The afternoon at the Mobile Internet World was okay, not great. First I attended a panel discussion on the evolution of mobile devices. There were three panelists, an IBM employee, a Nuance employee, and a Qualcom employee, all of whom were very smart and well spoken. There were three insightful ideas mentioned in this presentation.
First, the idea that people want mobility in all devices, but don't really care about the underlying operators or networks. The simply want to be able to get pictures from their camera to their Facebook page, or get their most recently purchased book from Amazon onto their Kindle, or their most recently purchased iTunes song onto their iPhone. It seems that some devices do this better than others. The popularity of the devices that do it well should help competitors adopt the innovation.
Second, the advent of 4G networks will really push the idea of delivering services to users, independent of the device. Enterprises will cease to standardize certain desktop computers. Instead, it will entirely be up to the employees. Developers will get whatever high powered machine they want, and executives will get a highly mobile laptop. Regardless of the device, the same services will be delivered to each.
Finally, with regard to open versus closed mobile platforms, people (and open source software advocates) can argue all they want about how good open platforms are (such as Android or Symbian), but the fact is, the two most successful mobile platforms are produced by RIM and Apple, and subseqently the most closed and most expensive systems. Even though they are closed and costly, the users' love for these devices is still immensely high. (heck, I just switched off Verizon merely so I could own an iPhone :)
Next session was another panel entitled, "Device and Operating System Wars." On the panel was an employee of Limo, the Linux mobile foundation, and the director of marketing for deviceanywhere, a service that helps you test your mobile apps on many devices (more on this later). Probably the single biggest theme out of this discussion, was that operators (like TMobile and Verizon) are very hesitant to provide a device based on an open platform merely for fear that the user's experience will be negatively impacted. In my opinion, this is a very real fear. I think Android's success will help strengthen, or weaken, the fears of the operators.
In the last session of the day, I heard from Kate Walsh, an employee at the Yankee Group in charge of advertising for the Mobile Internet World conference. She described how the Yankee group leveraged an improved mobile website, as well as social networking platforms, to significantly increase the number of conference attendees from 2007 to 2008. Personally, I joined the Facebook group for the conference about a month ago. It was cool to see the other people going, but beyond that, I didn't really take advantage of it. She also placed presences on LinkedIn, Twitter, RSS enabled the website, and provided registration discounts to people who registered on the mobile version of the conference's website (darn, if I only knew). To me, these are obvious ways for cheap publicity, and nothing revolutionary. I'm glad the Yankee Group is eating their own dog food. It's no secret that these platforms are heavily used. Maybe it's just that enterprises are starting to understand that (and use them).
More to come tomorrow...
Tuesday, October 21, 2008
Mobile Internet World - Day 1 - Keynotes
There were two keynotes on day 1 of Mobile Internet World. First, Michael Bayle, Senior Director of Global Money Monetization at Yahoo spoke, and he was followed by Ian McKerlich, director of mobile web and content services at TMobile.
Michael's presentation was strongly focused on how to best advertise on mobile devices. It was certainly interesting, but I'm not really in the business of advertising. I did find that many of the topics he was talking about applied to general brand awareness on mobile devices, not just advertising. He first poses the rhetorical question, why aren't more brands on the go? Answers he posed are that the mobile landscape is too fragmented, the media is too small, and no clear definition of how start. On the otherhand, it's the perfect place to push your brand since it's hyper-personal. He cited that if you lose your wallet, it takes about 26 hours to completely report all stolen items. On the otherhand, lost cell phones are reported in an average of 68 minutes.
At this point, Michael made some joke about Sarah Palin's hacked Yahoo email. I think it was funnier that the Yahoo employee was joking about this, rather than the joke itself.
Other stats on the hyper-personal nature of cell phones are:
60% of married mobile owners won't share the device with their spouses
68% of teens won't allow their parents to see their phone contents
And finally 6 out of 10 people sleep with their cell phone (maybe because they use it as an alarm)
Next, Michael covers various examples of mobile advertising, and how they take advantage of this hyper-personal nature of the devices. Nothing too extraordinary. While he was wrapping up his presentation, he mentioned a unique anecdote: the hottest venture capital topic is that of mobile analytics.
After Michael concluded, Ian McKerlich, director of mobile web and content services at TMobile was introduced. This was probably one of the most interesting presentations of the day. Besides the hot news related to Google Android lately, he described some other innovations from TMobile. The first thing that jumped out at me, was that he mentioned that TMobile executives are required to serve a specified amount of time in the actual store fronts assisting customers (just like the people who help you when you walk into a TMobile store). I found this very innovative on behalf of TMobile. I think this would definitely help keep the executives grounded and focused that the ultimate goal of the company is providing the best experience to customers, on all fronts.
