MobileFocus2008 - Get Flashy with Flash and new channels for rich mobile multi-media

”Flash in your mobile - channel for a rich multi-media massmarket” by Michael Berman Telenor/Mobilstart and Patrik Nilsson, Adobe

They presented launch of new Rich Internet Applications (RIA) applications and quick snapshot of the history, how we got here;

PS -> PDF -> Flash -> Air (flash/XML/HTML)

Adobe has created an Open Screen Project to promote Adobe Air among other tools (the Creative Suite, CS4 Master Collection is the "Gold" standard to go for). The open Screen Project includes most chip vendors, Verizon Wireless and SonyEricsson among other companies.

Mobilstart is heavily using Adobe applications and together Michael and Patrik showed a really good live demo of verious news (http://www.svd.se http://www.dn.se), weather and sports sites displayed on a mobile phone. Adobe is pushing hard to get away from todays environment where you have to develop mobile phone applications (very time consuming and expensive in the mobile phone developer environment today, with too many phones and too many OS environments). You should also not having to think like a computer user navigating between applications all the time.

Mobilstart by Telenor is offering gateway services for content providers that work with all mobile operators in Sweden, free to sign up and test drive.

More from this event will come in newer blog posts from Thomas Lidforss International

MobileFocus2008 - iPhone changed the rules for mobile internet

”iPhone and the changed rules of the game for mobile internet” by Ulrika Steg, Product Manager Consumer markets, TeliaSonera

Ulrika presented the impact from the Launch of the iPhone.

• 28% more data traffic in their 3G network after 1 week, since 160% more data traffic
• Most iPhone users browse outside their portal (the way it should have been everywhere from day 1 when internet access was possible on a mobile phone!) vs. non-iPhone users
• User cost control important
• iPhone users feel they have internet in a pocket
• 80% of buyers men under age 35 and half live in big cities (I think this also depends on the fact that in big cities you do have 3G coverage, I know a friend of mine living out in the country in northern Sweden and as he put it, "you have to climb up in a f%%%ing tree to get phone access")

The good thing about the iPhone launch, it forced the mobile operators to start thinking about how to offer value priced "flat-fee like" data plans. Telia has come up with pretty good plans so far, at the expense of higher price for the phone. The Metro daily paper actually made up a plan, buy cheap Ryan Air tickets, fly to Rome Italy in the morning, buy the iPhone, fly back home and you save a lot of money. But this is just the beginning of smart touch phones with turbo 3G access, more phones have just been introduced and more competition from Tele2, Telenor and 3 will mean better and better data plans. It will be interesting to see what happens here in Sweden when the new Nokia 5800 XpressMusic phone starts selling at the 279 Euro price for an unlocked phone.

More from this event will come in newer blog posts from Thomas Lidforss International

MobileFocus2008 event - Is mobile content revolution here? Views from Norway

Mikal Rohde, Schibsted, Head of mobile busines, Schibsted Corp. presented, ”Is the content revolution for mobile phones a reality now?”

Mikal represented views from Norway. He started his career with marketing at Netcom, GSM mobile operator in Norway.

Opinions from Mikal:

• The value UIs and ease of use for a user
• Walled garden is a dead concept
• flat-fee reasonably priced data is needed
• more ad paid services
• internet with mobility
• 20k iPhones represents about 50% of all internet traffic vs 5M other phones

UI friendly is the key to success, even the new Nokia's are too hard to use still

Google's strategy with Android+Chrome+AdWords = key indication of a driving direction for the future

Use all advantages of knowing about the user to build useful services, quality on ads needed. The next big wave is ads on the mobile internet and by 2011 $12.8B market according to Gartner group.

More from this event will come in newer blog posts from Thomas Lidforss International

Touch UIs for your next phone?

In addition to previous post about the new update to Nokia S60 released in the new Nokia 5800 Xpressmusic, here comes select videos for Samsung Omnia, LG KC910 (Renoir), BlackBerry Storm, SonyEricsson Xperia X1 and Google G1 demoing the UIs of these devices. When it comes to evaluating the user interfaces you have to consider different aspects such as; formfactor, input and output methods, touch and feel, visual impression and convenience.

Formfactor: All the models have pretty much the same typical "candy bar" shape, some are wider and two (G1 and X1) are sliders with "real" keyboards. If a device is too wide, not good for one-handed operation and the BlackBerry Storm may be in that category as are the G1 and X1 when you use the keyboard. I prefer the soft keyboards (even if they take away screenspace), you get a lighter phone, more flexibility (vertical and horizontal keyboards).

I/O: Easy to use with one hand I think is again to prefer vs. two-handed friendly slider models. Some interesting differences, "roller" mouse on G1, "optical" mouse on Omnia vs. touch and touch and hold only. Easy to find connectors, micro SD style memory slots and rich Bluetooth profile support including audio/video controls also important.

Touch and Feel: Touch with a tactile feedback function is usually better than "sound" feedback, I prefer features you can operate without somebody noticing, silent operating mode. Interesting to see, screen "vibrate" key clicks on Nokia 5800 vs. screen "mechanical" key click feedback on BlackBerry Storm. On the overall feel feedback is also the need to easily find and operate the controls on the device.

