvifone isn’t strictly Garmin’s first phone it’s the first for a while and owe nothing to its predecessor. It’s slipped   I’d expect it to slip some more.

27/7/08

A friend and I were chatting recently. He’s a big name in the games industry and said that he’s getting into mobile gaming. He’s going to do iPhone games. So  I thought “welcome to my industry”, I started to think about what advice he needed, and there was none.  He didn’t need to know about JSRs and the different levels of compatibility: that just having JSR82 meant you could support all the Bluetooth features that you expected. He didn’t need to worry about the complex matrices of screen sizes and compatibility.

But even better he didn’t need to worry about negotiating lots of different business models in different territories, dealing with aggregators where you have to let someone else, often a competitor, sell your work for you or worst of all operators that want to take 80% of the revenue for doing 0% of the work.

The need to cater for the vast number of different phones is linked to the low revenues operators are prepared to pay. If there was more money to be made from a game the software houses could target better and produce a game optimised for a single phone. Phones sell in millions so that should be possible but the operators see to it that it isn’t. And this means that the games are compromised.

Ok so Apple takes 30% but they provide a complete route to market. They supply amazing, flexible tools. Android talks about being open but it’s more talk than fact. You only get the SDK if you are in the clique. Apple gives you an elegant integrated development environment with an emulator and the ability to develop for iPhone or Mac in Java, C, C++ or C#. Android only lets you develop in Dalvik.

Whenever the computer industry has tried its luck in mobile it has failed, but Apple is different. Apple managed to sell the device it wanted to build, not something that conformed to the operators list of non-negotiable terms. Apple managed to get a share of the revenue from the services on the devices it sold. Now Apple has changed the route to market for application developers.

I hope that at last we’ll see the mobile games market grow the way it should. The iPhone will be the success the nGage never was. Nokia failed at selling games on memory cards to circumvent the operator, but Apple with it’s established iTunes mechanism has a much better way around the operators, and you know what, when people start playing multi-player games that generate over the air traffic more and more people will sign up for bundled data tariffs and ultimately the operators will do better from it.

If you are a regular reader you may have noticed the button for the Computer Weekly awards. I’m up against some much more established blogs so I would really appreciate it if you could vote for me in the Mobile Blogs category.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here.

Links

Good kids at my school got Gold Starts. LG used to stand for Lucky Goldstar and is heading towards the top of the class.

Vodafone is a smart company but occasionally falls prey to stock market insecurity.

Anyone who is used to organising their files neatly on their computer will prefix the files they want first in the directory with 001filename. Now it is being proposed for In Case of Emergency numbers. Expect loads of calls from your family's pockets.

The Egyptian network Orascom, in conjunction with Globalive, has won the new Canadian  licence.

I’m not the only one who thinks the operators are taking too much for mobile applications. Motorola’s Steve Baker claims Mobile Apps Are 'Balls-Achingly Difficult.

People don’t even buy PCs as a platform, they want “the internet” or “word processing”. To think that they want an open OS where they can install applications on a phone is as odd as to think that they want an open OS where they can install applications on their television. Today many set-top boxes run Linux but it’s there for the convenience of the programmers not for flexibility for the consumer.

Of course it’s not just ARM which has made this mistake, and ten billion cores on, they haven’t done too badly. It’s been worse for anyone trying to sell one of those open OSes. They have been as much of a money pit as a Cornish holiday home.

I can’t plead immunity. I saw the SD I/O card in a phone as being as powerful as the ISA slot in a PC.

If you work in the industry you’ll have been badgered by people who say “I just want a phone that makes calls”. If you push most of these people you’ll find that there is one other thing they use, be it internet access, music or the camera. And that’s the answer. Not a phone that does a bit of everything but which does something well. If Apple was braver they would not have put a camera in the iPhone. It does music well, very well. Anyone who wants a cameraphone should go and buy a C902. If you want push email you buy a Blackberry (to supplement your voice phone).

And that is what has happened to the smartphone. People have been smarter than the manufacturers. Consumers know what they want a phone to do, and it’s not a bit of everything. It’s one thing well.

Of course with 3 billion phone users out there, plenty of people want a bit of everything, but a lot of those work for companies like ARM working out what people want in the future.

If you are a regular reader you may have noticed the button for the Computer Weekly awards. I’m up against some much more established blogs so I would really appreciate it if you could vote for me in Mobile Blogs category.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here.

Links

Could the Nokia deal with MCN?

Be the start of Nokia’s assault on Google? Still Nigel Clifford has muddied the Android waters

Sport in general, and Formula 1 in particular is about size and scale. Just the thing you don’t want on an itty bitty mobile screen.

Mobile payments is portrayed as a collaboration between operators and banks. It reality it only works when the Operators have the power so maybe it’s a good thing that they are setting an NFC standard.

