Moto/MS Get it Right (Smartphone)

Third try is a charm, the rest of the Smartphone world should really start worrying about Microsoft now. It looks like the new Motorola MPX is going to be VERY hot. Here is a fansite with photos and a description. There are 14 pages of comments so far -- it is worth going through all the pages as "Bengalboy" answers readers questions and posts more photos of the device and its capabilities throughout... THE MOTOROLA MPX

JavaOne Blogger Meetup

I'll be at the JavaOne Blogger Meetup on Monday -- how about you?

The IM Wars

Yahoo decided to change the API for connecting to their IM service. Jim Hu of ZDNet writes "Yahoo to Trillian: Talk to the hand." Of course the change blocks other 3rd party clients such as GAIM, and the one I use on my mac Adium.

But the egg is on Yahoo's face as Trillian has already released an update to fix the problem -- according to publisher Cerulean Studios

So why continuously change the interface if it takes less than half a day for the third parties to patch their software? Someone over at Yahoo needs to get a clue -- this is a war they are going to lose. Yahoo should learn to love the 3rd parties instead of harrasing them.

Congrats to Benioff

$1.7 Billion. That is the current market cap of market innovator Salesforce.com in the second day of trading on NASDAQ. And what a coup to have scooped up the symbol CRM -- as the Wall Street Journal said, "that would be like Porsche asking for the symbol CAR." Marc and his team have proven that the application service provider model is a viable business model, if not the future of software... or should I say, the future of no software? I expect to see more companies follow in this company's footsteps.

But don't be mistaken by the name of the company or even the ticker symbol -- the magic here is not a new approach to salesforce automation of even customer relatoinship management. The secret sauce is a multi-tenant industrial strength application hosting environment. This infrastructure investment could be the launching point for hundreds or thousands of new applications - now to wait and watch Salesforce (and their development API division SForce) to see if they can break out of the narrow application specific market that they have succeeded in so far, and provide a broader platform for applications.

FCC Chairman Endorses IP Inferno

OK, not exactly. I think what he said in his keynote speech here at Supercomm was that "the IP market is on fire!" Which does sound like an endorsement of my proposition that IP is the fire burning down the traditional telecom industry..."

All quiet...

Its quiet over her because I am posting the results of Supercomm interviews over at IP Inferno... Come on over and read about the WiMAX Forum, Motia, SkyPilot, and Peerio... And more to come.

Taking the Plunge

It has only been a month since we shut down CallTrex and I have alreated started a new adventure. The good folks at Mohr, Davidow Ventures have asked me to join them as an "entrepreneur-in-residence." This is an exciting opportunity to pursue some of my own ideas and to learn more about how the venture community works, from the inside. I am here for my first day, learning about what an EIR can do to support a venture partnership. It will be an exciting few months!

Russell Beattie on Nokia

Long time mobile watcher Russell Beattie has a great post on what is wrong over at Nokia. If you follow mobile devices and Nokia in particular, this is a must read. I have only one disagreement with him -- he suggests that Nokia exit the S40 business. Its sometimes easy for gadget wonks like us to forget that most of the world still wants *free* phones -- well, subsidized by operators. Nokia has to have the world's cheapest phones in addition to the world's best phones. It is a delicate balancing act -- maintain the volume with operators and the public so you remain the most important guy on the block, but produce the best mid-range and high-end phones to earn real profits. But without the volume business, Nokia would have less distribution power for the high-profit phones. I mean, would anyone have agreed to carry N-Gage at all, if it wasn't for Nokia's overall market presence?

Deja Vu All Over Again

Just in time for summer, BusinessWeek has rediscovered digital convergence! You know, the coming "Big Bang!" in which the computer industry, consumer electronics industry, and communications industry all merge. Let's turn back the clock and look at a few other times they have "discovered" this phenomenon...

July 2, 2001 -- Technologgy's Unholy Convergence (doesn't sound like nearly as much fun as a Big Bang)

June 23, 1997 -- Is Digital Convergence for Real? (I guess it wasn't...)

For extra credit, how about an examination of BusinessWeek's other lead story -- Wounded, Nokia Comes Back Firing. Where have we heard this before? How about in BusinessWeek...