While overviewing TMobile's recent work, he mentioned two unique contrasts between mobile devices and laptops:
Mobile devices have the permission to interupt you in a meeting, laptops don't.
Mobile devices have the permission to know where you are, laptops don't.
Humorously stated, but pretty profound in my opinion.
Next, Ian introduced the TMobile devPartner community. To me, this looked IDENTICAL to Apple's iPhone developer community. Well, not "looked" from a visual sense, but provided with the same intentions. It's a place for developers to gather, find documentation, and provide apps they write for TMobile to distribute to consumers, JUST LIKE THE IPHONE APP STORE! I should clarify, these aren't just Android apps, these are apps that would work on all TMobile devices. There's a profit sharing structure also similar to iPhone App Store.
During the Q and A, I posed the question to him, is the TMobile devPartner community a rip off (phrased a little more politely) of Apple's App Store? And what lessons learned has TMobile observed from the launch of the iPhone?
While he was responding, I could detect the slightest annoyance about being asked about the iPhone, almost as if he was thinking, "do I really have to talk about the iPhone again???" He indicated that TMobile has been working on this community for about a year and a half, that they were disappointed that Apple beat them to the market with the App Store, but also encouraged since the App Store's success has validated their approach. During his response, he also said, "Grandma doesn't know what an application is." almost degrading Apple's terminology while describing why TMobile's approach will be better for consumers at large. One nice feature that he explained will be part of the TMobile's version of the AppStore would be that when searching for "NY Times." Users will not only get a search result for the TMobile native app, but also a search result that would direct them to the smartphone designed website for NY Times. I would find this very useful on my iPhone. I'd really like a way to be able to find websites that are designed for the iPhone, maybe Apple should consider integrating this with their App Store???
That's it for the keynotes.
Michael's presentation was strongly focused on how to best advertise on mobile devices. It was certainly interesting, but I'm not really in the business of advertising. I did find that many of the topics he was talking about applied to general brand awareness on mobile devices, not just advertising. He first poses the rhetorical question, why aren't more brands on the go? Answers he posed are that the mobile landscape is too fragmented, the media is too small, and no clear definition of how start. On the otherhand, it's the perfect place to push your brand since it's hyper-personal. He cited that if you lose your wallet, it takes about 26 hours to completely report all stolen items. On the otherhand, lost cell phones are reported in an average of 68 minutes.
At this point, Michael made some joke about Sarah Palin's hacked Yahoo email. I think it was funnier that the Yahoo employee was joking about this, rather than the joke itself.
Other stats on the hyper-personal nature of cell phones are:
60% of married mobile owners won't share the device with their spouses
68% of teens won't allow their parents to see their phone contents
And finally 6 out of 10 people sleep with their cell phone (maybe because they use it as an alarm)
Next, Michael covers various examples of mobile advertising, and how they take advantage of this hyper-personal nature of the devices. Nothing too extraordinary. While he was wrapping up his presentation, he mentioned a unique anecdote: the hottest venture capital topic is that of mobile analytics.
After Michael concluded, Ian McKerlich, director of mobile web and content services at TMobile was introduced. This was probably one of the most interesting presentations of the day. Besides the hot news related to Google Android lately, he described some other innovations from TMobile. The first thing that jumped out at me, was that he mentioned that TMobile executives are required to serve a specified amount of time in the actual store fronts assisting customers (just like the people who help you when you walk into a TMobile store). I found this very innovative on behalf of TMobile. I think this would definitely help keep the executives grounded and focused that the ultimate goal of the company is providing the best experience to customers, on all fronts.
While overviewing TMobile's recent work, he mentioned two unique contrasts between mobile devices and laptops:
Mobile devices have the permission to interupt you in a meeting, laptops don't.
Mobile devices have the permission to know where you are, laptops don't.
Humorously stated, but pretty profound in my opinion.
Next, Ian introduced the TMobile devPartner community. To me, this looked IDENTICAL to Apple's iPhone developer community. Well, not "looked" from a visual sense, but provided with the same intentions. It's a place for developers to gather, find documentation, and provide apps they write for TMobile to distribute to consumers, JUST LIKE THE IPHONE APP STORE! I should clarify, these aren't just Android apps, these are apps that would work on all TMobile devices. There's a profit sharing structure also similar to iPhone App Store.
