Mobile Maturing - Are You really Ready?

Is 2011 the year of Mobile? This is a question that so many people ask. I have to say I am not quite convinced on either side. In fact I think the question has become rather irrelevant.

Mobile and Social are already here. We are however still struggling to get good at both of them. And good we must get. There is a nice series in WIT drawn from a series of discussions between Siew Hoon and Gerry Samuels Doing it "Bloody Well" and understand who wins - Supplier or Intermediary - are great discussion pieces. If WIT is not on your regular reading list - you are missing a treat.

Getting good at Mobile is not a trivial exercise. There is a lot of infrastructure that is frankly not in place to make it easy. Therefore early providers are having to bootstrap solutions to get the end to end services running. Regulatory and service level functions are scant and frankly the performance of the networks and devices together SUCK. Publishers are complaining that they dont find it easy. For sure they are not adopting fast enough.

One key issue that is decidedly a constraint on Mobile Commerce are the payment systems. There is a plethora of options and the market is just beginning to pick up.  The battle for the mobile wallet is a royal one.

There is the huge battle going on between the OS systems on the small aperture devices.  You have Android split into Pure and Honeycomb. You have the Apple with its iOS. You have a bunch of also ran players - Microsoft, Nokia (now moving with MS), RIM (About to exit the tablet space by slashing the price of the Playbook), HP (not sure if they are in or out at the moment). Let's not forget the App vs Browser battle.  An  astonishing statistic is from HP who projects there will be 25 million apps by 2020.

Underneath it all there is a multi-billion dollar battle over patents. This is enough to make ones head spin.

But allow me to put a little perspective on things. While I think it is a bit premature to declare victory for mobile, there is a very interesting trend. The Gen Y/Millenials are not worrying about the problems of infrastructure. It either works or it doesn't. Unlike the Baby Boomers (like me!) who struggle with the small apperture of the devices concerned - they are quite comfortable in using their mobiles to do a wide number of things concurrently.

My conclusion on this? Mobile is darn hard. The traditional gatekeepers in travel commerce are nowhere near prepared for mobile. The suppliers need to break free and stop using traditional processes to address mobile solutions. AND most importantly you have to use every trick in the book to get the consumers to start pulling through adoption. Traditional ways of pushing products into the marketplace and hoping for the best frankly are useless. If I hear one more person scream that their investment in mobile has been wasted - I think I will eat my hat. It's the adoption not the features stupid!!!

Travelport Tiptoes Into Mobile in ZA

One of my spies in South Africa alerted me to the latest from Travelport there,
Travelport Mobi - seems like a nice basic app for travelers.

I thought you would like to know.

Cheers

Expedia does a Mini Google in Buying Mobiata

Mobiata who develops both its own suite of Mobile apps and provides a number of white label tools has agreed to be acquired by Expedia.

So while I may be stretching the scale issue - there is a strong analogy between this acquisition and Google+ITA.

2011 will be the year of the mobile when we see adoption but this is the year when the deals are being done.

This is a significant one. The logic for Expedia buying Mobiata is not just in the pool of talent as Dara put it yesterday but in the breadth of the platform and the existing relationships with the infrastructure and the customers they have. It shows that Expedia was clearly wrong footed on Mobile.

So this makes mobile travel more interesting.

As a shameless plug (not something I do on a regular basis) I am part of a consortium who own the most appropriate URL - ping me if you would like to know more.

"Who Do You Love?" Or Trust...

That old Bo Diddly song was stuck in my head the other day. Actually the Geoerge Thorogood version. And I have been thinking more and more about the essence of Trust. It just amazes me in Travel how much consumers are expected to trust and are constantly let down.

And then I read two stories from emarketer. Both related to Trust. The first one related to consumers perspectives with regard to trusting Facebook. Interestingly they were more concerned with the commercialization than the abuse of their personal data.

The second item from the same day by emarketer was on the acceptance of mobile marketing messages. Today we are bombarded with the "year of the mobile" messages from interested parties. Yet the first truly mobile commerce generate - the Millenials are none to happy about being marketed/spammed via their mobile devices.

This doesn't bode well for people expecting to make squillions of dollars by sending messages (unsolicited) to mobiles - smart or dumb.

So dear friends - think very carefully about what you are doing before you go down that path...

Cheers

Apple! Time To Pay The Piper

A milestone in our society and culture occurred earlier this month. Apple became worth more than Microsoft. So now Redmond which used to be castigated as the Evil Empire is now 3rd behind Google and Apple.

Apple has largely arrived in its much vaulted position by avoiding such issues as security and integration into the corporate world. Here is a great article from Infoworld. (How I miss the print edition!)

Well - now it has to step up to that challenge and it better start do it pretty fast. So since I have your attention this far let me have my say on the subject of the iPhone.

