February 18, 2009 at 10:46 pm · Filed under Observations and Ramblings, The Future, TigerSpike Innovation Lab, Work Related Stuff and tagged: apple, appstore, nokia, ovi
This blog entry is mainly about Nokia’s Ovi store. Loosely this is an App store like Apple’s, but it promises to be availble to 300m devices by 2012.
This is big. I am a big fan of apple, but iPhone sales are dwarfed by sales of Nokias. In my opinion Apple is still way ahead in terms of the phone design and useability, but Nokia (and everyone else with varying degrees of success) are all trying to copy; and as Motorola found out, you can’t just make one awesome phone (the V3) and then sit back and bask.
What does Ovi have?
- A general app store that gives developers 70% of sales revenue (like Apple) accross 15 set price points, and charges though the carriers (after the carriers take their share (which is SHIT – carriers take 40% to 50% – there won’t be anything left!), or through credit card. Apple is way ahead in this respect, and Nokia will have to come up with some more solutions – things like Paypal will help, but one thing Nokia hasn’t got that Apple has is the billing relationship. And that matters. Alot.
- Nokia music store does pretty much the same thing as iTunes, and also streams from your PC. It also has a recommendation engine which is good, but it isn’t as cool as Apple’s iTunes Genius (neither of which are as good as last.fm)
- Nokia Friend view, which actually pits Nokia against Google (their new Lattitude service). I think that Google has a better chance, as their solution goes accross all platforms wheras Nokia’s is only availlable on S60 handsets at the moment. They both look cool though – check out the videos here.
- MOSH which is Nokia’s UGC thing which I won’t go into here.
- A games capability which Nokia will be ahead of Apple for; due to their experience with the N Gage. That said, Apple is more Wii (because of the accelarometer) and NGage is more Playstation, and I prefer Wii over Playstation. Steve Jobs doesn’t really like gaming either, so he may be missing a trick here. Games outsold DVDs this year.
Distribution
- iTunes has between 100m and 250m users depending on who you ask, iPhone has tens of millions
- Nokia say that Ovi will be on 300m devices by 2012. This is bullish, but Nokia do have 40% of the global market, and there are more than 4bn connections out there (or thereabouts), and 40% of that is 1.6Bn!
- Something else to remember is that iPhone users use their devices way more than Nokia users do – even the new Nokia devices… we will wait and see what Nokia produces to answer the iPhone. I haven’t seen anything close yet (from anyone – confirmed by our guys Nic and Simon who are at 3GSM in Barcalona at the moment)
Can Nokia get it on the handsets?
All the new ones yes – the first one is the N97 in May, but they say that they will be able to get it on the Series 40 and 60. Through an ‘on handset’ application. Getting people to download that is by no means easy.
Also remember that Nokia will start to piss the carriers off as they will theorise that they will lose revenue (the credit card part). Who knows they may gain more (i.e. their share of the carrier charged downloads), but they will fight over it – which should be fun to watch! The carriers need to invest in this stuff too otherwise they will become dumb pipes, which they need to either accept, or do something about. And it has to be something more impressive than Nokia and Apple, and Google can do. And that is a very tall order…
So will Nokia win?
Even considering that Nokia has just laid off a load of their R&D guys due to the recession (Not a good time to need to innovate and develop cool stuff) in summary: If Nokia can connect effectively with their handsets: i.e. all the lower end handsets download the application OR all new Nokias pre load Ovi AND they sort their billing out, AND the carriers don’t kill them, THEN they will have the biggest network in the world. Even if they do this – Apple will still be there, they won’t go away because they are too cool and they do things right and their design is beautiful.
But while Apple is “cooler” than Nokia. it isn’t by that much…. Finnish people never hurt anyone, so Maito on calista, Sokeri on Halpa to you!
February 13, 2009 at 12:13 am · Filed under Observations and Ramblings and tagged: interns
I was lucky enough to be an intern for Chase Manhatan (as it was then called), and they paid what I thought was pretty good money back when I was a student in London. We have always used interns at TigerSpike. Thank god because one of our first jobs for Big Brother was built by unpaid interns.
