Mobile pizza

Google's Open Automotive Alliance and the Internet of Things

We used to have a dystopian view of how the Internet would reshape our lifestyle: picture teenagers trapped in their bedrooms lost in cyberspace. Fortunately, things have turned out differently because mobile phones have taken the Internet everywhere. We have Apple and Google to thank if our teenagers are now out and about snapping Instagram pics rather than glued to their chairs - the former for showing the way with iPhone and the latter for making it accessible to everyone with Android.

Mobile phones are however just the beginning. We are now watching the Internet reach into our homes and cars. 

 

It started with beautifully designed niche players, like Nest (for the home) and Zubie (for the car).  Big players like British Gas, Mercedes and Ford have already got involved, offering more integrated, but closed, solutions for smart homes and connected cars. If the Internet of Things is going to have its own 'iPhone moment', it is likely to emerge from this space.

 

We are now seeing the beginning of a different space: yesterday's announcement of the Open Automotive Alliance brings Android and its Google-controlled open model to the connected car. Just a few weeks earlier, the Linux Foundation announced the formation of the AllSeen Alliance to foster the development of an open ecosystem for the Internet of Things. With LG, Sharp and Panasonic among its founding members, the initiative will clearly begin from the connected home.

 

While I expect companies like Nest, Tesla or British Gas to deliver the first wave of truly useful and widely adopted connected services, these and other open initiatives are likely to take off even earlier than Android did in the smartphone race because convenience and utility increase exponentially with every additional connected device and, at least in Andoid's case, they already have a thriving development community.

Mobile World Congress - the future was there

 “Non ho visto niente di nuovo” [I haven’t seen anything new] – complained my old Italian friend as we were sipping a quick coffee at one of the Mobile World Congress’ bars. It was his first time at the Barcelona event and he had spent the previous day and a half walking around the 8 giant halls that make up the exhibition.

It’s true: these days it is difficult to walk around MWC and bump into something completely new and surprising, because you may have read about it online, or because there is so much to see. I pointed out that what really matters at MWC is the fact that everyone who cares about mobile is likely to be there, so new trends and interesting products are likely to come up in the hundreds of conversations one has over the week.

So one has to start by filtering out the amazing volume of noise at the congress & exhibition. Here are a few of my filters for 2013:

• It’s not about the devices anymore – the HTC One and the Xperia Z stood out as the best new Android devices, Nokia looked good both at the high & lower range and Motorola had little to show, but I didn’t sense much excitement about any of the above. The point is that they are all getting better at industrial design, the OSs are maturing and smartphone performance is impressive. Innovation will come from elsewhere.

• It’s not even about the OSs – the big players didn’t have a high profile at MWC, raising much speculation about the reasons behind it. Apple never make the trip to Barcelona, Google were satisfied with throwing the best party of the week, Microsoft didn’t go beyond taking over an entire hotel and Blackberry… I guess they decided to focus on their BB10 announcement. The general feeling I got is that the battle lines between ecosystems are now drawn: we know who the leaders are and who’s struggling to follow; they each have their strengths and weaknesses and will battle it out for a while.

 So, where was the future of mobile? Here are a few hints:  

• Intel’s perceptual computing – none of it was new, but it points to how voice control, movement tracking and gestures are quickly becoming mainstream;
• Wifi & NFC connected devices were everywhere, like the lovely GoPro, wireless speakers and NFC check-ins - the phone can talk to almost everything around you;
• Mozilla are going to have an app store - so maybe web standards and apps can coexist;
• Cloud services are better integrated, like Dropbox’s dual-account implementation on Galaxy devices;
• In-car mobility was more in evidence than ever, including Ford’s stand and Mercedes Benz’s Drive Kit Plus;
• Connected Home demos were of course also at every stand, from Sony and Samsung to AT&T and Vodafone.

 They all point to the most exciting take out from MWC: that mobile is already moving beyond the smartphone and towards a point where ‘mobile’ will be everything and everywhere, but no longer about phones:

1. The smartphone is where the real innovation is going to be for a while, as a hub for connected sensors (think GoPro), devices (like Nest or your TV) and cloud services;
2. In this world, apps will make more sense than ‘pages’ irrespective of whether they are built on native or web technologies;
3. The phone itself will however disintegrate into its parts – why carry storage if connectivity is always available? Why carry a screen if you can connect to one everywhere you go? Maybe you'll just carry an NFC sim to prove your identity and a 4G dongle for connectivity on the go.