The mobile industry has a peculiar view on growth. When it’s only going to be 10% instead of 15% that’s doom and gloom.

Today’s MID, typified by the Nokia N810 is a paperback book sized web browsing device. Pogo was a similar size albeit splat-shaped seven years ago.

They only made 5,000 Pogos which in an industry that’s shipping a billion phones a year makes it a Total Reality Vortex sized speck in mobile annals but unlike most things which failed because they were a bad idea, pogo failed because it was too early and they didn’t have enough money.

That line “too early” is usually used to prop up bad ideas – like combined DECT/GSM or Xelibri, they were an answer to a question no-one ever asked. Pogo was the answer to a question no-one had asked yet.

Today they are asking it. “Why should I be away from the web when I’m away from my computer”. Just as voice, messaging and gaming have gone mobile so will web access. And of course web access is duplex. Blogging, facebooking, if you are working on a mobile internet device or a service targeted at mobile internet use you’d do well to research the Pogo.

It was a touch screen device with a telescopic stylus. There was an SD card slot and it was a reasonable MP3 player. But the most telling thing was that it ran Macromedia (then, Adobe now) Flash. This meant it was easy to develop stunning user interface applications. Pogo never took off and so the ecosystem – which always trails a successful device by three years – never happened, but the foundations were there. But the best thing about it was the usability. The server side compression meant that even at 9600bps web pages downloaded at a decent speed and looked good. There was freezing of animated GIFs, font substitution and a host of clever acceleration technologies all of which went to make this device, eight years ago, something where it was fun to web browse while on the bus.

That last bit is what’s missing from today’s mobile internet: it isn’t fun. It’s not bandwidth, in today’s world of HSDPA there is plenty of that. It’s latency, the time mobile internet sites take to find the data rather than transmit it is a ridiculous overhead. In the days of the Pogo the bandwidth was less but the experience was better. That’s what we need to remember for  the future.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here.

Links
Less is more, particularly if that’s mobile operating systems, and a bunch of  Operators agree so much they’ve aligned with the Symbian Foundation. Hmm, shouldn’t that be “fewer is more”.

Isn’t it supposed to be ‘just after you’ve had one Chinese you feel like another one”? Not if you are Vodafone. It appears that it’s “just after you’ve bought one African network you feel like another one” .

Orange has pulled Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Skyrock, Pikeo, Flirtomatic, DailyMotion and Meetic, all into one central portal on Orange World

While the Pogo might have made the web fun eight years ago it’s only now that the Mobile web has reached critical mass  according to survey company Nielson

No text please we’re American. 

From a 3G services standpoint, I see a number of very good things happening with some semblance of intelligence sitting behind those services from a business model perspective – as long as you don’t roam!  Although one of the benefits WCDMA is the ability for operators to relieve their burdened GSM networks that were starting to see rises in dropped calls, the benefit most touted by 3G was the high speed data.  Some of these services are clearly moving more mainstream – so much so, that in the UK, you certainly see operators now starting to chase the fixed broadband market with aggressively priced USB dongle packages.  MMS traffic continues to increase as people realize that hey – you can actually now upload pictures and videos without it taking forever.  Again, picking on my friends at 3, offering products like the Slingbox on X-Series or mobile TV priced on a per-day rate illustrate that there is some reasonable belief that the network won’t completely fall over if people actually use the service.

Being British (actually yes, I’ve got dual nationality), let me now state where I think the problems remain.  I chose to do this with my British hat, because it seems that if you ask any Brit how they are, the inevitable is always in terms of “degrees of bad.”  “How are you?”  “Not so bad.”  “Not too bad.”  Try it. 

I see two main challenges remaining for 3G to ultimately hit the finish line where we can declare it a success.  One is rather easy to solve – the other more complicated.  The first challenge remains network build-out and capacity.   I live in Atlanta where AT&T has deployed not only 3G but HSPA as well.  At my office, I have full bars of coverage and incredible service.  At home, I have no network coverage.  I am 23 miles from downtown.  It is not limited to AT&T – there is no coverage from any of the 5 major network providers in my area.  And thus, when you watch an advert on television from AT&T or Verizon Wireless, they do not talk about new and amazing things you can do with your phone.  Instead, the catchphrase is “it’s the network” or “more bars than any other network.”  No, you don’t.  Until T-Mobile introduced the Blackberry Curve with WiFi and the ability to deliver phone, email, and text via my home network, I was blissfully able to avoid any calls as soon as I rolled into my driveway.  In the USA, our networks are all about coverage, because we don’t have full coverage.  And so, unless you’re within a tight, major metro area, you will drop back to EDGE/GPRS or possibly no coverage.

This isn’t a USA-only phenomenon; consider how recently O2 in the UK nearly faced fines from OFCOM for not ensuring it had reached the population coverage mandated by its 3G license., although at least in the UK you always have 2G coverage. 

