Hugh Spear's Blog

Is the pendulum of popular support now going to start swinging away from Apple?

Back in 1994 when we started Dialogue with an SMS application called PageMail we gave ourselves three years before we were either acquired or out of business. Why? Well in those days the personal computer software world was controlled by Microsoft and the general view was that if you did something well and it was popular then Microsoft would either do it better and make it cheaper, or acquire you and your product. The result would be the same but you would be wealthier if you were acquired. 

We've lasted longer than 3 years partly because SMS didn't get as popular as soon in the US as elsewhere. We've also seen that Microsoft has become less important in the world and this is partly due to anti-trust lawsuits which have prevented them from having a stranglehold on the market. The most prominent of these was the one which prevented Microsoft from automatically installing Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system. 

Now we seem to be seeing the same approach coming along from Apple and threatening small groups of developers who just like Dialogue are just trying to create and sell innovative solutions to an embryonic market.

The advent of IOS 5 marks for me the stage at which the  world's support for Apple will start to weaken and it will be seen less as a force for good and more and more in the same light as we saw Microsoft at the height of its powers. 

I was one of many who applauded Apple for its pioneering iPhone. In one fell swoop it disrupted the mobile industry forever. Nothing demonstrates this more than a look at the once unbeatable market leader Nokia. Nokia has lost market share, lost its Finnish locus of control and lost its' operating system. 

I also applauded Apple's way of dealing with mobile operators who have always been in control of what went on at the handset. This control has not given us great usability nor great innovation. It has pretty much continued with a status quo. Apple pretty much single-handedly democratised the production of a better user experience.

It has been fantastic to see m0re and more handset manufacturers making devices which are as close to the look and feel of an iPhone as they can get without infringing upon Apple's intellectual property.

So all of this work by Apple has been a breath of fresh air to an industry which was set in it's ways. Apple was the new kid on the block, doing something different, frightening the old dinosaurs and we all loved them for it. I still have no sympathy for other handset manufacturers nor carriers who have had the resources to innovate but failed to. But in the background something less healthy was going on.  Apple was getting to enjoy its growing market share and it moved from the 'little guy' fighting the giants, to the 'big guy' who liked to throw his weight about. 

The first hints of this were the controls it placed around what Apps you could install and run on your iPhone. But we forgave them for that because there were so many Apps out there that we ignored the ones we missed. Then there was the very public denial of support for Flash on the iPhone. Again we forgave them for that because Adobe is big enough to take care of itself, and we've all suspected that Flash wasn't as stable as it needs to be.  But all the same we don't put up with this 'Big Brother' style control over what we use on our PCs.

Now we find that with IOS 5 Apple has included all kinds of new components, applications and services and has been accused on several fronts of cherry picking the best third party Apps and recreating these to be part of the Apple product set.

I love the idea of not needing to synchronise with a PC. Even with my MacBook Pro it takes 3 hours to sync my iPhone. It takes twice as long with my iPad so it has ceased to be a suitable solution. So moving iTunes to the cloud and synchronising over wi-fi is fantastic. But wasn't there a wi-fi sync App which was refused approval by Apple and ended up being a very successful App for jailbroken iPhones?  Also, moving iTunes to the cloud makes sense, but iCloud also provides all kinds of other document storage and synchronisation. This poses challenges to products like Dropbox and services like Flickr to compete.

iMessage goes down the same route. There are lots of Apps which merge instant messaging with SMS. One of the more popular is WhatsApp Messenger.  These Apps have had to work around all kinds of difficulties to provide a good product with a good user experience. They are all significantly challenged by Apple bringing out iMessage which is a closed App and doesn't have any obvious API access.

In a recent article, Tim Hanlon explores this idea of Apple putting App developers out of business even further. Sadly, he concludes that it's Apple's ball and they will decide what you do with it and for how long.

I guess we do all have to play Apple's game just as we once did with Microsoft. But there are starting to be the stirrings of anti-trust lawsuits against Apple now and at some point, if they are not careful, they will become the target of a lot more. 

Perhaps it is the natural order of things that empires whether they are technological or political eventually become too strong and people turn against them. It woud be a shame if this is now starting to happen with Apple. It probably won't stop me from using their products, but it will reduce my admiration for their business.

Mobile World Congress 2011 - take-aways

MWC 2011 Starters

This must be something like fourteen years of visiting this show in either Cannes or Barcelona and each time I try to justify the event to myself as something worth doing.  Some years the justification came from seeing the progress of the technology and trying to identify what we would need to do to keep up. Other years it was just to see which themes looked like dominating the industry.  Now it seems to be more the practical value of being able to meet with so many important contacts in one place during one week. I just hope that someone kept hold of the list of 'Next Steps'!