Comments are welcome.

Cross-screen applications - Momo Athens, 22 October 2012

Yesterday evening I was one of the speakers at Momo Athens, all talking around the theme of cross-screen applications, aka 2nd screen. 

My presentation was on live participation: the way digital can bring people together around an event. It's not the only use case for 2nd screen applications, but it is an old favourite of mine.

The presentation featured some Future Platforms works, from the Ghost Detector to Roulette Cricket and the 2011 Glastonbury apps, mixed with milestones like Big Brother, Smule's Sonic Lighter, Million Pound Drop, the F1 companion app and Zeebox.

A few key points:

• Consoles, mobile and web TV boxes will drive the first wave of innovation
• Fragmentation is a distraction - there's no denying it, but strong propositions can already shine through
• Participation needs events - producers, brands and OS/OEMs can join broadcasters in reaching audiences over IP TV
• Switching from passive viewing to participation is still too cumbersome - in fact participation may only really take off once most people use apps, be it specific titles or generic TV guides, to select and view broadcast content
• New live participation formats will make you feel like you are part of something bigger, in the company of like-minded people, but still values as an individual

Sofia Svanteson from Ocean Observations talked about their service design work with telecoms and other organisations. Eurosport, for their sins, were an example of siloed digital channels. 

For me, the most interesting message in her presentation was that a bad customer experience is not just the result of poor design, but also of the organisation's failure to think through the necessary changes in the 'back office'.

Andreas Constantinou, from Vision Mobile, then gave the kind of market review you would expect from one of the people behind the Mobile Industry Atlas. I liked his OS vs Screens grid and agree that mobile companion apps remain the stronger cross-screen opportunity at present. 

The evening didn't stop there, like at most Momo's. It was followed by calls for local startups to engage in awards and incubators, and by talks about Webinos, a cross-platform application framework, partly based on node.js, that's worth keeping an eye on: it's an open-source project, has very credible partners already involved, and some early results to show.  As a widget-based runtime, it cannot however get into the App Store, and its ability to elegantly handle UI across devices remains to be seen.

Native vs. Html5 - why native won

This evening’s Mobile Monday London witnessed the once-a-year battle between native and Html5 – a topic that comes up whenever mobile is discussed and that deserves enough time to play out the arguments.

This year, in a significant swing from last year’s equivalent debate, native came out on top. Why is that?

First, let’s summarise the key arguments:

• Native is better because it gives you access to a massive audience, especially if you are an unknown brand. I don’t really buy this argument because discovery within app stores is a challenge more than an advantage – the days of app stores acting as your key marketing channel are long gone
• Through app stores, native gives you access to easy payment mechanics. I think this true for many sectors (e.g. game publishing, subscription services), but not universal (retailers and established brands can happily cope without it)
• Html5 is better because it is open, not locked into any walled garden and at the mercy of the app store key holder. This is a complex point that would deserve its own essay. In summary, I would argue that even in industries like betting, that risk may be worth taking if the reward is a significant market share over the next couple of years
• Html5’s promise of build-once, deploy everywhere is a myth because users of different operating systems expect different experiences. I only buy this argument if businesses are launching Html5 apps that are pretending to be native apps; an Html5 app should look and behave like a smarter mobile site and needn’t comply with the platform UI
• Native apps will always give you finer control over the experience, deeper access to device APIs and better performance. I don’t think anyone would argue against that, but the question is always going to be whether they are worth the additional investment of building and managing multiple applications.

In summary, none of the points above would sway me one way or the other, unless my business relied on app store billing or the app required native performance and APIs.

What made me come off the fence and lean towards native can be summarised with one word that was mentioned today: fragmentation.

The strongest argument for Html5 – the one that fuelled the hype – is the idea that you can build your app and get it running across all mobile devices.  While there wasn’t enough time to play out the argument this evening, I think that our industry has realized that browser and operating system implementations create their own fragmentation, making Html5 more brittle than one would expect.

On the other hand, Apple and Google put a lot of work into helping native apps cope with different OS versions and screen resolutions. What’s more, developers who have been working across multiple platforms have evolved techniques to share more code between app versions, reducing the duplication of effort when supporting multiple platforms. 

The result is that a well designed native iOS app, followed quickly by an Android version, deliver the best value for money across most segments.