With all of this said though, this is a problem that can be surmounted.  Operators universally need to ensure that they build their networks to a sufficient level to deliver a decent experience if they want this increase in data traffic to continue. 

Where the larger challenge lies is in the business model.  Technology is generally not the issue at the end of the day.  Boffins will continue to invent ways to solve problems we don’t have with new technology capabilities.  Every technology goes through the same hype/trough/reality cycle, and 3G is no different.  However, the easiest way to kill a new technology is to have a broken business model, and there are a number of areas where it is badly broken.  Look at the state of mobile television – it was the saviour of our business barely three years ago if you listened to the marketing hacks.  At Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this year, there was nary a mention of it at all.
So let’s look at where these business model problems exist.  Consumers – especially those on prepay – are not going to take up if they think they are unclear of the costs.  A prepay consumer is making a conscious choice to trade voice/text away when accessing any sort of data service, and so, the value of that service must be sufficient enough to make that trade. 

Mobile music is a great example.  Who in their right mind would use an operator music store that has some sort of bizarre DRM, making it impossible to transfer that music elsewhere at a cost beyond what they could get from the Apple iTunes store or the Amazon music store?  Do I really want mobile TV from the operator at £5 or £10 a month if it is a rather limited channel selection?  Don’t even get me started about the rip-off pricing that is called data roaming!  I am not a fan of the heavy-handed action of the EU, but it doesn’t make sense to me as to why my Vodafone tariff changes when I go from one Vodafone network to another.  The internet doesn’t care.  Just because I connect from a Dutch gateway to get to a UK portal should not incur a massive jump in my data charges.  I don’t pay those costs crazy costs if I go to a friend’s house in Amsterdam and plug my laptop in – to check on something carried by ESPN – why should it happen in mobile?  I love what 3 does (see a pattern here?) in allowing you to keep your tariff when you roam onto a 3 network elsewhere, but their footprint isn’t big enough to make this work enough of the time.

It seems to me that we need some revolution in business model here.  If Cat lets me, maybe I’ll write further on this next time, because I do have an idea here.  Of course, it might be no better than what we have today, but it at least has some degree of common sense behind it.  It will take an enormous leap of faith from the operator community, but as someone who now works in media, I have a feeling that it has some merit behind it.

And thus, the answer to question 2 – whether or not HSPA and LTE will be successful, will certainly rely on the answers to the above question.  If we don’t put some intelligent thought into the business models up front, Cat will be having me write this exact same article in 2016.

Next week we’ll be back to the usual Cat Keynes column

Links
Meanwhile the comments on these links are from me, Cat:

Typically analysts do a great job of researching a market, digging out numbers and then either state the obvious or jump to the wrong conclusion. A great example is the Multimedia Intelligence report that the US teen market is saturated (obvious) and that this leads to stagnation (wrong) and that it’s important to get subscribers early (also wrong). Teens have PSPs, Digital cameras and iPods they are a great target for multiple device ownership. Just because they don’t have multiple mobiles now doesn’t mean they won’t in the future as those devices start to include a SIM. And you can’t count on loyalty from a tech savvy, fashion conscious audience in a market that has 20% churn.

The iPhone has brought back an idea from the 1990s: The three year contract what next? Billing by the minute? Analogue?

Vodafone has bought 66.7% of Ghana Telecom for $960m. There are 6 million, low ARPU, mobile subscribers so that’s  $240 per subscriber although of course they get the infrastructure too.

Virgin Mobile has bought Helio for $39m for 170,000 high ARUP ($80) subscribers, that $230 per subscriber, but most importantly it gives tougher negotiating rights with Sprint.

What is it about keeping your friends close? Verizon clearly doesn’t know the next bit, as it wants to buy out Vodafone which might be a little dangerous if Vodafone uses the money to buy Sprint.

Intel paid for Apple to move from the Power PC to Intel processors, now it seems that they have ARM in their sights with an Atom powered iPhone.

The EU, Banks and Mobile Operators are co-operating.  sounds like a recipe for disaster.

Being able to read 2D barcodes is something that’s been talked about at conferences for a long time now,  Telstra is doing it Half a million users is more than a trial.

I’ve dabbled with code but never got my head around object orientation. The stuff I did was embedded. You could map directly from the chemistry producing binary, to how simple gates could be built into adders and multipliers, to operators and operands being numbers – and the evil delight of self-modifying code – to a program. You could see how it all worked.  Even if we did do stupid things at school like a program to calculate when Easter was.

In those simple programs you could understand how everything worked. The contribution of Symbian to the new Symbian foundation is 10 million lines of code. No-one will ever be able to read it all let alone understand it. Code in phones has got hard. Really, really hard. Motorola reportedly has 7,000 people working on its Motomagx version of Linux, rough estimates show that it’s cost Symbian something like $500m to get to where it is today with Nokia spending a similar amount on S60. Add in UIQ and what Nokia spent buying content for N-gage and you are over $1.2bn.