At the time we just started and made very litle money. No one in the company had salaries. Not the interns, not the management. We had a points system so when we won work we paid whoever was involved in the sale and production. It wasn’t such a bad system in the beginning.
Yes, it was probably illegal in Australia not to pay (especially as was with us unpaid for 2 years), but had the long arm of the law come down on us, we would have had to let him and the other interns go, and we wouldn’t be where we are today – (employing over 30 people across 3 offices). The interns who worked for nothing are still with us, and are being paid now, and we are moving one of them from Sydney to London, so it all worked out in the end 
I suppose my attitude towards this is fairly right wing. Problem is that if we got all lefty about it and had to give a ‘living wage’ to everyone, then we just wouldn’t have been able to hire anyone, and things would have been very different.
January 6, 2009 at 7:12 pm · Filed under Observations and Ramblings, The Future, TigerSpike Innovation Lab and tagged: projectors
In my last post I talked about mobile phones with projectors in them. This means that the small screen can become a big screen (then I saw this article about 3M designing miniature projectors today). So will this mean that all our business designing for the small screen and building mobile sites will dry up?
Well the answer is no. Even if ALL new phones have new projectors in them, it would take 18 to 24 months for those devices to get in people’s hands, so there will be 3 to 4 years before projectors become ubiquitous (god I HATE that word!). It took as long for cameras to get in all phones, which is pretty much is now; but remember the first one was on there 5 years ago.
More importantly, the nature of projectors is that you need to remain in one place (to project on to something), and the nature of mobile is that you engage alot of the the time, when you are on the move; and those two things don’t go together.
What it does mean is that mobile TV and mobile movies become more viable. Imagine going to iTunes (or bit torrent – lets be honest) with your phone and downloading a movie, then watching it wherever you find a nice surface. And the good thing is that it will look cool (so as I said, the geeks and gadget lovers will love it).
December 31, 2008 at 8:36 pm · Filed under Observations and Ramblings, The Future and tagged: 2009
So what will happen in 2009 for mobile? (and some other stuff)
- Companies will go bust. In my opinion these will be mainly venture funded companies without a viable business model whose venture capital backers refuse to give them more and they can’t raise it from elsewhere. I reckon more than one of the mobile ad networks will go under. Banks are still reluctant to lend to small and medium sized businesses despite government handouts and pressure
- Companies will get stronger. The good thing about downturns is a) it means you have to work harder and smarter, and people who don’t get axed (i.e. the company becomes leaner, as you separate out the high performers from the people who can’t cut it)), and b) because some companies will go bust, even a smaller market size with fewer players will lead to a larger market share for the surviving companies
- Mobile internet will become a no brainer. i.e. everyone will have a mobile enabled website. Smart companies will design and build these appropriately rather than just squashing their on line content into mobile. Because of this, mobile advertising will settle down and actually start making some people some money (the remaining mobile ad serving networks once some have gone bust)
- Mobile payments has to happen soon, but maybe 2009 is still too early for big adoption. I see someone like Visa / Mastercard winning this race, despite the lead being taken by start-up companies. Mind you Paypal didn’t do too badly against the big boys
- MMS will become bigger in the USA as interconnect happens. But it won’t go massive
- QR codes/Bluetooth/other peripheral mobile tech still won’t be mainstream enough for brands to seriously consider them for anything other than to get PR
- iPhone will continue to grow and push the market. We haven’t seen any devices that are as good. Yet. Mind you mine runs out of batteries in less than a day! something must be up!
- I think that we will see the first phones sold with mini projectors in 2009. Allowing full screen web browsing from the phone. Which will stir things up conceptually, but will be in the hands of GEEKS! and will be mainstream (if at all) in 2 more years
- Android may well become big, depending largely on whether Sony Ericsson / Motorola / others adopt it in new handsets… they have said they would…
- Facebook will get stronger as will Google and Apple (well Duh!)…. carriers and handset manufacturers will get weaker. Carriers won’t exist as we know them in 10 years time.
- Japanese toilets will become big in theUSA. Ok so that won’t happen… but it would be good if it did!
