The Google Phone – a slippery sucker
I left Nokia last week after six fun-filled years to pursue new challenges, and am currently exploring a range of these - will post updates when there's more to report. However, one of the advantages is that I can now (with a clear conscience) use non-Nokia phones. Now for a mobile guy, the choice of one's first (for a while) self-purchased and paid for primary mobile device is not a trivial issue - and after much to-ing and fro-ing, the shortlist was the iPhone or Google's Nexus One. Blackberry seemed too corporate and while I've heard good things about the new Palm OS, I wasn't convinced there'd be enough of an application base to try out the cool new augmented reality apps etc.
The uppers
I went for the Nexus One due to the novelty factor, a better camera with a decent flash, and tight integration with Google's services, without which I can hardly get out of bed. At first it didn't disappoint - when you set it up it's blazingly fast - just enter your Google username and password and the thing magically works and is synced with your emails and pictures. The value of the phone is now pretty much in the cloud - apart from the replacement cost and delay, losing this phone wouldn't bother me, as I know I can get my data from anywhere. The usability, speed and intuitiveness of the OS puts Symbian to shame - things work how you expect them to work, and I can't think of a prompt coming up when it shouldn't (such as Do You REALLY Want To Go Online, just after you've asked it to, or Packet Data Active beeping up on every call). Other plus points are the fit and finish - it's robust, sleek and smooth.
The downers
But, boy is it smooth. This is the biggest downside - the thing slips out of your hand. Ok, I've got bigger and maybe even sweatier hands than normal, but I've already dropped it three times as I move it from ear to hand and back. The iPhone fits better in the hand, and this starts to matter. Also the screen while great inside, is completely invisible in sunlight. My gripes aren't limited to the hardware though, lest Google feel they can relax. The messaging and call handling is clearly done by a newbie to mobile phones. I may be asking for trouble because I use Google Voice which makes things a bit complicated, but I can't for the life of me figure out how to find sent messages, or take a specific message and forward it on, or cut and paste. Call handling via Google Voice is also at times a farce - the call comes in from a number I know well (e.g. my wife's) and yet it still screens it, and forces me to find the screen (impossible in the sunlight as noted above), switch over to Dialpad, enter in 1 to accept then put it back to my ear, without dropping it. Many people have just hung off by the time I get that done. And for numbers in my contacts book, why does it even bother to ask me to approve - let them all dial direct, please Mr Google.
So while I think Google and HTC have done an excellent job in creating a mobile computing device, Nokia still makes a better phone. If they could just merge the form factor for the E72 with the Android OS, I'd be happy. As for iPhone, when the next version comes out with a >5MP camera and decent Flash, I'll have another hard decision to make.
To get value out of the real-time web, thinks stock tips rather than Starbucks
The Real-Time Web is fairly frothy right now, with numerous startups either feeding the Twitter beast or extending the status update idea, witness the Facebook redesign, FriendFeed or the buzzy event-focused HotPotato. This is going to be an ever bigger story that needs to be better understood - Gartner points out that most firms lack a real time web strategy.
The rtw is more of a New York story than most web memes. Normally laggards on the Interwebs compared to our West Coast cousins, its emergence has finally given the Big Apple's speed-crazed denizens something they can get their teeth into. New Yorkers love instant; they turn email into instant messaging, and they (we) think people care about what we're doing every minute of the day. Perfect.
Leading the charge for the East Coast team are two exceptionally well positioned firms Betaworks (Bit.ly, Twitter, Tumblr, Tweetdeck...) and Union Square Ventures (Twitter, Tumblr, Outside.in, FourSquare...). Twitter singlehandedly created and now dominates this space. But in recent months I think it's headed off in a direction that takes us away from where the value will be. It started off with a simple question that was context (What are you doing?), but has since shifted to content, as celebrities have joined the bandwagon. Anything a celebrity says, even if a dull 3-word "I'm at Starbucks" update, is content. This has resulted in most people seeing the real-time web as nothing but a tidal wave of fairly low quality drivel, with no relevance to anyone but OCDs and stalkers.