 

 

It’s a long journey for the Travel industry

Last Wed I was in sunny Dubai, speaking at the Arabian Travel Market conference.  

The format worked well: 3 speakers, about 20 minutes each, followed by a panel discussion moderated by Paul Richer.  For a start, it gave me the chance to meet Paul and the 2 fellow speakers: Debbie Hindle from Four bgb and Giles Longhurst from Frommers.

Debbie talked about how the travel industry should approach social networks. A few points I picked out:

• Good on her for showing some data that was specific to the Arabian market – in particular the fact that Facebook have a higher penetration in the UAE than in the US
• The importance of photography in social networks – and consequently the opportunity that hotels, airlines and tour operators have in exploiting their existing pictures
• The importance of engaging with travel bloggers not as journalists, but more as publishers – individuals who may have a very intimate relationship with part of your audience, are going to be involved in the long-terms and may well have commercial interests in a close relationship

Giles covered both social and mobile, but from the perspective of a content owner who has been creating digital services for the travelling consumer. He shared some interesting data, so I intend to go and unpick his presentation. Here are the few nuggets I noted down:

• Social media, Content and Mobile development are the top areas where the travel industry is expecting to increase investment in 2012
• In-destination services, i.e. how tourists are supported once they have reached their destination, is full of untapped opportunities that mobile can now unlock
• The lowering cost barrier for smartphones doesn’t just lead to the exponential growth in the audience you can reach, but it also means that you are no longer addressing an exclusive club – your mobile audience will include cost-conscious individuals

 Giles also made a very good point during the panel discussion, relevant to the mobile web – mobile apps debate: if your service is likely to be used 2-4 times a year, then you’d better go for a mobile site. I completely agree, although I would also look at it the other way around: can I create an experience that will keep my audience engaged more than 2-4 times a year, so that I will be top of mind when they are ready to travel? 

My presentation was about the choices behind mobile development. I used our recent work for Lastminute.com to illustrate the importance of user experience when it comes to mobile:

• Convenience
• Playfulness
• Usability & speed

I then looked at the key considerations one has to make when investing in mobile.  It is a tricky balance:

• On one hand you need to consider the cost of reaching multiple platforms, supporting the application in the long run and getting your back-end infrastructure into a shape;
• On the other hand, one should not underestimate the importance of the user experience you deliver.

The recommendation is to have a presence on the mobile web as well as in app stores. I showed how our clients in the travel sector (Lastminute.com, Rough Guides, Malaysia Airlines, DeVere Hotels) have in many cases built a solid smartphone-optimised site and have then created apps to serve their highest value segments.  The numbers also agree: a significant percentage of people use mobile when they research, purchase and ‘consume’ travel services, with many of them using an app for part of the journey and the mobile web for other parts.

The closing point was about the wider context around mobile. As it becomes an increasingly significant channel, it cannot be developed in a silo. Organisations will need to have a clear understanding of how it fits in the overall customer journey and how it will need to be supported by their IT infrastructure.

 The fact that the 3 of us covered, in about 90 minutes, two topics like Social & Mobile, which could easily justify a conference on their own right, is an indication of where the travel industry is at present. As Vikram Singh pointed out in a later session, many hotels and tour operators don’t even have a presentable mobile site, let alone anything more sophisticated. 

There was a lot of talk about mobile and social across all the presentations I saw, but not as much action as I would have expected.  The numbers tell us that the audience is already there, so the travel industry needs to get a move on or risk getting disrupted in the same way music and publishing have been disrupted.

Mobile World Congress 2012

Another year, another Mobile World Congress closing its gates.

For those who haven’t yet had the pleasure of attending this once-a-year mobile industry meet-up, you should know that it is so huge that the best way of really hearing what’s going on is to follow it online.  No point in walking miles to hit all the stands.

The point of being here is that you get to catch up with the rest of the industry around the Fira, at fringe events and at the parties around town (Helen Keagan’s Swedish Beers above all). So what were people talking about?

Mobile payments struck a chord.  Facebook’s announcement that they want to solve the mobile payments problem was the main highlight: app stores will continue to have the upper hand when it comes to micropayments until there are alternatives that are global and just as seamless.

Paypal joined in,with their own declaration of intent. They also added a data point: they are expecting $7bn worth of mobile payments in 2012.

