Sprint’s EV-DO Rev A Announcement

Sprint dropped a press release stating their Rev A plans. They’ll have it out to 220 million people at the end of 3Q 2007.

With Revision A technology, peak download data rates increase to 3.1 Mbps (from 2.0) and peak upload data rates increase to 1.8 Mbps (from 144 kbps). Average download speeds improve to 450-800 kbps (from 400 -700) and average uplink speeds become 300 - 400 kpbs (versus 70 - 144 kpbs). The faster data rates can enable richer applications and services such as high-speed video telephony, music on demand, video messaging, large file uploads and high performance push-to-talk capability.

So the download speed increase is a little disappointing, but the upload speed is getting a big boost. I wonder if reliability and frequency of slower fallback speeds will be improved. Consistency is just as important as speed.

Verizon? Your turn.

Device Indenendent Application Patent App

Tribilis Mobile got around to filing a provisional for their SmartPath product.

Embodiments of the invention provide the ability to develop and deploy device independent applications for mobile communication devices having disparate operating systems. A workflow module is used to create an application comprising rule sets that are independent of mobile communication device specific operating system. The look and feel of each application is independent of the mobile communication device in which each application ultimately executes. Each mobile communication device executes a UI Engine that is specific to the device and operating system running on the device. Since the UI Engine is developed once per device and is capable of executing applications interfaces, the only element to be downloaded into each mobile communication device is a UI component comprising a rule set and content data that makes up an application screen. Upon receiving a user input the UI Engine sends an event comprising the application name, screen name, user operation and any user data to a server having a rule interface component. The rule interface component processes the event and based on the rule set builds the next UI component from the rule set and content data and sends the next UI component to the UI Engine. The UI components may be dynamically loaded each time they are accessed, cached for each session or stored permanently on the mobile communication device in order to optimize the responsiveness of the application. If an error is found in an application the error may be fixed in one location at the server and deployed into each mobile communication device the next time the application is accessed. In this way applications are always up to date and repaired on multiple communication devices hosting disparate operating systems with one upload to the server. UI components may be transmitted to mobile communication devices in binary format to further optimize the responsiveness of the application.

Basically, it’s a meta-language that drives a proprietary UI library. This is one solution but is it unique?

Appforge has their Crossfire product that seems to be quite similar. They have the client that runs on the device that provides the common denominator environment. But I think they are actually running device-native code like J2ME or .NET. So I think there’s a case for differentiation if Tribilis is running meta-code. Am I wrong?

What an industry mobile porting has become. You kind of take for granted how desktop software has only 3 major players (Win, Mac, Linux) to deal with. After dealing with porting, I found myself wishing for a monopoly in the mobile hardware and OS arena just to make it all stop.

Mobile Advertising - Hint Hint

Carlo at Mobhappy posted about the lack of a way to provide enhanced mobile content and features without charging.

This post is just a hint that our company, Tomo Software, is working in that direction - specificially to support mobile applications. Yes, that statement is a bit vague But believe me that it is a different effort than anything out there now.

We are currently looking for publishers and advertisers to come into a pilot program we are arranging. If you’re interested, ping me at rich at mobilitee.org and we’ll have a chat.

PayPal Mobile - Eliminate the Carriers

This is such good news. After reading Russ’ post about PayPal Mobile finally being out, I checked out the FAQ.

I have to say, I was afraid for a while that monthly bills from carriers would start looking like credit card bills. If the premium SMS model started dominating all commerce with or through mobile devices, this seemed inevitable.

The good news is that PayPal did it better and sooner. They have your info already - so now they can use it. Shipping address - check. Different funding sources like credit cards and checking accounts - check. You can still buy that CD on your United Plus Airline Miles Card and not get a separate bill from your carrier.

The security is there too. You’re getting a manual phone call where you have to type in your PIN - you do not send it through SMS so it’s not floating around in plaintext. No worries if you lose your phone either.

So is the next step RFID or QR codes interfacing with this? That will cut out the texting part and speed things up a bit. But what about the manual phone call? If PayPal does the credit card fraud monitoring thing, they could lose it in favor of a charge protect plan where they look for suspicious activity. That requires a bit more infrastructure, but if it gets big enough I’m sure they’d attempt it. Another way to go is a client application. Use it to scan the QR and it prompts for your PIN. Both are then securely sent over as a purchase.

Is this a viable source for publishers to charge for mobile applications? That’s a solid “maybe”. If the service gets popular and it can be assumed that most people have PayPal with the mobile features activated, then sure. But until then, Premium SMS is still the most straightforward way to charge the user. If the carriers want to keep up this lead however, they’re going to have to put a backend billing system in place for it like PayPal, and not just have it pop up on your phone statement.

