i went to walk around the street markets in hong kong last night. it is divided so there are several markets each focused on a specific category: electronics (the biggest), clothes, gold fish?! (these guys are weird in more way than one), food, and "all the rest".
being the impulsive shopper that i am i looked to buy a compact digital camera. i made the mistake of asking sellers what would they recommend. each one recommended a different model and bad mouthed models recommended by others (they all had good arguments..).
the amount of choice was overwhelming. so i found it hard to make a decision.. at the end i decided on a panasonic. now i assumed (like many other shoppers i suppose) that this type of market will offer very attractive pricing, especially that many of them have stickers claiming their products are not fake..
when i got the quotes and started to bargain i used my blackberry to access shopping.com and see what is the best price i can get for the product if i was shopping online in the US.
to my surprise the prices online in the US were ALWAYS cheaper than the prices in the market. only in one case i was able to get the seller to match the price (and throw in a bigger memory card), but he was out of stock…
when i got back to the hotel i checked the reviews for the camera, and was happy i didn't buy it..
this does not bode well for these small merchants. as mobile comparison shopping will hit the mass market (and it will) these guys will be left with very little or no margin. consumers will be smarter and will negotiate better. information is king.
in the skype 3.0 beta that i am using they added a bunch of features. one of them is a new button in the chat window offering the user to “do more”. this is currently used for games, but seems like a type of a place to throw in junk.
following on my previous post on what makes me switch between online services i’d like to extend a small piece of advice to skype/ebay: do less.
there is also an additional tab on the main window for joining “live conversations”. doesn’t seem like a mass market feature to me.
they should look at what happened to icq, aim, yahoo and msn. too many features are hurting the user experience. their challenge is how to promote new capabilities to the user, but whatever the new feature is, it does not worth messing up the user experience.
their core business is free (or cheap) calls made simple, and getting people to buy skype credits (mostly for skypeout and skypein). this is where they should focus.
Nokia announced today the Nokia 6300. it’s way-too-late foray into the thin phones category. which is still much thicker than competing models from Motorola and Samsung.
the picture above is of Nokia N93. i saw it on the wall street journal. below the picture it had the standard copyright reference “Nokia Corp.”, i accidentally read it as “Nokia Crap”… a little freudian slip, but one that truly reflects what i think of this device.
over the past few days i had the opportunity to hear executives from at&t, verizon, sprint, t-mobile, virgin, helio and amp’d talk about their business and their thoughts about the future.
these guys just don’t get it.
they are still locked in the mindset of walled gardens. they talk about openness, but they think that “open” means letting users open a browser and download ringtones off-deck.
the reality is that carriers are holding back the mobile industry from realizing its potential. they are a bottleneck for innovation, and are frustrating entrepreneurs. until the mobile environment will not be as open as the internet it will not be able to create the value created by the internet.
today developers that would like to innovate beyond creating a simple mobile website (very limited in functionality), must go through the carrier’s certification process in the good case, or beg them to open certain APIs in many other cases (e.g. to access the address book, device storage, UI, etc.). and once you get your app running say bye-bye to 30%-50% of the revenue (the fee you have to pay to the gatekeeper).
the handset vendors are also somewhat to blame. they develop phones that are not friendly for developers.
imagine that this was the case for the internet. several major ISPs controlling what users can access, what can run on your PC, and any application developer should give the ISP a major portion of his revenues. do you think amazon, netscape, google, ebay, skype, myspace, yahoo would have happened? do you think all the entrepreneurs would have spent their time trying to build internet companies?
the answer to all these questions is of course “No”. the internet would have been nothing like what we know today.
but unfortunately this is the reality in mobile. an oligarchy that controls the value chain and stifles progress. hearing these executives speak made it clear that change is not going to come voluntarily (they still think their role should be one that polices the industry, putting more barriers and taking more control over what gets to the hands of the consumers. they explain it under the cover of “assuring the quality of the user experience”…).