January 22, 2001 Is Nokia's Star Dimming? (short answer, no it didn't)

August 10, 1998 Nokia: Can CEO Ollila keep the cellular superstar flying high? (short answer, yes he did).

So is it just me, or are there certain stories that the mainstream media has decided sell papers (magazines in this case), and they just roll them out every few years as if they suddenly had a new idea? I can almost hear the folks sitting around the newsroom, "Hey, we haven't run that stupid digital convergence story in a few years... no one will remember the last time we ran it so lets prop up an issue with the usual sweeping statements updated with a few new quotes from the usual suspects..."

I am almost to the point of joining the blog-only news groupies...

This Compromise Stinks

I rarely wander from the beaten path of technology on this blog, but now that I have been firing up IP Inferno as my outlet for tech related commentary and news, I might comment a little more on non-tech. What has me in a lather today? This terrible ruling by the US Supreme Court.

I respect you if you think that the word "God" should be in the US Pledge of Allegiance, and I respect you if you think that it should not be in that Pledge. As citizens we can all respect each other's right to believe in a God (or Gods) or not and express our opinions on what the government should and should not do about those beliefs.

But the Supreme Court is the place where decisions should be made, sometimes hard decisions, on what the relationship between Church and State should look like in the 21st century US. The Justices have abrogated their responsibility to this nation by ruling that Michael Newdow cannot sue his daughter's school because he "...is in a protracted custody fight with the girl's mother."

This ridiculous side-step of the core constitutional issue comes at the wrong time for the US. We need to be demonstrating to the world that our system of government works -- that it is possible to balance the powers of executive, legislative, and judicial branches and to emerge with a government by, for, and about the people. In this ruling, the court has demonstrated that it is, once again, willing to step away from a difficult issue.

We should be engaging more Americans in the debate about the relationship between church and state, not trying to bury the issue under legal technicalities.

Another State Taxes VoIP

Thanks to Andy Abramson's VoIP Watch for the link to this Seattle Times article --

Washington state regulators yesterday determined that Portland-based LocalDial, which offers Internet phone service, is a telecommunications company and must start paying access charges like any other phone company.

The case is interesting in that it only determines that VoIP is a phone service in a narrow case -- where it is used for the backhaul of voice communications between a caller and call recipient who are both using POTS.

Nokia vs. Sony?

While the talk was about how Nokia's new clamshell phones might be too little, too late -- no one seems to have picked up the other interesting tidbit in this Reuters article, that Nokia is coming out with their own MP3 player...

"...plans events at its headquarters in Helsinki and in Asia, where it is expected to launch one or two fold-away phones, a music player without a phone keypad, a lightweight communicator model..."

Just tucked in to the middle of a paragraph, between the "buzz lacking" fold-away phones and the expected replacement for the brick. Will this "music player without a phone keypad" even be a phone? or will it be an add-on device that connects via bluetooth to your phone?

Nokia seems to have increasingly fixed its eye on Sony, competing to define the digital lifestyle. Lets hope that both companies realize that these devices eventually all need to be open and programmable...

What's the punchline?

Someone failed to tell Guy Kewney over at eWeek about Vocera before he wrote his article, Voice over WLAN Still a Joke That's Not Funny. And I suppose he also failed to do any background research into the matter and missed the recent tests by Vonage of Voip over Verizon's EV-DO network. Not to mention the trials that IDT Corporation currently has underway of VoiP over Wi-Fi in the Ironbound neighborhood of Newark, New Jersey. So why does a reporter blast a technology based on a trade show floor demonstration? Is there something going on here, other than sloppy journalism?

Delays in ITALK2U

I spoke with John Jarvis, CEO of LitFiber, by phone this morning regarding the delay in release of the "Final" edition of ITALK2U. John told me that they are hard at work adding the capability of bridging to a POTS network -- their revenue model for the product. He expects that a new release will be available on their web site by the end of the week.

VoWLAN is back...

As regular readers of this blog know, I have been concerned about the evolution of the acronym for VoIP over wireless networks. My primary concern has been a marketing one -- we are still in the process of explaining to consumers what the heck Wi-Fi is, now we need to explain to them voice applications over these wireless networks... so we start confusing them with VoWLAN.