I think it is an amazing piece of technology. But I have a very hard time with its model. Unlike the traditional players in the mobile space - they blazed a new model and have been very successful at it. All at the expense of the consumer.

Normally the network operator guys keep their revenues and the handset guys get paid a fee or sell direct. Mostly the former. Thus the network operator has been in control of the market. This was not good enough for Apple. The asked for AND managed to get it - a share of the network revenues from the first customer AT&T. In exchange AT&T got exclusivity. But the price was high. But Apple wasn't content with that - they wanted additional revenue. So they simply applied the iTunes model and created the App Store thereby creating an additional revenue stream.

And just to make sure that they MADE enough money - they ensured that the design of the network usage required additional data access for even basic services such as email and texting. Thus when you are online with your mobile device - the amount of network traffic can be high. Pity the poor people on the Pay as You go model billing schemes. But it is FAR worse if you roam into a different network. Then you pay $$$$ for network traffic. I have seen some staggering bills from people who roamed for just a short time in a foreign country.

Sloppy design by Apple makes this the default state rather than an option. So those Apps might be free to download or low cost but they can COST YOU BIG TIME. King Gillette is probably laughing his head off in the great pantheon of business ideas.

If you hear me speak at conferences - I call the iPhone the devil incarnate for this reason. (In fairness to Apple - Google's Android does much the same thing). I don't just stick with my crackberry because the device is better - no - its because I can manage the cost of the device AND the network.

So Apply - time to start playing nice and being a good corporate citizen. No more cavalier behavior.

Do you think they will listen to me? Naaaaa..........

Cheers

Nokia Buys Dopplr - Finally Mobile Gets Travel?

The leading mobile players are the handset guys and the networks.

Up till now they have disdained the travel market plumbing for the sexier applications such as music. However I have always believed that the real deployment of smart handsets would occur when the applications moved into being more generic.

Although there was a link between Dopplr and Nokia before (shall we just say it was family), the move is a smart one for Nokia. They are now staking a claim in the concept that the handset really is a PID - Personal Information Device. This makes the device a serious contender for the user's favorite service. Up till now Blackberry has been leading in this space with the delivery of most applications via the BB service.

The stunning success of Apple and the iphone has changed the paradigm. The vast number of user based applications is great but after a while you are bewildered with the array of choice and the support of these applications makes big demands on the user. Great and fun for now in a social context - but perhaps not so interesting in the "useful" category. I realize that I will be slammed by the faithful for this statement - but bear with me a little. I have watched a lot of iPhone users (from the original to the latest 2 versions) and you can see how the lack of some functionality hurts and the frustration of having too many different apps becomes counter productive. In essence the line "there is an application for that" is now replaced with "how the heck do I manage all that".

The silence of the network providers is stunning in all of this. The profitability of the mobile environment even after forking out all that money for 3G licenses remains almost obscene. However the network providers who have tried so desperately to avoid becoming just a pipe as the internet was for fixed line operators are not necessarily winning the war for the hearts and minds of the user. We are seeing higher churn rates in different countries where the networks have matured. I believe that the applications like Dopplr need to be offered by the networks and that the networks need to be far more involved in the PID services than they have in the past.

So SOME of Mobile gets Travel. When will Mobile really get Travel? I am hoping that it will be sooner rather than later.

Travel M-Commerce - Still Birth Pains

I am a fan of the whole idea of M-Commerce. Particularly how it can have applications for the whole Travel Category.However my enthusiasm is tempered by (now more than) 10 years of experience in trying to get Mobile Apps off the ground without any noticeable success.

So I was very interested in reading the latest M-Commerce Report by eMarketer.

In particular there are two contrasting elements to their study.

Travel was one of the highest categories of product that people SAID they would be willing to purchase via a mobile app. However there is a huge gap between the desire and the execution - early adopters don't even rank travel apps on their radar.

So we have a chicken and egg situation. Further the obstacles to success of M-Commerce are many and varied. Of these the largest percentage are not going to get solved - in my humble opinion - any time soon.

So take a look at the list the ones that consumers in the report detailed this is illustrated on the top here. However consider both the small sample size and the audience.

I spent much of the summer roaming around Asia Pacific and Europe testing 3G networks and interactions. (OK this was a by product of what I was doing - I really am not THAT sad - even though the SFR shop in St Gilles Croix de Vie was getting pretty sick of me by the end of August). I found a lot to commend it. The networks in general are now reliable and robust. But the applications are clearly lacking. So the red hot market at the moment is the marriage of the Netbook to a 3G network and the corresponding Carrier sponsored products. EG Lease a Netbook for X Euros a month and get the device and the data included.

Steve Jobs - not so secret - iTablet project will hope to capitalize on this trend when it emerges likely at CES or MacWorld in January 2010. But by its nature this is likely to be a further obstacle to the deployment of robust Mobile applications. Namely the splintered client side applications environment.