Software has replaced chips as the major cost in a 3G phone.

The result of software getting bigger and more complicated is that it’s much harder to develop. You switch from the physics model (where you know how everything works) to the biology model where you have to find out. Biology is all about testing. What was the effect of a chemical? Why didn’t the same thing happen in all circumstances? We don’t really understand much about living organisms. Doctors might say “take these pills and see what happens”. Today’s software developer might say “I’ll compile it and see if it does what I expect”.

But in one important way software can’t be like biology: a drug may take ten years to reach the market as it goes through all the testing. A phone carrier wants to test in under six months.

It’s long been easier to get phones through approval if they used a common RF platform but with a shift to software the testing priorities change.

At the press conference The Symbian foundation kept saying “This isn’t a reaction”, meaning but not saying, iPhone/Android. The journalists found that hard to take, but even if the other OSes didn’t exist it would be necessary for the industry to reduce the overhead of testing and integration by using a standard platform.

Consistency won’t make programming less like biology and more like physics, it’s too late to turn that clock back. But it will make programming less like a science and more like an art, which is how it should be.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here.

The internet is ad-funded and after many dotcom failures it seems to work. It works too for mobile phones if you get your target audience right. Blyk has expanded into Europe.

And E-plus is looking at it too.

When Orange launched in the UK they talked about being able to buy your own signal boosters. Everything comes to those who wait, as femtocells start to take off.

The 3G iPhone might be a lot cheaper now that Apple has bowed to the subsidised model in order to make good on the target of 10m units in 2008 but there is still a healthy margin.

Charging for incoming calls. As I said last week, yes that would be stupid.

I was reminded if this when I met Daniel Doulton from SpinVox, not because he’s red headed – he’s fair – but because the story of SpinVox of how he built SpinVox and so many things in the mobile phone business is either full-on or full off. I’ve seen some brilliant technologies and ideas fail. And SpinVox appeared just as one of the most brilliant: Wildfire was failing. Both Wildfire and SpinVox were voicemail services, both did clever things with voice recognition. Wildfire was a personal assistant who listened to you and acted on your instructions to return a call or create a contact. SpinVox is a service which converts your voicemails into a text message. It’s ideal for people who want to pick up messages in public or in meetings.

In the redhead mobile phone world one brilliant application succeeded and the other failed.

But what is really special is the story behind how SpinVox came to be. Daniel was working at Psion, and like all of the men I’ve met who are ex-Psion he’s incredibly smart.  Smart doesn't always save a company and when Motorola pulled the plug on the Odin project, just as laptop manufacturers started building modems in rather than buying PC cards from Psion Dacom, the company went into free-fall.

Daniel left Psion and met Christina ‘Sherry’ Domecq who was running a business in New York which he helped with. Christina complained about the nightmare of Voicemail. Daniel started building his ideas for SpinVox.

The great thing about voicemail services is that they get into what mobile phones are about: always being connected with voice. The brilliance of SpinVox though is how it works as much as what it does. What Daniel designed was a system which used voice recognition to transcribe to text, but which would compensate for itself when the transcription failed.

To map this out he took redundancy and went off to think for six months. Spending the time teaching paragliding in Switzerland

Things don’t get more redhead than what happened next: His sail collapsed and he fell. The ensuing accident shattered both his legs, broke his back and broken ribs punctured his lungs. He suffered multiple injuries each of which very nearly killed him. A catalogue of his injuries makes it sound as though only that really little stirrup-shaped bone in the ear was intact. Staying alive was a challenge, and that life would be in a wheelchair.

He spent six months in hospital. Thinking and building the architecture for SpinVox.  “It was the God-send I needed as it gave me the reason and the drive to recover and get back out there” he told me. The solution he came up with for how to cope with transcriptions that failed was to make the system score it’s confidence in the transcription. If the Artificial Intelligence wasn’t happy with the result it would pass the message onto real intelligence in the form of a human operator – sent over IP to a low-cost call centre – who would manually transcribe the message. And then the really clever bit, the artificial intelligence would learn that transcription. So when the next voicemail with the line “Hleb is following Thierry” comes through it doesn’t have to be punted out to the human operator but can be automatically transcribed. He explained “The original system specs were written by me in hospital, I did my first technical workshop with systems guys in hospital and issued our first tender from there too!”.

Still on crutches, but with Daniel happy to be alive, Daniel and Christina started the company in a small London office. It took it’s first paying customers in 2004 And struggled with the networks to become accepted, but time, perseverance, the right contacts and luck led to  rapid growth.

Today SpinVox employs over 340 people and has over 1m subscribers. It’s available in 4 major languages and is growing rapidly, but the best thing of all was that after we finished our chat Daniel got out of his chair and walked away. No wheelchair, no crutches.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here.