But I recently saw an article in the respected CMP publication, Mobile Pipeline that used the term VoWLAN (the article is here) so I wrote to editor David Haskin and asked why he used the term VoWLAN. His reasoning is persuasive. Repeated with permission, his email reads:

It's an entirely subjective decision. My thinking was that WiFi (Wi-Fi, actually) is a brand created by the Wi-Fi Alliance that refers to a specific type of wireless technology. WLAN is a more neutral term. It likely won't happen, but if an entirely new wireless LAN technology emerges, I'd rather not be guilty of promoting one technology over another, even if it's subtle.

I certainly have to agree with David. With WiMAX growing in importance and Wi-Bro on the horizon and ever more wireless options emerging, VoIP over wireless will not be limited to Wi-Fi. VoWLAN now makes much more sense to me. Oh well, think of it as a full-employment program for marketing departments...

Why HP and PalmOne will be the last 2 PDA makers

Steven Bush, founder of Brighthand, has this interesting article on the evolution of the PDA market -- Then there were two. The article begins 20 years ago, with the innovative Newton being dreamed up in a lab at Apple and lightly sketches a few historical points on the market's evolution. More interesting is his analysis of the market today, and where we will be in the near term. He observes:

The "Big Three" Pocket PC manufacturers of just a few years ago -- HP, Compaq and Casio -- has dwindled down to one, HP. And the "Big Three" on the Palm OS side -- Palm, Handspring and Sony -- is now down to palmOne.

While acknowledging that other manufacturers such as Dell and Garmin still exist, he believes they will be niche players. What's missing from the article is an analysis on how and why we ended up where we are.

On the Palm front, my view is that Palm made good decisions about partnering -- licensing their OS when Apple had made the wrong decision on this point so many years before. However, they made two mistakes. The first was execution. While the licensed the OS, it remained too tightly connected to their hardware business. By the time they made it a truly independent business, the market was already in decline. And far too much time and energy was spent in this process. Not to mention the process of spinning off from 3Com or being acquired by 3Com. Corporate restructuring may be necessary but it can be very disruptive.

The second mistake was around innovation. Palm became stuck in their approach to the PDA market and change was a monolithic process. New operating system releases were painful for the company and for licensees. The company was not able to take some of the base ideas and technology and use it for adjacent device categories like mp3 players or smart phones, both of which started growing much faster than the core PDA market. This inflexibility and inability to innovate limited licensee growth. Palm's competitor, Microsoft, hasn't succeeded here either, but MS has the drag through revenue and relationship with the desktop and laptop platform that Palm had to compete against. Palm needed more of a constellation of devices supporting the same set of APIs, if not running the same OS.

On the Pocket PC front, rather than saying HP, really we should say Compaq was the winner here. This is a story of early commitment to a market, innovative engineering, hard work, and smart marketing. Despite Dell's proven approach in the PC and Laptop market of gutting cost throughout the engineering to delivery cycle, Compaq/HP has been able to hold their ground in this segment of the market. I attribute this to the innovation necessary so far in the PDA segment and for this reason I would not count out Dell in the future. Once Microsoft publishes a universal reference platform that can be made cheaply in China and is appealing to consumers, Dell will be back in the game. As long as consumers are looking for innovation in the device, Compaq/HP will continue to lead.

But as I have written elsewhere the PDA market is in a period of terminal decline. Perhaps it is more appropriate to say a period of transition -- the things we do with a PDA are not going away. Just the idea that Palm was born on, a personal digital assistant. Perhaps the old adage is true, that it is always that characteristic which gives you your strength which is also your weak point. Palm succeeded because it eschewed the general programmability model of the Newton and focused on providing core functionality and doing a great job in that limited area. Now the market is moving in three directions, away from the core value proposition that Palm was built on --

(1) even more special purpose consumer electronics (mp3 player) though I expect this market to drive toward high volume and low cost rather quickly.

(2) general programmable device with a very small form factor -- smart phone. In this market I expect to see the greatest challenge coming from integration with the rest of the computing stack. Here Symbian is the only player with any significant volume.

(3) integrated platform, running the same OS, from smallest device to largest server -- Microsoft and Linux are the two options today.

So what should Palm do? Ditch PalmOS. Start making devices based on Linux. How about the Palm user interface on top of Linux? Start making devices in other categories outside the PDA -- Linux MP3 player, Linux Video recorder, Linux Smart Phone...