While the big guns try and solve a problem that should have been sorted ages ago, the mobile industry is already setting the next challenge: NFC payments. Visa announced their partnership with Samsung for the Olympics and with Vodafone for the Vodafone Mobile Wallet.  It feels like it is just the beginning – surely device fragmentation will step in and hold back full rollout for a few years.

I may have been talking to the wrong people, but the Html5 vs. Native debate seems to have become more rational.  Facebook, again, brought it into light by announcing their involvement in Html standards evolution – effectively recognition of the fact that Html5 is still short of the build-once-deploy-everywhere promise – something we have talked about a lot.  It is still the future though, and the Telefonica+Mozilla partnership shows that powerful players are behind it.

I didn’t really look at many devices. Every year needs a tech first, and I would give that to the Galaxy Beam – mobiles with projectors have been promised for years and it’s good to see someone mad enough to make it happen. On the downside, I didn’t hear many positive comments about the award-winning Nokia 808 PureView – is a 41MP camera more likely to beat the iPhone than a projector beam?

The one theme that stood out when looking at devices was the idea of cross-media / cross-platform experiences. Sony were showing off multiplayer gaming with console vs. smartphone, Microsoft showed a preview of Windows 8 seamlessly working across devices and there was a lot of talk about 2nd-screen experiences. Designing and executing these kind of experiences is probably the most exciting challenge in our industry.

Last but not least – the OS war. Apple were not here, as usual. Still odd, given that they currently define where the mobile industry is at, in terms of audience and revenue. They at least organized a party and were (possibly) bothered enough to time their iPad3 pre-announcement with Eric Schmidt’s keynote. Android was everywhere – again, no surprise there. I think that Nokia & Microsoft did well out of it: they have a good product, Skype is now on WP7 (beta), they get some sympathy for the mountain they have to climb, and Windows 8 impressed everyone.

 

Brand Perfect Tour - Berlin

I was kindly invited to help with the Brand Perfect Tour event in Berlin yesterday. I wasn't quite sure of what to expect going into it. We had done a bit of prep for the afternoon's workshops, but I couldn't picture what delegates would have got out of the day.

Now I know.

The telling moment for me was when I was dragged out of the post event drinks to make my way to the airport. I didn't resent it so much because of the (excellent) Prosecco I was leaving behind, but because I was watching people from different disciplines making new connections, exchanging notes and imagining new possibilities.

I think that the buzz was created by two themes that ran through the day, starting with  Aral's opening keynote and replayed across all of our contributions as speakers and facilitators:

1) Do not settle for mediocrity, however tempting. Coherent visuals, behaviour and functionality are what will make your brand stand out;
2) New processes are needed if brands are to achieve that. It's about collaboration, and thinking of your mobile presence as a product, rather than a project.

So thanks to Monotype for creating a forum where mobile experts can mix with brand and marketing practitioners, sharing evidence and techniques rather than sales pitches. Looking forward to the next event in London!

 

Radio1 Big Weekend Retrospective

Richard Morland at the BBC has just posted a very open and frank report of how the Radio1 Big Weekend web app we built for him performed on the field. To summarise it:

• People seem happy to share their location when at public events and are pretty clear about privacy implications
• If you are creating some mobile tech for a live event, remember that things do not work as well as they do in central London (or Brighton in our case) and also make sure you have tech support during the event, because surprising things will happen
• Checking in to a gig, rather than just a generic stage/location, increased the bragging potential of people's posts and also drove likes & comments from friends

On a more personal note, this is the first time I see my name in the end credits of a video - thanks to the BBC team.

Creating the Check In app for Radio 1’s Big Weekend

Blogging about a project just before its go-live date, especially when it is centred around a single live event, feels a little scary - I hope we are not jinxing it by doing so.  It’s however worth doing it now because this is something of an experiment and a learning experience, so what better time to share than when you’re sprinting for the finish line?

The experiment is about using Facebook’s Places in the context of a live event - in this case Radio 1’s Big Weekend. There’s more background on the project on the BBC’s blog.

The process that got us there was an interesting one. Using Facebook Places via the new API and checking into gigs rather than physical places wasn’t something we had done before or could research, given that I guess very few outside of Facebook would have had the chance to play with it. We still had to commit to an unmovable deadline and a fixed budget.  

We got there by being truly agile and thanks to the BBC’s team’s readiness to trust us with it.