One of the things which has held back growth in the US is the system where you pay to receive incoming calls. Now EU commissioner Viviane Reding wants to do that here.  How stupid.

Most industries would kill for a growth are of 5% a year. Yet growth slowing to 2.7% in a quarter is  spelling gloom and doom in Russia.

Despite offering $70m as a package, no-one wants the job to head Motorola’s Mobile devices division. Which could be an embarrassment at the forthcoming financial analysts meeting.

If you’ve read earlier column you’ll know that I think that Nokia sees mobile advertising as a major future revenue source.  They are making progress.

One of the 10 winners of the UK guard band spectrum auctions is doing something with its property. Mapesbury Communications,  has announced an agreement to broadcast its UK01 GSM service from hundreds of payphone kiosks.

Fashion rotates, I’m sure I saw leg warmers in on a girl in Oxford Street last week. I’ve seen an historical documentary which featured those – a film called ‘Fame’.

Some history is more recent. In 1994 we saw the launch of Orange, not only did they have a strange name; they did odd things. Faulty, lost or stolen phones replaced in three hours, a card which came with the phone that you could write numbers on, then post back to Orange and have the numbers put in your phone book for you, free calls to free numbers and some things we’d never seen before like billing by the second, bundles and (free) SMS, something we now call text messaging. They even had a service where an operator would take a message and send it by SMS to you. Cool, different and innovative. Things got better with Orange Value Promise, Wildfire (the bets thing on mobile phones ever) and Everyphone.

But Orange got big, corporate, dull, hard nosed and French. Orange was no longer Orange, Virgin was. Virgin was the new Orange, clever billing, cool ‘Xtras’ and proper service.

In December the man who built Virgin joined Orange to head up the UK. Tom Alexander was at Cellnet when Virgin knocked on Cellnet’s door and proposed a Virtual Network. Cellnet in a typical ex-BT way almost said yes, held lots and lots of meetings about it and then decided not to jump into bed with Virgin.

So Virgin popped up to Borehamwood and came to an arrangement with One 2 One. But the men at Virgin liked the cut of the jib of the man at Cellnet and so brought him on board to run Virgin Mobile.

Mr. Alexander has a hobby. Google him and you’ll find that he races Aston Martins. Very big, very expensive ones. Expensive by Aston Martin standards is like saying flying first class is cheap, I’ll take my own jet.

He didn’t do badly by getting the top job at Virgin, nor by it floating.

So I rather expect that it wasn’t the need to meet the mortgage or pay the paper bill that led him to take the job at Orange. It’s clear why Orange wanted him – the best person in the world to revive their fortunes but why would he be interested in something that’s on the slide, clearly hard work and has a reputation for being misunderstood by the foreign owners? I can only think that he laid down some rules before he started: He could pick his own team and do it his way.

That’s already started. Three of the senior people from Virgin Mobile now have jobs at Orange. Just watch as your LinkedIn contacts at Orange update their profiles: shiny new descriptions, a photo and few headhunters to the contact list.

It’s just the shake-up that Orange needs, and maybe if he gets it right the man who has worked at or with Virgin, O2, T-Mobile and Orange will become the man the French need to head their global battle against Vodafone. I’m not sure that killing “The Future’s Bright, The Future’s Orange” is the right thing to do for two reasons. The first is that it’s served the company so well it’s passed into common usage, but the best reason is that it annoys the French. The line “The Future’s Bright” was associated with the pre-war socialist movement in France. It would have been far better to have killed the stupid animal tariffs which are the dumbest thing Orange has done since the ‘Hard Nosed businessman’.

Expect to see a new innovative Orange, not far removed from the very old one.

The Telegraph drew comparisons been Tom Alexander and Sir Richard Branson, but actually Tom Alexander has much bigger shoes to fill – those of Hans Snook, the man who made Orange,  Orange. And I think he can do it. After that.

Some things won’t revert, back in 1994 there were only two phones, the Nokia Orange and the Orange mr1 from Motorola. Something which prompted my friend Gary to say “Why are Orange phones black when an aeroplane’s black-box flight recorder is Orange?”. Hmm, maybe some things are not worth brining back from the past: like Gary’s jokes and leg warmers.


Links

The 2008 market does look weaker than 2007, but it’s TI which is feeling it worst with Motorola decamping to Qualcomm and both Nokia and Samsung going Infineon

Those with exceptionally long memories will think of the game Splat! When they learn that Glu has bought Superscape.

The Motorola purchase of Symbol bears fruit with a $3000 new rugged device

Spice is one of the biggest players in India (that means they have a good slice of the 10% of the market that isn’t Nokia). They have an interesting portfolio of dual mode CDMA/GSM and dual SIM GSM phones as well as a super cheap phone without a screen.  Now they are producing a Braille device.