- The USA should do something cool with tech as they have a newly appointed CTO type person. Countries should start to cover themselves in WIMAX soon, and even if they don’t, internet access from laptops will happen everywhere. If not through WIMAX then standard wireless, or 3G cards. In the later part of 2009 you won’t be able to buy a laptop without as a minimum, the option to connect wherever, whenever. And it will be free. Maybe not in 2009, but certainly by 2010
- I hope they sort out international roaming charges. I am sick of having 3 SIM cards. The EU is legislating for this which is good news. But I can’t see it getting sorted in 2009. Carrier tech is actually way crapper than you think, it isn’t just the money men hoarding their pennies!
- Because of Facebook and myspace’s sharing of content it will become less important for politicians to be squeaky clean. Doing the odd line of coke or dressing up as a girl or kissing a dude won’t ruin your political future (or it better not otherwise we will be out of politicians very soon – and to be honest I wouldn’t trust someone squeaky clean to run things anyway. Hitler was squeaky clean vegetarian, whereas Churchill was a drunk)…. so I will add a quote from Abraham Lincoln “those with very few vices tend to have very few virtues!.
Happy new year….
November 25, 2008 at 9:11 pm · Filed under Observations and Ramblings, The Future, Work Related Stuff and tagged: patents
Apple is being sued for patent infringement over the way its iPhone surfs the internet by EMG Technology, who alledged that the company infringes on a patent it holds for navigating the internet on mobile devices. The patent was issued little more than a month ago, but relies on 76 claims that were originally filed in 1999. The patent covers how online content is displayed on mobile devices after being reformatted from HTML to XML.
Wake up call to all the old way of doing things: Gen Y don’t give a shit about copyright, and China doesn’t give a shit about Patents (ergo: they will be worthless within 50 years, and a good thing too!).
In my opinon if someone comes up with an innovative new product, they should get off their ass and commercialise it and make money from it, then by the time everyone has copied them and they therefore make less (which is good for the consumer) they should be continually innovating to commercialise their next product.
People like the Tetra pak moguls don’t deserve their millions. I can’t see any arguement that can be used to say that they do. Sure, make a few million, but end it there; let patents last a maximum of 3 years. These guys are essentially sitting on their arses making money without hard work or continual innovation. And that is wrong.
To all the Pharmaceutical companies who whine about “the cost of R&D needs to be protected” get over yourselves you make way too much money and you know it.
With regard to the Apple case, it seems like EMG renewed a bunch of patents with the specific purpose of suing. Why don’t they stop being babies and make money from it themselves, not wait for Apple to and then try to bring Apple down for succeeding where they failed!. By the way I am not an Apple-phile; they took us to court in Sydney when we trademarked “mPod”, (which we did before the iPod came out, but they took all “pods” to court) to be honest it was just their Lawyers using up their retainers and justifying their own existence and producing nothing.
ok so I am sounding a little socialist (my grandad was in the Communist party when he was at Oxford!). And I am not saying lets redistribute the wealth, becoming rich is fine if you do it by working hard or innovating, or both. Not inventing one thing once, and then build a giant lazy-boy (reclining comfy chair) out of Patent protection lawyers.
November 24, 2008 at 11:52 pm · Filed under Work Related Stuff and tagged: MMA awards
We spent a few days in San Diego and LA for the global mobile marketing awards. Had a good time chatting to a load of people including heads of two of our compeition: Steen from 5th Finger and two of the Hyperfactory brothers. We all ended up on the same table with Adam – win all the awards – Dunn and a nice Spanish guy from Mobile Dreams Factory.
In the end The Hyper Factory and Mobile Dreams Factory took off with most of the awards (I am thinking of changing our company name to “TigerSpike Factory” – that must be it). We do win our fair share of awards but didn’t at this event (we were nominated for two).
What was pretty cool is that for all our competition with eachother we are all good guys and all seem to get along well, share information to help eachother and have fun competing… like a big game of monopoly!! (Except with real money and not involving property or little shoes or a mini dog, and also Monopoly usually ended up with someone throwing a tantrum and throwing the board in the air… so not really like monopoly at all actually).