But this misses the point. Twitter's original mission was bang on - context, not content is king, and this seems to me to be the real source of value likely to emerge from the real-time web. 140 characters is not enough for a novel, but it is enough to signal information that can be used elsewhere.
Blackberry-toting financial analysts, the meat and potatoes of this city, have an insatiable appetite for speed, and live their life in a blur of real-time data-driven decision making. These stand to be big winners here. One example I heard from ThomsonReuters recently - if a number of geo-tagged Tweets talk of a fire, powercuts or a bomb going off somewhere, it won't take much to connect that to the local businesses, and short the stock of companies relying on them as suppliers.
This is really a semantic web story, and one that needs machine readable structured data. The obvious ones that come to mind are location, direction, keywords, links and communication history. And the source of much of this - overlooked in most discussions and startups so far - is the mobile.
People designing tomorrow's real-time web plays should keep in mind the highest business value for the output of their services may not be celebrity-spotters looking for trivia, but analysts looking for semantically readable, mobile-sourced data to help inform and speed up business decisions.
So, good times ahead for those who can figure out how to connect the real-time web with the mobile - and not just at the creamy, mocha-flavored superficial level.
AdMob reaps the benefits of simplicity
I don't know Omar, but I've known employee number 2 at Admob Russell Buckley (one half of the MobHappy gang) - for a number of years. Wonderful result for him and the team, and a lesson for me. I've spent a lot of time thinking up fancy-schmancy new mobile advertising paradigms, most of which are gathering dust in powerpoint archives, whereas these guys "just" went out and built something that is simple to describe (banner and text ads on mobile websites) and they crucially, executed well, with smart advisors. Seven hundred and fifty million proof points that execution matters sooo much more than ideas.
So if I ever find myself going down the startup route, and i) what I do can't be described in 7 words or less and ii) executing to those 7 words is not what every employee spends all their time doing, someone please shoot me.
Mary Meeker finally gives mobile the thumbs up
Morgan Stanley Internet guru Mary Meeker presented her much-anticipated annual Internet trends talk at the Web2.0 Summit yesterday. This is the first time (she's been at this about a decade) that she's finally seen this to be the year of the mobile Internet, and spends most of the slides on that.
Couldn't agree more, in particular with these:
- Social networking on the mobile driving major changes in communication and providing new commerce opportunities.
- Mobile internet will create big material winners and losers in shareholder value.
Interesting, data-rich and worth a read, though I thought there could have been more about the explosion of mobile as the first Internet device for the next 1bn Internet users in developing countries.
The birth of mainstream 3D screens that don’t suck
There must have been a bunch of garage-dwelling coders being roused today with a poke in the ribs and an urgent "Dude wake up, you gotta see this!".
As they groggily clear away the pizza boxes and gather round their PC screen, I imagine there's a collective intake of breath and murmured profanities as they watch the very telegenic Johnny Lee describe how he can help anyone with a Wii and a pair of cheap looking infra-red glasses experience an awesomely-cool 3D experience from the comfort of their couch. This is not your father's colored-specs wearing, blurry and not that convincing 3D of yore, this really is the business, culled straight from a game developers' dreams.
Come on coders, inhale that coffee and start banging out the next rev of games, navigation aids and real-estate software and just about any other image-centric service you can imagine. The future for consumer-screen interaction just arrived and is banging on the door.
The new Picasa – Big brother with a friendly face
One of my favorite (and somewhat underrated) services from Google is their photo management sofatware Picasa. They bought this from IdeaLab in 2004, but unlike numerous other Big Co acquisitions, it's kept improving. It has a very smooth PC photo management client that is good at handling large numbers of pictures (though navigation is sometimes a little random) and seamless synchronization with the web version - 10GB of Google storage available for $20/yr. It also plugs into a bunch of partners' online photo services, which we've used to print out hard copies and create photo books.
They just released version 3.5 and it has come with some powerful additional features, most notably in the area of metadata management - ie improving the ability to add people's names, places and tags to the pictures you take. I think this will be a key battleground in the coming years as content creation is democratized and every device worth its salt can create and distribute content. As pictures get smarter and tagged with machine readable information of what is happening in the picture, which namespaces will they be using? Will this be a way that Google can unseat the defacto address book of the world, Facebook?