Motorola goes to the movies. I guess most of the people there are hiring The Great Escape.

Following on from the UK success of Blyk, the Germans are trying to Squeeze out something equally cool for cats.

Cool new eyewear from Vuzix, means you can watch TV from your N95 without squinting.

And if you wear Ableplanet’s better-than-Bose noise canceling headphones you’ll be completely covered. 

Adding mobile to heart rate monitors or diabetes aids makes them much more valuable. Doctors can check patients are taking the tablets and see what effect they are having without the need for constant check ups.
Telemedicine often takes the form of adding Bluetooth to existing medical equipment and then writing software for smartphones to connect and collate. It’s awkward, unreliable and expensive.

This needs to change, the features need to be added to phones. Not for the good of the elderly and sick but for the whole world. There is a ratio, known as the “potential support ratio”, it’s the number of people aged 15-64 who can pay taxes and look after people who are over 65 and retired. In 1950 it was a dozen workers to a retired person, in 2000 it was nine. By 2050 it will be two. There is no way a third of the population can be cared for in a traditional old age way with things like regular doctors visits. Technology has to provide a mechanism for fewer doctors to care for more old people. Telemedicine is a major part of this. This doesn’t have to be done as charity, as the numbers are so huge it falls into the territory of mobile phones which are built by the millions rather than thousands.

It will need some care, a phone which messes up an MP3 download or Geotags a photo wrongly isn’t going to end in a lawsuit, one which sends the wrong medical data is.

The ultimate aim isn’t a phone where you call to say “hello how are you”, but one where you already know.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here.

Links

Nokia has started selling advertising on MOSH, it’s social network.

Fortune magazine gets history wrong when it says Motorola was slow into 3G (it was with networks, but not handsets). Perhaps they will get the future right in the prediction that A new head of mobile devices is about to be announced.

The mobile phone processor market is a rough place, Intel gave up and sold their ARM based technology to Marvel Now they are back with x86.

It’s dangerous to predict something only a few days away, but I’ll risk it. The new Infineon chipset will be in the 3G iPhone.

When a Swedish magazine was told that HTC was cancelling a meeting because of merger talks they leapt to the conclusion that it was Sony Ericsson doing the buying. It’s much more likely to be Microsoft, which sniffed at Motorola, didn’t like the smell and would love to kill HTC’s Android phone.

Once the innovator, the first network to offer SMS, bundle minutes and great customer service, Orange got a bit lost but under new boss Tom Alexander it looks like it has found the way back.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here.

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Japanese Children hooked on mobiles, which I guess is better than lots of other things.

The news that Samsung is using Infineon rather than Qualcomm misses the major point. What Infineon is good at is the low end cheap as chips, er, chips. The deal shows that they are serious about taking on Nokia in the mass market.  

Last week I wrote about M:Metrics, source of great stats. They’ve been sold For the first time ever Handset sales have declined. Is this a trend or a blip? Adobe and Brew. It will be interesting to see if they can play nice

Lots of people believe in mobile advertising, Orascom has invested USD 10 m in in MyScreen. One of those people is  Google boss Eric Schmidt Let’s hope he read my warnings about Nokia.

Vodafone wanted to buy MTN and to expand in India but it looks like that other things might make that too difficult.  
 
Another mobile payments trial. Yawn.

Oh goodie, new handset manufacturers, this time from the home of my favourite cat, Jaguar cars.

AT&T have what the world really needs a simple phone.

Loads of people have iPhone deals. Including Hutchison in Hong Kong.

When are they going to realise that their home market is already saturated with unlocked imports?

Someone at Vodafone Germany  Needs to read my views on mobile TV.

Links

Cuban Americans can now (legally) send mobiles to their relatives in Cuba.

Dior aims for the Vertu Market with a $5,000 phone.

M:Metrics is a great agency for interesting facts and figures. They’ve found that Americans do it twice as much as Brits. Mobile Web browsing that is.

Mobile phones in the class room might be a good thing.

Vodafone buys Zyb the Danish social networking company.  They clearly don’t sort their shopping list in alphabetical order. Next on the shopping list might be Huawei.

Nokia sees green, but is a good way with biodegradable phones.

Qualcomm takes a stake in ip.access, the Cambridge company that makes Femtocells.

He was at the GSMA mobile payments conference investigating NFC: loads of trials. It’s the next big thing. Yup, another Groundhog Day technology.

Rod was full of the wonders of local infrastructure. Not GSM but the older infrastructure of Sphinxes and Pyramids. Ancient Egyptians built huge buildings, worked out a year was 365¼ days long and made beautiful jewellery when Brits were still wearing skins and throwing rocks at each other.

As Egyptians discovered empires fall. The empire no-one can tell if it's friend or foe, is Western Union.

For some it’s easy. Those countries America has recently bombed have a problem transferring cash through an American company.