Well done PayPal.

Update: Carlo at Mobhappy is taking the opposite viewpoint. He thinks the complexity of setting up that additional PayPal layer will be the main thing that hinders adoption.

I can’t say I disagree. But I’m coming from the angle that people know PayPal because of EBay. The people who will use this service will need to be at least EBay savvy to do it - maybe already having a PayPal account. I think that’s the gray area. They have a userbase through EBay. The question is the intersection of that set with people who will use mobile payments. Will that intersection be a critical mass to get this off the ground? I don’t know. But I’m certainly not going to dismiss the chance.

His last statement, though:

The breakthrough this market is waiting for isn’t PayPal — sorry, folks — at least not in this incantation. It’s still a touchless IC platform that supports both physical and online purchases. What’s holding back mobile payments currently, for the most part, is that operator revenue share. But that’s not a technical issue or even a societal one, just a flawed business model. PayPal’s real impact in mobile, rather than its actual product, may be to force that onerous revenue share down to more acceptable levels. But any mobile payment system can’t ignore mobile content, and that’s where the biggest opportunity is. But it’s also the one place where a system will butt heads with operators — so you have to wonder if PayPal’s avoided it intentionally.

… is dead on. If PayPal only serves to force the carriers to be less demanding in revenue share, they’ve made a lot of progress.

In-Game Mobile Advertising

According to MocoNews, IGA Worldwide and Exit games are bringing in-game advertising to mobile devices. You know - where you grab an ad texture online and map it to a billboard or something in the game.

This mode of advertising is still in its infancy on the desktop, with the most developed service being Third Screen Media’s Madx platform. It never ceases to amaze me how quickly people are jumping to mobile now.

There might be a market internationally for this. But I don’t see it in the US. People just don’t play enough mobile games. That’s backed by several talks at GDC this year focusing on how to get people to play mobile games. (Consensus: make good ones - duh).

More EV-DO Rev A News

According to a press release on their website, Sierra Wireless is set to release a new EV-DO Rev A PC card that runs at 3.1 / 1.8 Mbps peak. This should be available in Q3 2006.

They wouldn’t be announcing this if the Rev A upgrade was far off. Fingers crossed.

Casual Flash Games on PSP

Along with all the other cool news dished out regarding the PSP and PS3 today in Japan came the announcement that the next PSP firmware will include Macromedia Flash 6.0 support. No, I’m not talking about the (very impressive) homebrew Flash solution released last week. This is official support in the firmware.

One of the problems mentioned at the press conference was that the PSP user base is mostly male. Obviously the selection of titles available for the device has a lot to do with this, and the marketing campaign with the two “hells yeah” squirrels doesn’t help either. (The Japanese ads don’t do much to cater to women either) But this Flash feature, if implemented and marketed correctly, could go a long way to evening this ratio out.

The good news is that Flash is king of free online casual games. How many times have you received some email from a friend pointing you to some stupid Flash game that you can’t stop playing? Never, you say? Well then you need new friends. Go here to see one of the more infamous time sucking Flash games.

Now the bad news is that the Flash games out on the web now generally use the mouse for interaction. Yes, there’s some with keyboard control, but most of them go with a click interface. I know the browser does the analog stick crosshair thing, but that’s just not going to cut it in most of these games.

This doesn’t mean that there’s a huge opportunity here for both new games and adapting older games for the PSP by adding keypress control and reformatting for the PSP screen. I can imagine sites dedicated to serving up these adapted games - with banner ads to make some cash. To me, this completely changes the appeal of a PSP. Suddenly you have a wealth of free, casual games waiting to be played right out of the box. Buy the hardware, connect to the net, play the games. Never buy a UMD. It’s really like XBox Live Arcade without the monthly subscription fee.

After saying all that, I have to throw in some ways Sony could mess this chance up or help it along.

First, the PSP doesn’t have much memory. You can see this when you browse the web with it. Load up cnet.com and you’re pretty much out of space. If the integrated Flash player is not written well, development for it could be a pain, and games that are out there now might not work. If all this thing can do is play some flash banner ads, it’s worthless, nothing to see here. Let’s assume that’s not the case.

Playing Flash games would become 100 times more convenient if they could be read from the memory stick. This way, a PSP Flash game service could offer download links for games which save them to your stick, and you could pull them up when you’re not connected to the net. Huge gain there. A little less convenient but still workable is if the PSP would cache the Flash with the page, and you could access the page in your history while offline, until it’s erased.