Taking a leaf out of Facebook's stunningly successful social tagging feature allowing people to name the subjects of their pics, Google goes one step further - it learns who your friends are and then automatically populates their names as suggestions. You train it first by linking some names to faces, then like a well trained hound it churns through thousands of pictures, suggesting matches which in most cases are uncannily accurate.
Sometimes it grabs rather indiscriminately - heaven help you if you have one of those class photographs in the background of a shot - it will pop up another few hundred faces for naming, while you scratch your head wondering where they came from. One of the best matches was correctly identifying the portrait sitting on the piano in the background of one shot as being of my wife's sister - the portrait was taken 25 years ago.
Face matching on the web doesn't seem to have learnt from the PC app, so there's some duplication, and I am told I have 10,500 faces to tag (this is not my current priority in life though). The open question is what happens next to all this data. There's a vibrant social graph being populated everyday by users that links Google's massive distributed contacts lists with faces around the world. Unlike Facebook it doesn't send a message to everybody who you tag, as that would be truly scary. It's up to you whether or not your name tags are displayed on your public albums, and there is a "report this" option if you find a tag on someone else's album that you want changed.
This is a feature that will be successful because it provides immediate benefit to the user - it's great to be able to create collages of your favorite nephew with one-click for example. However, there is something akin to driving SUVs here - it's fun and relatively costless in the short term, but is likely to be creating problems for people down the line. I suspect it won't be long before the first subpoena is issued to Google to support or deny someone's story in court. So if your conscience is free, happy tagging!
Magic pills and the $290bn missing medicine opportunity
The WSJ reports on some fascinating new wireless apps that both improve patient care and lower costs. An industry report talks about annual savings from remote monitoring at "$10.1 billion for U.S. sufferers of congestive heart failure, $6.1 billion for diabetes and $4.9 billion for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease." Partly based on this promise, there was more VC investment in venture health-care in Q1 ($2.23bn) than tech companies ($1.88) - the first time this has happened.
Related to this, Mobihealth calls out the opportunity for better medicine management.
A new report conducted by the New England Healthcare Institute (NEHI) found that not taking medications as prescribed leads to poorer health, more frequent hospitalization, a higher risk of death and as much as $290 billion annually in increased medical costs. Anywhere from one-third to one-half of patients in the U.S. do not take their medications as instructed.
I suspect this number dramatically overstates reality, based on the breahtless overprescription of medicines and procedures in this country, and the fact that the drugs people forget to take are most probably the ones that are not helping them get better. But anyway, even if the number was one third of that, that's still an opportunity worth sharpening a pencil for.
When you have a hammer, everything looks like a nail, so I immediately think of text-based and mobile applications to do this. However, Mobihealth points to a next generation pill made by Proteus that contains a chip made of food (sic) that transmits info to the doctors by a pill ("Ouch, I was eaten at 12pm", "Ooh, this guy's colon is pretty messy"). It's facing regulatory hurdles currently, but as long as they can make the "it's food products, it's safe" idea at the top of mind, and get costs down below a penny a pill, this could be big. (The fact that the CEO is also a Brit transplant to US and studied at my university in the UK gives me extra cause for optimism.)
These type of Magic Pills will compliment not substitute the phone as the personal health solution. Once the data on pill consumption and their internal investigations has been surfaced, it will be trivial to create really interesting and useful consumer-targeted web and mobile applications that provide helpful pointers to the patient to keep them fit, and take some of the low-level grunt work away from doctors.
Mobile payments just got a whole lot easier
People often wonder why Europe and North America lag behind Asia when it coms to mobile payments. Japan's experience with Sony's Felica system is a case in point - ubiquity of phones and vendors allowing RFID-based contactless payments for all manner of things.
Without going into too much hair-pulling detail, the answer for the West's woes is simple - too many cooks spoil the broth. Many different operators, device makers and interest groups all pushing different standards fragment the market and consumers hang back until the industry has its act together, nursing their DVD and Video format wounds.