It’s easy for people who’ve left home to work for low wages in the West to send something back, who see 15% of what they’ve scrimped together line the coffers of a $17bn corporation.

It’s almost as easy for the vast numbers who’ve been defrauded by tricksters using Western Union because of the lack of accountability. Ebay fraudsters and 419 scammers. It is not Western Union’s fault people are dishonest but it’s not like they do anything to help track the criminals down either.

Deciding between friend or foe is less obvious for mobile networks which see Western Union as the leading candidate for the glue which holds international money transfer together. So I will help. Oi! Networks! Infrastructure and communication – the glue –  is what you do.

Western Union has 350,000 agents who collect or pay out money. The mobile phone industry has 3,000,000,000. customers. Sony Ericsson has sold more Walkman phones than Apple has iPods. Nokia is the worlds biggest camera manufacturer.

The phone industry will do to Western Union what Nokia has to Polaroid. Vodafone M-PESA in Kenya has grown to 40,000 transactions an hour and has half as many users as the country has bank accounts. One country, one year. Vodafone’s reach is huge: nearly 300 million subscribers and has licenced M-PESA to the first non-Vodafone network.

Banks and Western Union are in it purely for the money. Networks want money but will compromise fat profits for loyalty. We switch phone network every five years but stick with a bank for life. If banking loyalty can rub off the mobile networks will be very happy. Customers with mobile payment accounts earn more money and spend more on airtime. All things which mean the networks can charge less than the banks.

Rod was less happy. He was after technology solutions and complained most of the conference in Egypt was devoted to the mass market which are referred to as “people at the bottom of the Pyramid”. He didn’t get the joke, but maybe he’ll laugh when he sees me wearing the gold eyeshadow.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here.

 
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What’s pink and unappealing? It’s Spam and it’s thirty years old which is apparently something to celebrate

HSPA Evolved sounds like something you’d find in a Mad scientist’s test tube, but it’s the latest option for mobile data. Bet it gives nothing like the promised 20Mb/sec. Still AT&T is going to have it.

Time was when Oftel only beat-up BT, now Ofcom has sunk its teeth into Phones4U.

We know it as Freeview, but the techie term is DVB-T. While Nokia prefers DVB-H there is the slight problem that there are no –H programmes. So LG’s HB620T DVB-T Phone makes sense. Even if the name doesn’t.

Samsung comes second in a one horse race.

Helio marries Virgin, Or at least they’ve announced an engagement. Still we couldn’t have a whole week without the US MVNO count dropping.

Ofcom says a lot of entirely predictable things and the BBC thinks it is news.

One day you’ll have a computer in your kitchen and it will look like this.

Cat Keynes publishes her thoughts on the mobile phone industry every Sunday at www.catkeynes.com you can read the column  the previous Friday by subscribing here.


Links

Why have two incompatible mobile phone networks when you can have three? Deutsche Telekom, owners of T-Mobile US are rumoured to be looking at buying the unhappy merger of to buy Sprint and Nextel.  Sprint might sell Nextel first, or Deutsche Telekom might sell Nextel or as I predicted they might sell T-Mobile.

Nokia has realised that to reach its goal of  world domination it needs CDMA and has said that there will be more phones.

Greg Brown tells porkies. Hmm that was my note to myself about this story, but it is good enough. He claims that new innovative phones are just around the corner, but with MotoMAGX and P2K as the choice of operating system that’s not going to happen. No wonder the shareholders are not pleased.

GSM is pretty secure, but what happens when you switch to WiFi? Voice encryption is something that has to come and and an ex-Psion dude has the answer.

The worst software in the world is SAP. It was written for Unix thirty years ago and turned into a religion. You have to keep paying the tithes to the consultants or your business goes belly-up. So is the news that you can get it on a Blackberry A Good Thing?

This is nothing to do with mobile but it’s very cool. If you applied for tickets to the radio 1 big weekend you got an email about Band in your hand

This is nothing to do with mobile but it’s very cool. If like too many people in the mobile world you are a Gooner

You would have thought if you had a life-changing communications device you’d be good at communicating. Why is it that so few Blackberry users share the secrets of their devices?

Blackberry has a very clever system of testing it’s user interface. A focus-group-of-one: President Mike Lazaridis. But Blackberry users as addicted as they are to their devices don’t use them to tell each other about the great user interface.  People devoted to their guitars or  coffee machines are full of how to get the most out of them, yet the Blackberry-owning hordes are not like that. A quick browse of the help files shows neat tricks like pressing space twice to get a full-stop and space. Eighty percent of Blackberry don’t know it.

Tell someone to try pressing the space bar when they are typing an email address and they treat you as some kind of guru. They’ll delight in telling this to people in the lift but will they ever email anyone and tell them? No. It’s a damn communications device. They haven’t spotted is that it can be used for communicating.