Visual impression: Since you deal with small devices, screen resolution, color richness and possibility to see things in daylight are all important. Higher resolution and more colors preferred.

For global travelers, BlackBerry Storm stands out as the only phone that will work in USA on a CDMA (Verizon Wireless) whereas all the others will work on AT&T with the exception of Google G1 which will also work on T-Mobile in USA (T-Mobile is using 1700 Mhz which only G1 supports so far).

Samsung demo:

LG 910 demo:

BlackBerry Storm demo:

SonyEricsson Xperia X1 demo:

Google G1 demo:

Ice.net - Digital reuse of Europe's no 1 mobile network

If you have seen ads for ice.net without knowing what it is, you are not alone. I thought myself, maybe just another MVNO company. No, this time it is the rebranded new CDMA mobile operator company which used to go under the brand Nordisk Mobiltelefon.

Ice.net is using what was once known as NMT, the best mobile network in Europe that started already in the late 70s and had from the beginning full support for roaming and handover throughout the Nordic region countries. NMT operated in the 450 Mhz frequency band when introduced and got because of lack of capacity introduced in the 900 Mhz band, better suited for small city cell sites providing better capacity. NMT got superceded by the introduction of digital mobile services based on the GSM standard in the 900 Mhz and later in the 1800 Mhz (850 and 1900 Mhz in North America). The analog NMT 450 system lived on for awhile until abandoned and spectrum relicensed. The new NMT.net now Nordisk Mobiltelefon with subsidiaries throughout the Nordic countries got into using this spectrum with the Qualcomm developed CDMA2000 standard.

So, as a result now you have a Swedish startup operator providing 3G CDMA 2000 based services in the 450 Mhz frequency band with the advantages of excellent coverage in rural areas where you in many cases cannot get the UTMS 3G services and also in a number of places NO fixed line internet broadband access. Ice.net also as a result provides fixed wireless services for internet broadband access.

See snapshot of coverage from company homepage.

PS. For international readers, see the 199 SEK/month which is approx. $30/month

The Outlook Agent on an Industry Outlook Mission

It's time to introduce the industry outlook agent. He has been on a mission to find out what is going on in the mobile industry in particular. Here's a first taste of things to come.

The trend for 2008 is clearly,

• Location enabling of existing services
• Designing new vertical services benefiting from location information
• The big push for mobile social networking and community services that really can become enriched by using location information

Years ago, people in the industry talked about location based services and not very much has happened. This year, 2008, it seems like we are finally going to get the needed prerequisites in place for a wider commercial use in 2009. The dominating 2G GSM mobile networks and phones in use around the world were never designed having GPS like satellite navigation and positioning in mind. As a result, later due to emergency phone needs for 911 or 112 services required some kind of support for location information. Several different soluttions have been developed and kind of introduced, measuring time delay of arrival of radio signals from different cellsite towers, triangulation measurements based on radio signal strengths to simple just geo tagging of cellsites. When you are in a dense metro area, the cellsite radius is small enough to locate a user with a reasonable accuracy but in rural areas, just forget about the information, you cannot locate somebody like that. The other systems all require extra equipment to be installed in a radio network something few companies including consumers have been willing to pay for.

In North America, the situation has been different for about 60% of all digital 2G users, using the North American CDMA mobile phone standard which was by Qualcomm designed from the beginning to include GPS receiver capability to enable synchronization from cellsite towers.

As a result North American users have had turn-by-turn navigation services from their phones whereas the rest of the world have had to depend on stand alone GPS devices. The introduction of 3G (North American CDMA-2000 and UMTS/WCDMA) systems have finally resulted in GPS and its newer enhanced cousin assisted GPS to become widely available.

Now the roles can be reversed in favor of WCDMA users. One drawback in using CDMA 2000 devices is that you cannot use voice and data mode at the same time, a live data session gets suspended while you use voice whereas you can have several sessions in WCDMA devices.

The chicken and the egg comment about this is though that mobile operators outside USA charge way too much in most countries for mobile data use, so now when we have finally got to the point where most people can have devices capable of interesting and user friendly location enabled services, many people will not be able to pay for their use.

A big shift is needed for mobile operator companies, more about that to come in a follow up.

Contact Thomas Lidforss International for your business services needs.

Ribbit - Mobile VoIP finally here?

There has been a lot of talk about Ribbit, "embed voice" in your web application company today with the announcement of an acquisition by BT. Ribbit is a startup company in Mountain View that has focused on building or enabling voice applications from any computing device using VoIP and Adobe Flash/Flex technologies. From a technology point of view, a key new trend with VoIP and Adobe is that allmost all devices have (or can have) the technology embedded thereby avoiding the giant hurdle of designing and getting new VoIP applications into a mobile phone. From a businss point of view, there are questions around the business model. Paying Ribbit to "go through" their softswitch gateways is together with the fact that paying in most countries for mobile data access using a mobile operators radio network is way too expensive.

It will be interesting to see though what BT will make out of this acquisition having bailed in and out of having their own mobile phone network. More to follow about this and future outlook for mobile phone operators.