Complicating things further, the finance industry is, together with health, one of the most regulated and bureaucratic industries, with checks and balances in place for good reasons (security, transparency) and bad (protectionism). Layer the creaky edifice of an overly protected payments ecosystem on top of the wobbly foundations of a fragmented mobile industry, and it's no surprise that mobile payments success stories haven't started to pierce the skyline.
Progress will be made in two ways. First is the greenfield approach, where a whole new user experience, business model, technology and key players are created, with the standard baked in. This is what PayPal and others have done, and Nokia's recent investment in Obopay supports another similar approach.
A second way of doing things is a bit cheekier. It says, let's just work with the messy reality of what's there today. Here Africa's Safaricom has shown us up (ie the West) by creating a parallell payments system piggy backing on the existing text messages infrastructure they already built. This solves just a piece of the puzzle - but a very important one, allowing people to send small amounts of cash to people who need it.
Another cheeky "just get it done" idea was mentioned in the New York Times yesterday. Customers of USAA bank can deposit checks to their banks by just taking a picture with their iPhone of the front and back of the check, and sending in the pic. This hit the TV morning shoes and everybody seems to have seen it - awesome marketing. This short circuits a lot of pain and aggro associated with the dead tree technology, but doesn't require very different user behavior, or all the players to agree on a common standard, since it's just one bank. But as first mover in this area, I'm sure they're getting a big spike in new users, as many people will give some credit from their mobile innovativeness to their financial management acumen.
The long slow march to mobile payments nirvana just found a short cut.
Slightly surreal email marketing
Had to do a double take on this email i just received:
"Dear Mr Johnston,
Apologies for the intrusion. According to our records we don't have permission to contact you by email. If you're happy with this arrangement, you need not do anything. To encourage you to reconsider, please take a look at Your Preferences (based on past purchases) - a new service designed to help us look after you better."
And signed off:
"Contact us if you want to contact us!" by the MD of the London based wine store that was sending this note.
While it certainly has chutzpah, its brazen flouting of my earlier stated preferences just looks dumbass. Bin.
Event ad, NYC: The Hatchery goes Mobile
I met David Blumenstein recently at a schmooze-fest in New York. He's one of the founders of The Hatchery - a mashup of Dragons Den and a traditional tech meetup. He circulated this flyer- thought I'd post.
Am planning to attend, so ping me if you are too.
_______________________
Stephen,
Please alert startups in the mobile space to The Hatchery and please pass on the information below:
The Hatchery is calling for submissions to the next mobile technology event on March 25. Submissions are due February 11. If selected, you must be available for event preparation and advisory the 4 weeks prior to the event. Please read and submit here.
Hatchery is a New York based venture collaboration group focused on creating opportunities for the technology community.
The Gauntlet is a forum in which start-ups, investors and corporate America converge, and has been likened to American Idol meets Venture Capital. It is an interactive platform at which emerging start-ups and developing companies present their ideas and themselves to a high-caliber audience and expert panel. A team of Hatchery experts review submissions and applications from the pool of emerging start-ups and early-stage companies, months prior to the events. Three presenters are chosen in line with the respective Gauntlet theme to appear before the panel of experts and general audience. The expert panel participants are chosen for their level of experience and skill in each Gauntlet’s respective theme/category. General audience attendance is strictly invitation-only to ensure that the chosen theme is of relevance to the audience and maximizes deal-making opportunities. Each presenter is given 7 minutes to make their case, and is followed up by 15-20 minutes of interrogation by the expert panel. Finally, the panelists are given 1 minute to sum up and analyze what they have seen and heard. For those who have prepared, it is uplifting, for those presenters who have not, it can be a train wreck. Either way the audience is engaged and entertained and come away with a clear sense of the presenters’ mission, objectives and market viability. It is a mutually beneficial ecosystem for all, and one we refer to as Venture Collaboration.
To learn more about The Hatchery and see previous presenters please visit The Hatchery website - www.hatchery.vc
Thanks in advance.