If the average Blackberry user was 18 and not 38 it would be different.  In the 1980s it was social disgrace to have a keyboard on your desk. Typewriters were for secretaries. Now you want qwerty in your pocket but the mindset of sneering at technology still exists.

This will change as the Text generation grows up. One of the great things that has happened is the slow demise of txtspk. If you shorten messages by missing out the vowels you don’t know how to use  predictive text and that’s uncool.

They are as adept with 12 keys as the current generation are with 102, but that’s not what matters, it the use of social networking to pass on tips that will really define the future.

The Apprentice might run for a couple of generations, AMS, Nick and Margaret will be replaced, but let us hope that their candidates of the future don’t lust after anything as antiquated as qwerty.

Texting habits are different depending on how old you are and some research predicts that IM will oust SMS.

Mobile search is going to be big. Duh! But a brave and expensive research company is daft enough to put some nunbers to ‘big’.

Popcap games aims to raise $100k for breast cancer. The bosses asked their mums who thought it a good idea.

AT&T , Microsoft, HTC  and I-play announce  the AT&T Game Development Contest. Just like the Sony Ericsson one, the Motorola one and the Google Android one.  Not what you’d call innovation but hey, it’s $25k.

If rumours where money then Steve Jobs would be rich. Hmm, perhaps, never mind, still the 3G iPhone at $200 is a good rumor.

T-mobile launches  3G the wrong way round. It’s voice only.

Motorola has moved it’s 3G business from TI to Qualcomm and Nokia is saying that customers for replacement phones are looking for something cheaper and less sophisticated. It’s no wonder that Texas Instruments is playing safe in its forecasts.

Plenty of people still think that this is the year of Linux – I’m not one of them – and one of the many standards is LiMo. The talking shop for operators who think they know how to make a phone has announced a new document: the first specification

Over 1700 applications submitted for the Android challenge. It just goes to show what happens if you have a good SDK.

Lots of cool stuff leaked from T-Mobile. Including a great new cameraphone from Samsung.

Richard Branson, as well as recruiting 30 people for a one way mission to Mars at CTIA, said that Virgin Mobile is ready to weather the storm in the US. It’s now looking to tighten its belt.

Why do some of the coolest mobile companies fail to make it? NXP, the chip company which was to Philips what Infineon was to Siemens or Freescale to Motorola has great video tech and yet has done nothing. Yet rumours of it’s death are overblown.

Getting people to pay for games is hard enough but $2.99 to receive advertising? It’s not lie, it’s a Burger King Whopper

Fake mac or fake company? Internet detective work rules the roost.

O2 goes HSDPA, they are the  last of the UK networks to launch, perhaps it’s preparation for a 3G iPhone in June.

Not news, but I stumbled upon this and thought it cool. You can sign up to Become a Vodafone beta tester.

M-Pesa to launch in Tanzania. Mobile money is better than the real stuff if you live in a place where you are likely to be mugged. It’s been a huge hit in Kenya and now m-pesa (Swahili for money) is now to roll out in Tanzania.

Motorola are simply to be pitied. So says the Google Android fanboys.

US consumers aint got no rhythm – or perhaps they all have iPods.

Microsoft rediscovers mobile web browsing. In 1999 Microsoft bought the leading Symbian browser developer STNC (Some Things Never Change) in Cambridge. The excellent browser appeared in the Sony CMD-Z5, Benefon Q and Amstrad E-mai@ler (have you noticed how they now don’t have those in The Apprentice). Now it seems that Microsoft is trying again.

Less content with content. The network in the UK with the highest Average Revenue Per User is 3. They do this off the back of content. Principally porn and sport. Now it seems they’ve changed their mind.

Everyone is putting a spin on the Nokia 6212 classic describing it as new in having NFC (it isn’t) or a mobile wallet (that’s seven years old), what makes it special is easy Bluetooth paring.

Everyone agrees on 3G LTE licensing. It’s co-operation and interoperability which made GSM a success and it looks good for the future of 3G LTE. The standard which isn’t called 4G but should be. With Nokia, Sony Ericsson Alcatel-Lucent, Ericsson, NEC, NextWave Wireless,  and  Nokia Siemens Networks all agreeing to play nice.

Qualcomm Chips herald phones from Dell (and HP and others)
Dell takes second step towards making mobiles

Modelabs build a phone for Tag heuer and give it a crocodile skin back. Makes vertu look so 2001.
Tag Heuer’s $7,000 cellphone is $7,000 worth of “meh”

Americans discover the mobile phone, usage is up
U.S. Mobile Phone Users Talking, Texting More

Orange Marketing man gets control of retail
Orange UK brand chief to take retail responsibility

Fools sell fuel cells
Fuel Cells For Laptops and Cellphones

Win €40,000 for the best game in the Nokia Innovation challenge
Mobile Games Innovation Challenge