So what do I mean when I say truly agile? We have been running Scrum for a few years, so this project was no different to many others we have run: a backlog, sprints, daily standups, iterative development.  It however worked out particularly well because of the way we prioritised our work:

• We started by developing the core functionality - getting line-up data into the system and talking to Facebook’s APIs
• Styling and copy were applied slightly later on and evolved through the project
• We identified features (stories in Scrum talk) that the BBC could have done without, if it came to it, so we got to a release candidate a lot earlier than planned
• While we ended up delivering most of those, having a minimum spec web app ready to release did mean that we were able to slot in higher priority and unexpected tasks into the project without taking the risk of completely missing our deadlines

The most significant ‘unexpected task’ was related to the check in process. Facebook users are effectively checking into an artist URL that also includes Facebook metadata. The original plan was to point to the BBC’s website URLs for each artist. As the project progressed, it became clear that coordinating the necessary changes on the website would have taken too long. We therefore ended up implementing a more complex system of redirects that does however give us the advantage of better tracking and more control over the user experience.

Was it all smooth and perfect? Of course not. We hadn’t appreciated the level of detail required to satisfy the BBC’s information security requirements; if we had, we would have planned for more upfront technical architecture work.  While all parties showed plenty of flexibility, we were still operating under a fixed price contract, so we had the inevitable tense conversations over change requests vs. expected features.

All in all though, we are very happy with what we have done and we are looking forward to the weekend to watch it all play out. So particular thanks to Richard and Robert at the BBC, much appreciation for Simon’s support at Facebook (great dev support guys make a massive difference when working on new platforms) and well done to the team: Jon Markwell & Chris Williams on development, Aegir Hallmundur on design, Paul Welsh on QA and Cori Samuel keeping it all running smoothly.

Highlights from The Master Switch

These are my un-edited highlights from reading "The Master Switch" by Timothy Wu. I'm hoping to write an article on the book soon.

Just to give it some context, the book looks at the history of revolutions in the communications industry as a way of analysing where our current Internet revolution may be heading. A great read.

“Selling radio sets—the old revenue model—was a good if limited business, for ultimately few households would need more than one radio every few years. But advertising revenues could expand indefinitely—or so it seemed then”

“academic studies suggested that films were dangerous to children”

“The denial that Armstrong had in fact invented FM was, if not the last straw, then very nearly the last. A man’s decision to end his life is inevitably a complex one and cannot easily be blamed on any one person or event. [...] He was nearly bankrupted, as the lawsuit with RCA consumed the once great fortune from his earlier patents. [...] The story of FM radio gives some taste of what television’s inventors were in for, and a sense of David Sarnoff’s genius in the art of industrial combat. [...] He was a man who proved it is possible to defy both Joseph Schumpeter’s doctrine of creative destruction and, as he turned RCA into a television company, the adage that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks.”

“Films are not screwdrivers”

“Within two years of the iPhone launch, relations between Apple and Google would sour as the two pursued equally grand, though inimical, visions of the future. [...] Steve Jobs accused Google of wasting its time in the mobile phone market; a new Google employee named Tim Bray in 2010 described Apple’s iPhone as “a sterile Disney-fied walled garden surrounded by sharp-toothed lawyers.... I hate it””

“these firms and their allies are fighting anew the age-old battle we’ve recounted time and time again. It is the perennial Manichaean contest informing every episode in this book: the struggle between the partisans of the open and of the closed, between the decentralized and the consolidated visions of a proper order. But this time around, as compared with any other, the sides are far more evenly matched.”

“Like all centralized systems, Jobs’s has its merits: one can easily criticize its principles yet love its products. Computers, it turns out, can indeed benefit in some ways from a centralizing will to perfection [...]”

“Apple’s long-standing adherence to closed design left the door wide open for the Microsoft Corporation and the many clones of the IBM PC to conquer computing [...]”

“The first major exercise was in blocking Skype, the voice-over-IP firm whose software lets users call each other over the Internet for free, eating into AT&T’s long distance margins.”

“And just as our addiction to the benefits of the internal combustion engine led us to such demand for fossil fuels as we could no longer support, so, too, has our dependence on our mobile smart phones, touchpads, laptops, and other devices delivered us to a moment when our demand for bandwidth—the new black gold—is insatiable. Let us, then, not fail to protect ourselves from the will of those who might seek domination of those resources we cannot do without. If we do not take this moment to secure our sovereignty over the choices that our information age has allowed us to enjoy, we cannot reasonably blame its loss on those who are free to enrich themselves by taking it from us in a manner history has foretold.”