A relatively small but significant misstep by Sony would also be not providing ways to capture D-Pad and some other button presses in Flash. If the only interaction is using the virtual crosshair to point and click, you can pretty much throw many gaming opportunities out the window. I can easily see this happening if the browser keeps the same key bindings when a flash frame is active in the browser. I just hope Sony takes the time to go this extra mile.

Finally, they need to tout this Flash feature, and maybe offer a casual Flash game site themselves. I know the previous additions like the web browser and RSS audio feed player weren’t mass market gold - so I can forgive Sony barely mentioning either of them in their ads. But Flash games can be. They need to play it up. They don’t make their money on the hardware, but pimping Flash could be the move that takes their install base to the next level - especially with women. Large install bases get them larger UMD movie sales and more people giving the UMD games a try.

So my fingers are crossed. Do this right Sony - you’ve got an amazing device with little compelling content. Let’s fix it.

MVNO and Network Neutrality

James Surowiecki has a nice summary of some of the issues surrounding network neutrality (the loss of), he concludes that “the middlemen are striking back.” The article stresses a couple of interesting things: weak market forces (90% of Americans get their Internet service from local cable or telephone companies), the “slotting fee” business model (like supermarkets) that tiered access will bring about for the Internet.

These ideas got me thinking about MVNOs in the US and their business models. I think we can all agree that a open network model, like the Internet now, is probably years away. That said, I can think of a couple of ways the MVNOs are (might?) be putting a bit of pressure on the incumbent operators in the US.

In regards to market forces, there will be an increase of players, and therefore an increase in choice for mobile service. Does this really change the mobile market environment from one of weak forces, to one of fierce competition? I’m not totally convinced. What will really put market forces in motion is pricing pressure, but from what I see most MVNOs are not interested in price pressure, they’re interested in value pressure. Ultimately the large operators are still making money on selling access to their networks. So as was mentioned recently at the MoMeMo meeting here in LA, the incumbent operators are essentially letting MVNOs take on some risk of exploring the evolving market space. If an MVNO finds itself with a great mobile brand, an AT&T could step in and buy it. All these VC funded MVNOs are going to want a great exit, and a buy out from a big operator with tons of cash is a great exit.

So what’s another way that MVNOs are going to put pressure on traditional operators? They’re going after niche markets and they’re going to “add value”. That sounds good on paper, and I admit that I’m excited about what might happen given that “adding value” is driving MVNOs to differentiate themselves. There’s a lot of value to add — One of them might get it right. The bottom line though is that MVNOs are quite happy being “middlemen” — that’s why they’re going after niche markets. These middle men are not opening the network (look at ESPN’s MVNO!), and they have a centralized focus on content because of the focus on niche markets. So are things going to change? Very very slowly. There’s money to be made, of course, but overall market conditions will change more slowly.

So the US mobile value chain remains unchallenged. Content Publishers don’t have to think only of pleasing end users, they have to please all the spheres of influence along the way. There is still friction for content/application start-ups in the mobile space because of how much “value” has to be distributed across the value chain before getting to the end-user.

I’m wondering if the advent of mobile advertising might upset this balance? End-user value might just translate directly into money for content publishers/providers. What do you think?

Casual Mobile Games / Animal Crossing DS

Casual mobile games. What springs to mind when I say that? Bejewled - check. Tetris - check. The new craze, Sudoku - check. Mostly puzzle and card games, right? Well here’s a story about trying to break that mold a little.

My wife, Robyn is the definition of a casual gamer. I think of all the things I’ve bought for her over the years we’ve been together, what she uses most is this PopCap casual game pack for her Treo. After a few days on call, she needs to wind down - and that usually means books, TV, or these games. They work wonders.

Needless to say, she’s played these games to death.

The problem is that getting her into a new game is difficult - due to the fact that she has really only played puzzle games (and all the carts we have around for our Atari 2600 - can’t beat the classics), so she really doesn’t know what she’ll like. Even between puzzle games her interest varies widely - eg. she enjoyed Lumines on the PSP but not Ultimate Block Party.With games not being cheap these days, it’s hard to commit to something for her. The PopCap games were like $15.. Nothing compared to a PSP game really - and she racked up hours and hours on those things.

Well this weekend we took a huge chance on a new genre for her - the open-ended non-puzzle casual game. I bought her the DS/Animal Crossing Combo Pack with my fingers crossed.

I have to say, they did a wonderful job with Animal Crossing. I keep remembering reading these articles about college kids skipping class so they can be at their Gamecube at a certain time to do something in the town. The game operates in real time so it’s pretty unforgiving. However, if you’re not a nutjob gamer, the game seems to work wonders as a low-key diversion. You build your town and your stats at your own pace - there’s not much penalty. You don’t die. You don’t have to reset. You just go do your thing - and the content keeps coming for months.