During the Q and A, I posed the question to him, is the TMobile devPartner community a rip off (phrased a little more politely) of Apple's App Store? And what lessons learned has TMobile observed from the launch of the iPhone?
While he was responding, I could detect the slightest annoyance about being asked about the iPhone, almost as if he was thinking, "do I really have to talk about the iPhone again???" He indicated that TMobile has been working on this community for about a year and a half, that they were disappointed that Apple beat them to the market with the App Store, but also encouraged since the App Store's success has validated their approach. During his response, he also said, "Grandma doesn't know what an application is." almost degrading Apple's terminology while describing why TMobile's approach will be better for consumers at large. One nice feature that he explained will be part of the TMobile's version of the AppStore would be that when searching for "NY Times." Users will not only get a search result for the TMobile native app, but also a search result that would direct them to the smartphone designed website for NY Times. I would find this very useful on my iPhone. I'd really like a way to be able to find websites that are designed for the iPhone, maybe Apple should consider integrating this with their App Store???
That's it for the keynotes.
Mobile Internet World - Day 1 - Morning
I'm trying a new format for posts from conferences. Instead of writing for each session, I'm going to simply merge the writeups from one half of the day. For example, this post will cover information from the morning of Mobile Internet World day 1.
First, the conference is heavily sponsored by The Yankee Group. The name was always familiar to me, but I was never clear that they are a research firm, very similar to Gartner or Forrester. For the morning, I choose the Mobile Development track. I heard three presentations. First, Carl Howe of the Yankee Group, spoke about mobile technologies in general. Near the beginning of his presentation he mentioned that "people in living in huts in Africa are mobile addicts." What a coincidence, one of my colleagues loves to cite this example as well! Another very important point he made that I remember reading in a book on mobility (can't remember the title at the moment), is when planning your mobile strategy, remember to mobilize, not miniaturize your site. This is very important. There are plenty of bad examples where companies try to simply mimic all functionality on their PC web version of their site, on their mobile version of their site. Carl makes a weak argument against native applications for mobile devices in favor of the mobile web. While I agree with his point that there are far too many devices to try and write a native app for each, I think there are certainly applications in which native applications make sense. I recently purchased an iPhone. For whatever reason, I find myself using Facebook's native app 100% of the time, instead of accessing their iPhone website. I think it feels a little quicker, or for some reason, more convenient? After trying to convince the audience why the mobile web is the optimal platform for apps, he identifies the problem of finding a company's mobile website. Is the address xxx.mobi? Is it mobile.xxx.com? etc. There's also the problem of browser standards. His research indicates that Opera and WebKit will continue to gain market share.
Next, Carl discussed some work the Yankee Group did to score mobile websites against criteria his form defined. 32 mobile websites were picked in three categories, financial services, shopping, and airlines. He didn't really go into the actual criteria used for evaluation, this is actually contained in the formal Yankee Group written research (which I've requested). The most interesting point in this part of his discussion was that, out of the 32 sites they reviewed, not a single site scored higher than a 68 out of 100 points. Highest ranking mobile web sites included Bank of America's, Southwest, Fidelity, and Edmunds. Highlights include:
Southwest - incredibly minimalistic. No graphics or colors, just text. Users can do the few tasks that one would expect on an airline website from a mobile device (check in, get flight status).
Fidelity - Any brokerage activity that one can perform on Fidelity.com, one can perform on fi-w.com. Also of note, the separate domain for Fidelity's mobile site, less letters mean it's easier and quicker to type.
Carl also mentioned WURFL. WURFL is an online open source free xml database containing a list and description of nearly every mobile device on the market. A very valuable research tool.
Carl now gave the floor to Francesco Rovetta, director of ebay mobile commerce. Ebay has one of the most successful mobile websites. The goal of developing mobile ebay was to make using the site as easy as making a phone call. I'd say they achieved that goal. Their native app for the iPhone is also very successful, in fact it's top rated in the Lifestyle App Store category. How have they measured the success of their mobile website? Well, Francesco indicated that users who bid on an item from their mobile device are twice as likely to win the auction. He stressed that when designing for a mobile site, never lose site of user experience. Provide the fewest screens and clicks possible, reduce complexities and distractions for the user, and be sure to consider hardware and speed constraints.
Primary lesson learned from ebay's mobile forays:
Provide a consistent experience across different Internet touch points (whether desktop, mobile, or native apps)
Ebay has separate development teams for their desktop and mobile websites. Additionally, the use cases provided on the mobile site are a very small subset of that on the desktop version of the site. For instance, new users cannot register on ebay's mobile site.
Hardest problem for ebay (and probably many other companies): Determining the best desktop features to mobilize.
