October 21, 2007 | Be the first to comment
On the eve of CTIA, Walt Mossberg in the Wall Street Journal and Mike Elgan in PC World both call for more unlocked phones.
Posted by: Jason
Categories: Mobile Market, Public Policy
October 17, 2007 | 1 Comment
My first Mobile 2.0 was an overall positive experience. Thank you Mobile Monday and The Open Group.
The organizers of the event, Daniel Appelquist, Mike Rowehl, Rudy de Waele and Peter Vesterbacka, did an excellent job of pulling together a veritable Who’s Who of mobile into an intimate, cohesive, and on-schedule performance. While the venue was standing room only, the approachable setting and laid-back atmosphere of the community allowed me to ‘do business’ while enjoying the whole experience: Productive business networking, a plethora of perspectives on the mobile industry, and the chance to see and meet (in person) the forces that are driving change in our market. For the price, it was a bargain.
Photo by: Rudy de Waele
A number of blogs have done a very nice job of producing a general summary of the event agenda. Instead of that, I’m going to focus on a few highlights and key take-aways, followed with some thoughts for next year’s conference and ideas for improvement.
Highlights:
Final Thoughts:
Overall, it was a very well organized one-day conference, peppered with industry specialists, and heavy on bloggers, who were oftentimes blogging out loud. It was savvy, down-to-earth, and light hearted, with high-level discussions covering the major topics of today. However, there were a few things that I think could improve the event for next year.
Posted by: Dan
Categories: Mobile Market
October 17, 2007 | 1 Comment
Steve Jobs just announced on the Apple blog that Apple will release an SDK for the iPhone in February, subject to some form of digital signing scheme (like Symbian Signed).
We hope that this isn’t limited to dashboard widgets. We hope that all we have to do to get an application signed is to prove that it is not malicious or harmful to the network (as opposed to getting commercial approval from Apple and/or AT&T). Assuming this is the case, it’s another important step towards open access.
Posted by: Jason
Categories: Mobile Market, Phones
October 15, 2007 | 3 Comments
Presidential primaries are drawing near and pollsters are dialing up homes from New York to Los Angeles to test which way the political wind is blowing. But who is picking up the phone?
(more…)
Posted by: Dan
Categories: Mobile Market, Featured
October 13, 2007 | Be the first to comment
We saw the HTC poster outside a branch of Phones4Free on Baker Street in London. The iPhone is not yet for sale in the UK, so this is a case of getting your retaliation in first.
Nokia is more subtle.
Posted by: Jason
Categories: Mobile Market
October 11, 2007 | 60 Comments
Two of us just received a notice from Verizon Wireless about CPNI. CPNI stands for Customer Proprietary Network Information: our call records, essentially. What numbers we called, how often, how long we spent on the phone, and how much it cost us. (It does not include our own names, numbers, or addresses.)
Verizon wants to share this data with third parties, and of course they need our permission: “you have a right, and we have a duty, under federal and state law, to protect the confidentiality of your CPNI.”
But that duty only goes so far: “Unless you provide us [Verizon Wireless] with notice that you wish to opt out within 30 days of receiving this letter, we will assume that you give the Verizon Companies the right to share your CPNI with the authorized companies as described above.”
Posted by: Jason
Categories: Mobile Market, Public Policy, Featured
August 31, 2007 | 4 Comments
It took much longer than we expected, but there are now at least four reported solutions for unlocking an iPhone, two of them requiring software only. (Apple and AT&T needn’t worry about techniques that demand a soldering iron.)
Several people have claimed that these hacks, though obviously bad for AT&T, are good for Apple, because Apple gets to sell more iPhones.
Wrong.
In return for exclusivity, Apple has negotiated a share of the monthly service revenue - up to 10% by some accounts. The iPhone starts at $499, and Apple’s margin on the initial sale may be 50%, or $250. Let’s assume the average iPhone bill is $100 per month (about twice the national average). 10% of $100 per month on a two-year contract is $240, and Apple’s margin on that revenue is near 100%. That would be enough to double Apple’s profit on the sale of the phone. And why stop at two years? How many years have you owned an iPod? (more…)
Posted by: Jason
Categories: Mobile Market, Featured
August 10, 2007 | 2 Comments
Nokia have a long-stated goal of capturing 40% of the worldwide market for cell phones. The biggest obstacle has been the US. US carriers have tight control over their market, as I may have pointed out before, and they are not about to give the farm away to some Finnish former footwear factory. In the last quarter, Nokia sold just 4 million handsets in the US, far behind Motorola, Samsung, and LG, and down 21% year-over-year.