And I have to tip my hat to the two factories and Aura for bringing home the spoils! We got some plaques for being nominated, which I think Matt has left in the rental car!… haha.. reminds me of the MMA Awards in Sydney where we always used to break ours. Why can’t they make them stronger! (or serve less alcohol)
November 7, 2008 at 6:28 pm · Filed under Observations and Ramblings and tagged: barack, obama, president
New York was apprently like New Year’s eve in Times square. McCain’s speech was excellent, marred only by the boo-ing of some of his idiot supporters. Barack Obama’s speech was even better. Really inspiring.
Many are saying that digital played a large part in Obama’s campaign. The results show that more and more usually apathetic young people voted, and they are far more digitally minded than their parents generation.
So the good news is 1) that America has a real reason to be inspired, excited, and pull together under great new leadership to get through recession and financial chris, and 2) digital is clearly becoming more important and prominent.
November 3, 2008 at 7:36 pm · Filed under Observations and Ramblings, Work Related Stuff and tagged: contextual advertising, facebook, maori
I am not one to click on ads and buy things, but I did buy a Maori fish hook for ’safe passage over water’; I know it is kind of touristy, but I did like the design and I lived next door to NZ for 7 years so I am allowed!
I got it from wanderer imports. Then I got chating to Sean West there about how successful he has found Facebook advertising. He was very impressed with the amount of targeting that is possible, and pays on a CPC basis which is great as it is direct sales not branding.
From my experience the advertising was relevant to me, and non intrusive (unlike those twats promoting “boatbook.com”, who I mean to complain about but never get round to it). The price was fine and the website it went through to was simple and effective, and paypal is easy to I went and paid my $20 for it. Yes I could probably have got it cheaper when I go back to Australia, but I can’t be assed and bought it on a whim.
So all in all a pretty good solution for Wanderer imports (unless it arrives and is crap in which case I’ll amend this…. but you can’t really go wrong with a bone fish hook can you?)
October 29, 2008 at 5:51 pm · Filed under Observations and Ramblings, Uncategorized and tagged: haloween, slut, sluts
Halloween (extract from Wikipedia): “The ancient Gaels believed that on October 31, now known as Halloween, the boundary between the alive and the deceased dissolved, and the dead become dangerous for the living by causing problems such as sickness or damaged crops. The festivals would frequently involve bonfires, into which bones of slaughtered livestock were thrown. Costumes and masks were also worn at the festivals in an attempt to mimic the evil spirits or placate them.”
So what happens in New York? every single girl I speak to is dressing up as a slut. Most aren’t even doing “sexy witch” or “scantily clad vombie”, but are going straight for the “slutty nurse” or “slutty army officer” or my favourite “Slutty Slut”.
That all said, all the slutty sluts do look pretty cool, and can loosely be defined as “evil spirits” so I don’t know what I am complaining about. I was thinking of just going as a “murderer”. Just in my normal clothes.
October 28, 2008 at 10:11 pm · Filed under TigerSpike Innovation Lab, Work Related Stuff and tagged: android
We just bought a G1 in New York to send to Sydney, but before that our man Johnny Makkar had a look at it. See what he wrote here, it was a pretty popular article linked to many others.
Lots of clients are asking about Android now, usually in the same context as iPhone apps. If you do one or the other do an iPhone app, but really the important thing is to design a good, useable application. Once you have done that an android app or iPhone app or mobile site are just ways to communicate that to people using different technologies.
We used to have to do this to an extent with the Java mobile apps that we made – making 20+ versions to deal with the idiosynchracies was not uncommon. Where people are going mad is they are discussing technologies wen they should be discussing the value that the content will provide on mobile. In this respect the more important questions are:
- what content do you want to make available on mobile?
- Why use mobile? why is it an appropriate medium (two examples are 1) because the content is needed on the move when you are not in front of your PC, or 2) because you need to get the content or information that second)
- How will I make it as useable experience as possible. Design! think not just about the screen size, but the mindset of the user when they are interating.
A note on the G1 phone. looks cool, but iPhone is still way prettier. A nicer piece of design trumps technology any day. Thats why the pink Motorola Razr sold so many – I can just imagine the engineers snigering at the marketing person’s suggestion that making it pink will sell more than some piece of functiaonlity. Well sucked in engineers!
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