Unfortunately Francesco didn't suggest any techniques for answering this question.
Next, Michael Neidhofer, the CEO of Netbiscuits presented on ........... Netbiscuits! I'm going to keep this brief because I really hate when presenters use a conference as a channel for a product pitch. In fact, I see it as very similar to how presidential candidates use national debates to simply rant about their platforms on national TV rather than actually answer the posed questions. Enough of that, Netbiscuits is a platform for mobile development. It seems ok. I haven't developed on it, nor have I really used many websites that are built on it, so I won't pass too much judgement. Probably the most insightful thing Michael said was, when designing for mobile, focus explicitly on the use case you're addressing (meaning, pick the use cases! Don't just design a mobile version of your website!).
Overall, an impressive morning. I'm looking forward to the rest of the conference. Next, I'll discuss the two keynotes of the day.
First, the conference is heavily sponsored by The Yankee Group. The name was always familiar to me, but I was never clear that they are a research firm, very similar to Gartner or Forrester. For the morning, I choose the Mobile Development track. I heard three presentations. First, Carl Howe of the Yankee Group, spoke about mobile technologies in general. Near the beginning of his presentation he mentioned that "people in living in huts in Africa are mobile addicts." What a coincidence, one of my colleagues loves to cite this example as well! Another very important point he made that I remember reading in a book on mobility (can't remember the title at the moment), is when planning your mobile strategy, remember to mobilize, not miniaturize your site. This is very important. There are plenty of bad examples where companies try to simply mimic all functionality on their PC web version of their site, on their mobile version of their site. Carl makes a weak argument against native applications for mobile devices in favor of the mobile web. While I agree with his point that there are far too many devices to try and write a native app for each, I think there are certainly applications in which native applications make sense. I recently purchased an iPhone. For whatever reason, I find myself using Facebook's native app 100% of the time, instead of accessing their iPhone website. I think it feels a little quicker, or for some reason, more convenient? After trying to convince the audience why the mobile web is the optimal platform for apps, he identifies the problem of finding a company's mobile website. Is the address xxx.mobi? Is it mobile.xxx.com? etc. There's also the problem of browser standards. His research indicates that Opera and WebKit will continue to gain market share.
Next, Carl discussed some work the Yankee Group did to score mobile websites against criteria his form defined. 32 mobile websites were picked in three categories, financial services, shopping, and airlines. He didn't really go into the actual criteria used for evaluation, this is actually contained in the formal Yankee Group written research (which I've requested). The most interesting point in this part of his discussion was that, out of the 32 sites they reviewed, not a single site scored higher than a 68 out of 100 points. Highest ranking mobile web sites included Bank of America's, Southwest, Fidelity, and Edmunds. Highlights include:
Southwest - incredibly minimalistic. No graphics or colors, just text. Users can do the few tasks that one would expect on an airline website from a mobile device (check in, get flight status).
Fidelity - Any brokerage activity that one can perform on Fidelity.com, one can perform on fi-w.com. Also of note, the separate domain for Fidelity's mobile site, less letters mean it's easier and quicker to type.
Carl also mentioned WURFL. WURFL is an online open source free xml database containing a list and description of nearly every mobile device on the market. A very valuable research tool.
Carl now gave the floor to Francesco Rovetta, director of ebay mobile commerce. Ebay has one of the most successful mobile websites. The goal of developing mobile ebay was to make using the site as easy as making a phone call. I'd say they achieved that goal. Their native app for the iPhone is also very successful, in fact it's top rated in the Lifestyle App Store category. How have they measured the success of their mobile website? Well, Francesco indicated that users who bid on an item from their mobile device are twice as likely to win the auction. He stressed that when designing for a mobile site, never lose site of user experience. Provide the fewest screens and clicks possible, reduce complexities and distractions for the user, and be sure to consider hardware and speed constraints.
Primary lesson learned from ebay's mobile forays:
Provide a consistent experience across different Internet touch points (whether desktop, mobile, or native apps)
Ebay has separate development teams for their desktop and mobile websites. Additionally, the use cases provided on the mobile site are a very small subset of that on the desktop version of the site. For instance, new users cannot register on ebay's mobile site.
Hardest problem for ebay (and probably many other companies): Determining the best desktop features to mobilize.
Unfortunately Francesco didn't suggest any techniques for answering this question.