the good news is that sooner or later (a matter of several years) the walls will fall. they can’t fight technology forever. the move to IP, WiFi, WiMax, advances in handset OS, entry of new players, will eventually lead for the environment to be as open as the internet.
i downloaded the gmail mobile app to my blackberry 8700 yesterday. it is awesome! (does any one still use this word?) really. the best mobile app i played with to date.
it is fast. simple. and delivers the good.
it is just amazing that with all the companies playing with mobile email all these years it took google to come and show how to do it right.
now i have both gtalk and gmail on my blackberry. next should be google reader, so i can read all my RSS feeds easily.
so starting tomorrow everyone can register a ".mobi" domain. so what?
i am not sure i understand why it is needed. i believe (know) today's technology can enable device/browser detection, so if a mobile phone is accessing google.com the webpage can be rendered to fit to the mobile device form.
if you look at dotmobi's site and read what they are saying in interviews/pr they mention the main reason for dotmobi is to create a mobile friendly web. users accessing a .mobi site will know it works properly on mobile devices.
this does not sound like a convincing argument to me. for websites to be more mobile friendly they need to care about mobile usage, and create a version of their site that will cater to mobile users. the fact that there is now a .mobi domain will not make a difference.
so why create a .mobi domain given that .info, .biz, .us did not really succeed (nor does .net)? i think that the companies involved just thought there could be money made. thousands of companies will register the .mobi domain just to protect themselves. and if it catches on thousands more will follow, and a business generating millions of dollars will be created.
i don't think .mobi will be a success among end-users. time will tell.
i have been using Vonage for about 3 years, and i am not a very happy customer. some of it has nothing do with them, and more with cablevision which is my broadband provider.
but i think i am ready to make the next step and abandon my legacy VoIP vendor and move to a pure Skype set-up.
the idea will be to have a wireless (wifi) skype phone (like the one i just pre-ordered on amazon), have skype-in number, and use skype-out to make outgoing calls to PSTN.
i'll give it a test and if i am a happy customer then i will turn-off my vonage.
Cingular: Aggregators offering PayPal will be shut off
Cingular has tightened control of its aggregators' billing practices by prohibiting credit card, PayPal-like services or any billing service other than the Direct Bill option. According to a memo sent to Cingular's aggregator partners and obtained by FierceMobileContent: "…the current Cingular Wireless Customer Experience Policy…prohibit[s] the options of credit card and/or Paypal services for payment of content to Cingular Wireless customers. Please be aware that Cingular customers should always and only be offered the Direct Bill option for payment of content and/or services. Any programs that offer Paypal and/or credit card options to Cingular Wireless customers will be escalated and reviewed by Cingular Wireless for possible immediate shut off." While Cingular wouldn't comment on the leaked memo, Jay Emmet, president-Americas for mBlox, said, "We are aligning ourselves with Cingular's new requirements."
The crackdown on third-party billing options comes close on the heels of PayPal's recent launch of its Text2Buy program, and the memo references PayPal by name more than once. However, PayPal says that program enables users to purchase hard goods like t-shirts, posters, etc. and not "content" or a "service." The crackdown then mostly speaks to the larger issues of revenue leakage and the potential bypassing of carriers' billing mechanisms as off-deck content continues to gain momentum in the U.S. "Revenue leakage" refers to lost revenue from the sales of content or services because of faults in billing procedures. Obviously, being the sole billing mechanism gives Cingular a greater ability to stop revenue leakage. T-Mobile's policy on third party billing has always been that they are cool with it, for the most part, as long as they still get a cut–they charge their aggregators a small percentage for any transaction that goes through a third party.
this is very disappointing, but not surprising since the carriers see a real threat from paypal and the credit card companies.
the carriers charge off-deck (i.e. companies selling content/services directly to the end-users and not through the carrier's own portal) content providers 30%-40% of the transaction value for processing payments and presenting them on the user's phone bill. by comparison paypal, google and the credit card companies charge low single digit percentage (ebay/google ~ 2%).