Assault on Smart Phones

For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction... my physics professor tried to teach me something like that. Now I see what he meant. It hadn't occured to me that professional technology industry consultants would advise against the adoption of new technology. Luddites or Amish maybe. But thanks to Cory Doctorow, I now see how short term economic thinking warps some consultants brains... Cory points out an article from the Register entitled Symbian loophole 'threatens operator revenue' which details a report from consultancy Mako Analysis. Of the Symbian OS, Mako is reported as having said

"The increasing sophistication of high-end mobile devices opens up a range of additional problems and will continue to undermine the data revenue streams of mobile operators at a time when they desperately need them to be increasing."

At Mako's web site a full article is available on the topic. Mako explains that with the Symbian OS "...a savvy user can... completely bypass a range of services that are normally charged for by their mobile operator." Mako outlines four categories of services that mobile operators hope to charge for that could be impacted -- messaging, mobile music, gaming and phone personalization.

I don't suppose that Mako is aware that you don't even need Symbian -- with Java midlets, people have been avoiding operator's high prices on SMS for a few years with programs like this one.

At the same time another Register article warns of a University of Surrey study that shows that "Mobile phones drive us mental." The study warned that "...the incessant demand for instant communication heightens stress in the workplace, makes people angry and can prove to be an annoying distraction."

So perhaps instead of simply warning against smart phones, Mako should be arguing that we should do away with mobile phones altogether! Of course that would result in a somewhat larger impact on revenues for their clients...

A more useful role for a consultancy would be to advise mobile operators on how to transform their business models to take advantage of the relentless and unstoppable pace of technological innovation, as opposed to suggesting that it can in some way be halted.

VoWiFi it is!

Thanks to all the readers who sent me suggestions on how to solve the problem of the horrible acronym for voice over wireless networks.

The winner is in! First use goes to techdirt where on March 18, 2003 mmasnick ponders "...VoIP over WiFi (or is that VoWiFi?)..." in this post on the economics of wireless. Techdirt has used the term 15 times since that first use, most recently for this article on giving the homeless VoWiFi...

Lets keep up the momentum and make sure we aren't having to write VoWLAN in future blogs... and having to explain over and over again what it means...

Peerio Interview

Some time ago I wrote about Peerio444 as a competitor to Skype and raised a number of questions about their product and business model. This morning I was able to have a brief conversation with CEO Dmitry Goroshevsky and I have posted the interview on my IP Inferno blog. Enjoy!

Does Nokia have their COOL Back?

I recently wrote in this blog that the issue is not about how cool the phone looks and I still believe the basic premise -- that the next evolutionary step for phones is dependent upon programmability. But two announcements this week from Nokia definitely show that the good folks in Finland are hard at work to prove that they are still the thought leaders in mobility.

First is a very strange new technology which allows a mobile handset user to flash a message across a room to another person via a set of leds embedded on the back of the phone. The BBC has a good photo of the new phone, dubbed the Nokia 3220. The Register explains that this will "change the face of waving as we know it" and Joi Ito imagines what it would be like to have them in an audience, "it would be like a chorus of Hecklebots." More information is available at Nokia's web site

The second annoucement is more interesting in that the long term implications are deeper... Dan Gillmor writes just that "The project is young, but the possibilities are fascinating" while Marc Canter writes simply "This is Killer." What are they both talking about? Nokia's new initiative LIFEBLOG. What the heck is a Lifeblog? Here is what Nokia has to say:

Nokia Lifeblog is a PC and mobile phone software combination that effortlessly keeps a multimedia diary of the items you collect with your mobile phone. Lifeblog automatically organizes your photos, videos, text messages, and multimedia messages into a clear chronology you can easily browse, search, edit, and save. Nokia Lifeblog does the work of organizing the items you create and receive, and you can also add notes throughout the day, or tag and update your favorites so they're always on your phone.

The Nokia 7610 imaging phone will be the first to have the Lifeblog software. The 7610 is a tri-band phone with a megapixel camera, running the Symbian operating system. The phone also comes equipped with bluetooth, an MP3 player, and the standard Symbian productivity applications (email, web browser, etc).

Nokia definitely has a good claim on cool for this summer.