The features that really blow me away though, are those that work with online infrastructure WiFi mode. You can visit other peoples’ towns, chat with them, leave them messages, trade items that you make! and send NPC characters off with notes to random other places. So people make content and you suddenly find it sitting in your village. It’s the type of gameplay that keeps things fresh. Since Robyn loves to draw, making custom clothes and face textures with the touchscreen interests her a lot. (Though she’s not able to do that just yet in the game.)

Here’s the downside. Nintendo wants to keep this thing kid-friendly, so you can only do these online things if you have a friend code from another person. The code is some function on the serial of the cartridge and the DS. So it’s unique for everyone - and if you don’t know someone to get their code, you can’t go online and visit them. There’s also no way of opening up your village to any ol person either.

Fitting this into the mobile casual game point….

I’m not saying anything really new here. Animal Crossing and the word “casual” are almost always found together in reviews and promotional text. The problem is that I don’t think the word is used with the same demographic in mind as the puzzle games I mentioned above. Sure, Animal Crossing is casual for gamers - both light and hardcore ones. By the nature of its core gameplay, it’s a casual experience.

But is it the kind of casual game that gets Joe and Jane CouldGiveACrap to play on the train instead of reading a book or staring into space? Give Joe or Jane a built-in Bejewled on their phone right in the main menu and they could easily get hooked. Hell, give them Nokia Snake in the main menu and they could do the same. What I’m saying here is that if they had Animal Crossing there, I think it could happen too. It’s a gentle dialog-based introduction. The mechanics are fun. There’s new things to see each time they come back.

The problem is - they need to get a DS and the cart and figure out how to turn on the DS and run the game. Too much, unless they have kids that show them how to do it. Even so, they could associate it with their kids and therefore not take it as something they could enjoy as well.

So this is the start of a little experiment to see if Animal Crossing DS keeps my wife hooked as long as those PopCap puzzle games did. I’d even be satisfied for half or a quarter of the time.

Oh yeah. If you play Animal Crossing, send me your friend code (rich at mobilitee) and I’ll give it to Robyn. It would be interesting to see the online features at work. But not if you’re under 18 - Robyn’s ad for Tom Nook’s store wasn’t very kid-friendly… Ahem…

User-Created Mobile Video Content

You know how American Idol drew millions of Americans to SMS? To date, sending mobile video clips (MMS or otherwise) hasn’t had such a champion service to drive adoption.

Well, Ministry of Sound in the UK is running a mobile campaign that could be the template for such a champion service.

From an article in New Media Age:

Ministry of Sound, the dance music brand, is to launch a reality TV-style initiative called ‘Superstar’ that will form the heart of a direct-to-consumer mobile strategy and cash in on the explosion of user-generated content.

The company currently has a mobile presence on Vodafone Live!, O2 Active and Orange World, but is creating a direct-to-consumer proposition that will place user-generated content at the heart of its strategy. It has tenders out for the development of a mobile storefront and expects to launch its new strategy by March.

Matt Dicks, head of media at Ministry of Sound, said, “It means giving consumers the opportunity to be the centre of our world. We have editors, but the kids and young people out there are more qualified to tell the rest of the world about it than we are.
“Superstar is key to where we’re taking the brand digitally: putting the customer at the centre of the MoS digital media and mobile world.”

Ideas that are being floated by the company include users sending videos via mobile of themselves presenting ’shows’, with the best then chosen to edit the Ministry of Sound Web site and present online and mobile shows.

“We’ll give them the platform, make them the editors of the site, the stars of Ministry of Sound Radio and online and mobile TV,” says Dicks.

Other developments will include a music video service, original video content, ‘mobisoaps’ and an adult content play. A peer-to- peer function is also being considered, although Dicks admits that this may pose problems of copyright, considering the recent history of the music industry with P2P. The brand is also considering how to integrate a gambling offering.

“We’re working on tying the brand into gambling, rather than going for straight-up poker,” he said. “You could gamble, say, to win the ultimate money-can’t-buy lifestyle of a superstar.”

Now imagine this in the US. As video from mobile cameras improves, imagine being able to submit clips for shows like “America’s Funniest Home Videos” from your cell? What if you could send in your auditions for reality shows like The Real World or even American Idol through MMS?

Can’t travel to Memphis to do the audition in person? Send an MMS clip into the show and hope that it sticks out. It’s better than no chance at all.

There’s so many videos online spreading virally through services like YouTube and Google Video - I’m surprised a television show hasn’t tried to capitalize on it. Just collect videos through MMS and throw together a show with the best of them. Have people vote for the best through SMS, and give the winner a coupon for a free McGriddle or something.

G4TV are you listening?