they are afraid that paypal and the cc companies will make it easy for content providers to charge their users directly, bypassing the carrier's billing system and paying a much more reasonable fee.
the greediness of the carriers is bad for the mobile content industry. naturally the real innovation is taking place outside the carrier's walled garden. by charging such a high fee just for processing payments the carriers are making it much harder for companies to make money from selling mobile content, thus limiting the amount of dollars that can be invested in further innovation, and preventing certain business models from working.
blocking paypal and other payment mechanisms is similar to ISPs saying that all payments must go through them, and that users can not use paypal on the Internet. sounds crazy right?
i don't believe it is never a good policy (in the long term) to try and stifle innovation and limit end-users options. instead of spending their time trying to block the competition, they should focus on making their payment processing more affordable and user-friendly, so companies will continue to work with them. the carriers currently have the advantage (certainly in terms of user experience), but their greed might cause them to drive both the companies and the end-users away.
there have been many companies that announced they are launching an "iPod Killer" over the past couple of years, but iPod's market share continues to grow, and most of those "killers" are long buried and forgotten. now microsoft joins the fray and is coming up with its own MP3 player.
i read this article that is giving microsoft some tips on how they can try and take market share away from iPod, so i thought i'll try to offer them some tips, too
1. Form Factor is more important than features
take a lesson from Motorola's success with RAZR. Motorola proved that when it comes to a mobile phone the mass market cares more about the form factor than the features. rather than come up with the latest and greatest features they chose to focus on building the coolest looking device.
and it worked. people didn't care about the features and the ease-of-use of the software, they just wanted to use the coolest looking device.
microsoft should try to come up with a more appealing design for its device (slim seems to be "in"). if the picture below reflects their final design i think they may have not done enough..
2. Brand is more important than Form Factor
more important than form factor is the brand. iPod continue to prove this point. people don't even compare its with Creative, Samsung or Sony devices, they don't bother to look at those other brands. they just want their iPod, because that's what everybody else has. this is the toughest hurdle microsoft (or any other competitor) has to clear.
generating coolness is far from an exact science. and microsoft has some brand challenges to deal with.. i think their best chance is to try and work through influential grassroots, and one way to get the support of these guys is by implementing #3 - #5..
3. DRM is evil
many people are upset (the french parliament, too..) about the walled garden apple has built with iPod and iTunes. i can't play music i downloaded from iTunes on other devices, and i can't play music i bought from other services on my iPod.
this is a typical apple/steve jobs strategy and one that has lead to apple losing the PC business to microsoft. if apple is not careful they can see this market evaporate for them as well.
if microsoft can pick up the glove and lead the charge for an open, user-friendly, minimal DRM eco-system (maybe give a strong embrace to creative commons?). it may give them the "street cred" they so desperately lacking and start generating some real support from the users.
4. something better than itunes, embrace Podcasts and Vodcasts
the iTunes software sucks. it is heavy, slow and cumbersome. microsoft should offer a simpler version of the windows media player to manage the device, and create an easy-to-use interface to access podcasts and vodcasts. the podcast support in iTunes is an after-thought and it looks that way.
5. open yourself to the developers community
the iPod/iTunes is a closed environment, making it very difficult for developers (whether it is small companies or individuals) to create extensions and innovate.
microsoft should make its device and desktop software open to the developer community, so new features could be introduced and let the device/service be used in ways microsoft did not envision themselves.
6. WiFi, connectivity
iPod is really lacking connectivity. i would add to an MP3 player both WiFi and wireless data (EDGE?) capabilities. it will enable people to purchase music and videos, as well as download podcasts and vodcasts to their devices.
in addition they should let people share content between the devices (goes back to the DRM issues). they could do some really cool stuff with sharing over WiF
7. FM radio
not a great technology innovation, but really missing from the iPod.
if they implement all of the above i think they can generate some real buzz and get users excited. can't promise them millions of users, but i'll do my share and buy one.