Next, Michael Neidhofer, the CEO of Netbiscuits presented on ........... Netbiscuits! I'm going to keep this brief because I really hate when presenters use a conference as a channel for a product pitch. In fact, I see it as very similar to how presidential candidates use national debates to simply rant about their platforms on national TV rather than actually answer the posed questions. Enough of that, Netbiscuits is a platform for mobile development. It seems ok. I haven't developed on it, nor have I really used many websites that are built on it, so I won't pass too much judgement. Probably the most insightful thing Michael said was, when designing for mobile, focus explicitly on the use case you're addressing (meaning, pick the use cases! Don't just design a mobile version of your website!).
Overall, an impressive morning. I'm looking forward to the rest of the conference. Next, I'll discuss the two keynotes of the day.
Most comfortable conference
The Mobile Internet World conference has done a great job with their seating in the sessions. The seats are not packed in, chairs are at tables, there is very fast wifi (probably provided by the Boston Convention Center, but reliable and fast none the less), and power strips for plugging in laptops. Way too many conferences lack these simple amenities.
Attending Mobile Internet World in Boston
I'm attending the Mobile Internet World conference in Boston, MA for the next three days. I'll blog extensively about the conference after each day. I find it's too time consuming to try and blog midsession during the conference.
Here's the conference's web page
http://www.mobilenetx.com/
Here's the conference's web page
http://www.mobilenetx.com/
Tuesday, May 27, 2008
Google Developer Day 2008
I'm at the airport waiting for my flight to San Francisco. A colleague of mine and I will be attending Google Developer Day 2008 tomorrow and the day after. The official site is:
http://code.google.com/events/developerday/2008/
Instead of posting here, Karun and I will be posting our thoughts at a blog dedicated to the conference. You can find it here:
http://googleconference.blogspot.com/
http://code.google.com/events/developerday/2008/
Instead of posting here, Karun and I will be posting our thoughts at a blog dedicated to the conference. You can find it here:
http://googleconference.blogspot.com/
Wednesday, April 9, 2008
Gartner Emerging Trends - The Future of Search in the Post-Google Era
Today was my first day at the Gartner Emerging Trends conference. The first session of the day was titled "The Future of Search in the Post-Google Era." Overall, an informative presentation. A couple of themes coming from the talk were that IT shops should recognize that there may very well be a need to use multiple search engines within the organization. Often, picking a single search engine to fit all your needs may increase time to market for new applications requiring search capabilities. Additionally, a single search engine may force you into some corners and require compromises in the resulting applications. Instead, my spending some more money initially on a couple of search engines to complement each other, you'll reap the benefits down the road, and ultimately provide better search results to the users.
Another interesting metaphor presented was that of relating the searching a search engine does with an ant, rather than a spider. A spider (in the context of web search) determines which information is relevant to a query term by "crawling" over the content on the web. The ant metaphor, related to search, is more focused on how ants (the insects) communicate with each other by leaving trails of information related to the particular path. For instance, if an ant finds a trail to a food source, it will leave chemical traces along the path for subsequent ants to find, and know that the path leads to a food source. Cutting edge search engines are doing similar things related to the data that they find. For instance, if a user searches for "firm" and ultimately clicks a link related to a mattress sale (ya know, a firm mattress), the search engine will capture this and remember for future searches, that the user may be more interested in mattresses, than attorney firms.
Lucene, an open source search tool, was briefly recognized as a useful tool, but it was recommended to adopt with caution. The basis for this recommendation was primarily due to the fact that it's nothing more than a library of APIs to help index content. Usually, application teams have to do a lot of work around it to get to the desired endpoint.
Another random metric that was new to me, on average, search engines only receive 1.7 words in the query. Incredible, right?
Another interesting metaphor presented was that of relating the searching a search engine does with an ant, rather than a spider. A spider (in the context of web search) determines which information is relevant to a query term by "crawling" over the content on the web. The ant metaphor, related to search, is more focused on how ants (the insects) communicate with each other by leaving trails of information related to the particular path. For instance, if an ant finds a trail to a food source, it will leave chemical traces along the path for subsequent ants to find, and know that the path leads to a food source. Cutting edge search engines are doing similar things related to the data that they find. For instance, if a user searches for "firm" and ultimately clicks a link related to a mattress sale (ya know, a firm mattress), the search engine will capture this and remember for future searches, that the user may be more interested in mattresses, than attorney firms.
Lucene, an open source search tool, was briefly recognized as a useful tool, but it was recommended to adopt with caution. The basis for this recommendation was primarily due to the fact that it's nothing more than a library of APIs to help index content. Usually, application teams have to do a lot of work around it to get to the desired endpoint.
Another random metric that was new to me, on average, search engines only receive 1.7 words in the query. Incredible, right?
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