That makes it all the more remarkable that Nokia are very close to achieving their goal of 40% of the global market. In Q2 they hit 38%; how?
Posted by: Jason
Categories: Mobile Market
July 12, 2007 | 9 Comments
If you work in the Internet industry, you are familiar with the closest thing we have in America to a pure free market: countless competitors, zero barriers to entry, easy access to capital, and prices that drop so fast that sometimes we can’t find anything to do with the capital.
Most other industries are regulated to some extent, with both good and bad results. Take agriculture. Most people favor laws that make their food safe, but only Big Food and a few midwestern States love the Farm Bill. (If reading this in Europe, think Common Agricultural Policy.)
The cell phone market is unusual because it would not exist without enlightened regulation. Very early in the history of radio, people recognized that spectrum is scarce, a shared resource that requires some kind of collective oversight. The system they chose is that the people own it and the government parcels it up and leases it to private companies for different purposes: TV, radio, mobile phone service etc. (1)
The cell phone industry wouldn’t exist if smart regulators hadn’t carved out room for it in 1974. There are more than two carriers in the US because smart regulators made room for more in 1993, and banned the incumbents from the auction. But we are almost out of spectrum suitable for mobile phones.
Next year the government is selling off the electromagnetic equivalent of beachfront property - spectrum that happens to be perfect for cell phone service. It’s available because the government is taking it back from TV broadcasters who no longer need it. Because spectrum is so scarce, this may be the last chance we’ll get for a generation to increase competition in the cell phone market and to experiment with new ways of managing spectrum.
I’m one of those who believes that the mobile phone market ought to work more like the Internet market. I don’t have to ask Verizon DSL for permission to attach a computer to their network; why do I have to ask Verizon Wireless for permission to attach a phone to theirs? In the entirely new market for mobile applications and content, I don’t think that the law should protect companies as big as Verizon Wireless from competition with companies as small as Skydeck. Therefore I support some form of open access rules for the 700 MHz auction. I was honored to be invited to testify to Congress this week on the subject. My testimony is above; the entire hearing is archived here.
Why go to Congress? Because when it comes to mobile data, we don’t get to choose between regulations and no regulations. We can campaign for the regulations that we want or we can stay away from DC and let Verizon and AT&T write regulations for us.
It’s also because the Internet has changed the rules of debate. Ideas that were once discussed only in closed rooms we now debate online. We don’t just speak through canned quotes in press releases, we write blogs. If we’re prepared to say what we think on our blogs, then we ought to be prepared to go and say it in DC. And what we say in DC can now be heard around the world, because of sites like YouTube.
People in the Internet industry never understood the old rules, the game of politics that the telcos have played so well for over a hundred years. But we understand the new rules far better than they do. We should take advantage of that.
***
Full Disclosure: Skydeck believes that every company in the wireless data market would benefit from open access rules, so we support those principles as a company. But I did not testify on Skydeck’s behalf. Nothing that we are working on requires a change in the law, and it will be at least four years before a network gets built out and application developers benefit from this auction. We also reserve the right to speak through canned quotes in press releases in the future.
(1) New technologies like software-defined radio could in theory make much more efficient use of spectrum by allowing any transmitter-receiver pair to take up any unoccupied channel. But most engineers doubt that the technology is ready, and dismantling the current system would be like seizing all the property in Manhattan and redistributing it: unlikely.
Posted by: Jason
Categories: ThisIsBroken, Mobile Market, Public Policy
June 14, 2007 | 4 Comments
Once every radio used transistors, we stopped saying Transistor Radio. Once every TV had a color screen, we stopped saying Color TV. And now that every phone is smart, we can stop saying smartphone. In fact the sooner we stop, the better, since unlike transistor radio and color TV, the term smartphone confuses everybody.
‘Smartphone’ started off meaning a phone that could do something - anything - beyond making a phone call and sending a text message. The Nokia 9000 Communicator and the pdQ were freakishly smart, but Sprint called the NeoPoint NP1000 (left) a smartphone because it had a WAP browser and its black and white screen was larger than normal. That set the bar pretty low.
It is ten years since these phones came to market, and today almost every new phone in the world has a built-in camera, a color screen, an HTML browser, a calendar and address book that you can sync with your desktop, and can download a wide range of games and applications. Every phone is smart.
But surely some phones are smarter than others? This is where it starts to get confusing. One phone may be more powerful or capable than another, but it could be on any of a dozen different measures: my phone may have a 3.2 MP camera, but yours may be better for instant messaging.
Posted by: Jason
Categories: Mobile Market