In the various projects I have undertaken on Mobile - I have found that the stumbling block has been both the technology (lack of ubiquity of Client side application environment), the commercial model of making money. (This was usually the greed of the Mobile Operators who refuse to share the data usage revenue or alternatively at the very least figure out a way not to penalize the application with a surcharge). We long ago figured out solutions to the other problems.

The promise of Android (and son of Android aka Chrome) as well as other multi-hardware platform services such as Windows Mobile, Linux and Symbian has all so far proved to be a figment of the developers imaginations.

However I remain hopeful that this will eventually sort itself out. But as you saw from my post yesterday about Skype on Blackberry - the proprietary nature of the vendors and the networks seems to be at the root cause of the issue. However I am not holding my breath in the short term... So I am still bearish on this regardless of the optimism of others such as PhocusWright on the subject.

Thank you and have a nice day.

Today's Cigarette is a Mobile Phone?

If any of you have had a chance to see the excellent series Mad Money - you see that most folks look very cool holding a cigarette. And a lot of them do it throughout the show. I love this stuff. Back when neckties were really thin, and women wore their hair up in tight buns, long before PC became a watch word... ah those were the days.

I have been considering the issue of frequency of usage of our respective devices. With the diminution of TV viewership and increasing time slicing by recording devices - I asked myself a question - what is the "non-physical sustenance" product that we touch more than any other?

Up till the early 1990s - there was no other product that was touched or consumed more than the Cigarette. My father was in the tobacco business all his life and he was a master marketeer of the product. He lived and breathed his company and his product creation. Today - it remains one of the top world brands. But its use has been superseded by what product?

Why the answer has to be the mobile phone of course. We touch it, we play with it, we use it, countless surveys have shown that if you were to be left with only one thing - it would be your mobile. (OK for Americans Cell Phone).

Here is some great research on how people use their phones and what they would like to use it for. I do suggest that before everyone rushes to create expensive and (in many cases completely useless) mobile applications - consider what people really want and then consider the reality of the medium.

Here is a link to the research: http://www.lightspeedresearch.com/pdf/lsr_pr_meandmymobile.pdf

While the research was primarily from a UK perspective - the study is in fact multi-country.

Worth the read.

Cheers

Travel Mobile's Achilles Heel

Mobile and Travel belong together. Natural and synergistic... all those wonderful buzz words that can apply - but it has an Achilles heel. The business model.

I am sure that I will be loudly roasted for taking this position but after 15 years of watching and in many cases trying to break through this Gordian Knot - I can assure you there is not an easy way to make this category a success. It remains stuck in the one place where it needs to be unstuck. The business model.

So what are the obstacles?

Is it the hardware?

Nope - we have some great smartphones and even regular phones that can do just about anything. Great Machines like the iPhone, the Sony C902, The Blackberry Bold and Storm, etc etc.

Is it the client side software?

Nope - smart people have written some great apps that do a whole load of things: Make bookings, Manage reservations, consolidate data, help with trip repair, etc etc

Is it the server side software?

Definitely not - there are some great applications, SaaS and conventional web services. There is a plethora of these out there. Perhaps too many!

Is it the network?

Nope - we have been able to do some incredible things using plain old SMS 140 character limit solutions. There is an issue of unreliable network performance but this will ultimately be resolved. It just doesnt hold up the services though. Using Wifi or Wimax is too unreliable at this stage because of the poor coverage.

So what the FUBAR is the problem?

It is simply that for many applications to work we need to have an "all you can eat model" for communications costs. It must be as easy and at least the same price as a service on the web. So there are too many mouths to feed and the carriers refuse to play ball with this. Google's Android concept should be better at enabling a possible way to leverage cost - but frankly I still don't yet see it. Perhaps Wimax might resolve this? Probably not. So what will work? Frankly it will be competition. Only when we have open access and open competition and both the FCC and the EU Commissions step up to the plate will we have something.

So I hope that the incoming FCC Commission Chairman and both EC ladies Viviane Reding (Information Society and Media) and Neelie Kroes (Competition) get their act together. Not in 2009 or even 2010.


Is there any hope for the future?

I am optimistic - but staying optimistic for 15 years takes either a stupid person or someone who is a few screws loose. I think I qualify in both categories. However for the short term - I will avoid making any near term projections because I don't think we are looking at any near term solution that will break through the current Mobile Operators gravy train. Their argument is that they invested Billions of Euros/Dollars in both the licenses and networks. Frankly that argument doesnt hold up since they already paid the money. Now they need to provide a low cost service that makes sense to the consumer community.

IF only they would see that by enabling a marquee application like Mobile Travel then they would move people to using mobile data services. But this is not happening.

So I am not holding my breath... but just maybe someone will surprise me. In the mean time I will continue to experiment and hope that someone figures it out.


What do you think?