The items below are the things which I took away from the show this year. For me it was worth the time, cost and effort to attend, and I'm already looking forward to next year's show.

Maturation of Wholesale SMS supply

One of the two themes which for me seemed to re-emerge regularly during the week was the movement towards open cooperation between some of the larger and better established SMS Aggregators in the world.   There appeared to be agreement that worldwide SMS connectivity was becoming a regular requirement for many global businesses; and that the job of providing this was difficult to do successfully. There is now a core collection of companies that are already working together, have enough integrity to only promise what they can deliver and are poised to provide a global network of SMS connections.   Unfortunately, there are also a number of companies which damage the reputation of SMS aggregators by being less than honest about how they carry out their SMS routing and focussing on price without regard to service quality. My hope is that over the next year or so, we will see more transparency come to this market and that this will lead to some more sustainable and loyal revenue streams.

The need for an eco-system

This is the second theme which has become apparent in many areas of IT, but almost more so in mobile. One could argue that one of the primary reasons for the success of the iPhone is the quality of it's eco-system. iTunes for music, the App store for games and widgets to do almost any task. The simplicity of the purchasing experience which rewards developers, the huge industry of additional hardware which enhances the iPhone; from protective screen covers to high quality speaker systems.  The success which the iPhone brings to creative artists, application developers and hardware manufacturers means that anyone who wants to unseat the iPhone as the dominant smartphone has to do a lot more than just provide a cute handset.  

In the past the mobile networks thought that their role was to provide the eco-system of value added services and all they wanted out of a handset was something cute which had good signal strength and battery life.  The reality is that the mobile networks were not good enough or focussed enough to provide an eco-system which worked for all the participants, and this has enabled Apple and to a lesser extent Google to step in. 

The great news is that Apple provides a fantastic case study for other's to follow if they want to achieve dominance in their own field.  Many at the show now recognise this, but they don't have Steve Jobs at hand so we will have to see how well they can learn from the iPhone and apply the lessons.

Top 5 Personal MWC 2011 Awards

My own personal awards for MWC 2011 are as follows.

1. Biggest distraction - CBOSS Girls.

Whatever CBOSS do seems less important than how their stand looks. Their stand is a white stage and on the stage stands attractive women wearing less than the February weather really required. Everyone seemed to have visited the stand and many seemed to linger, but no-one seemed to know anything about the company or its products, or if it has products. 

2. Biggest attraction LG Optimus.

The LG Optimus is billed as the worlds first 3D mobile phone. It is fair to say that there were some beta software glitches, but overall this was a fantastic device and one has to congratulate LG for innovation within the hardware and showing that there is more to the world than just an eco-system.  The games were better and the movies more engaging when shown in 3D. It even has a twin lense camera to enable users to make their own 3D movies. 

3. Best Story to overshadow the show - Nokia and Microsoft.

Coming just days ahead of the show this was always going to be the big story. I bet that the other handset manufacturers running Windows Mobile 7 were a bit miffed and it probably damaged their commercial prospects at the show.

But really this could be the most important story of the decade. It remains to be seen whether Microsoft can recreate the success it had with the Xbox rather than labour on through more and more iterations of Windows; and whether Nokia can concentrate on hardware and communications engineering and be a little less Finnish. But if these companies can pull it off then the world will be a better place. 

4. Best Buzzwords.

If you have an LTE Cloud Computing App that raises ARPU year on year and comes with its own eco-system then you have got it made.

5. Most conspicuous absence. Moble Content

Whatever did happen to mobile phone personalisation? My view is that this is now included in the handset eco-system. So it is purchased from iTunes or its equivalent, comes via an App or is just retrieved through a browser. The opportunities for independent vendors seem to be reducing.

 

 

envelos the 1 SMS pitch

As a regular listener to the Jason Calacanis podcast - This Week In StartUps, I have found myself intrigued by 'Shark Tank', a section of the show where an entrepreneur has 1 minute to pitch his business to Jason and his guest. After the pitch the chat-room rates both the pitch and the business idea.

It got me wondering whether my products would stand up to this kind of scrutiny, and I wondered whether I could actually do a pitch in this amount of time which would tell the listener what the product was, why it was useful, how I would get customers and how I would get revenue.

 

This is the result of my efforts.

"Although an SMS can be up to about 25 words in length, most people use less than half of that space. 

The reason? We're no good at using a phone keypad to type more than a short sentence. 

So what if you want send someone a long URL in an SMS, or how about directions to your office or a list of people coming to the meeting?

If you, like me, are someone who'd rather not spend all day typing long messages into your mobile phone, then you're someone who could use envelos.com. 

envelos is a website where you use your computer keyboard to type text messages and send them out. People receiving your SMS messages will think they came from your phone and they will reply to your phone. 

Business users of envelos can also get their own 2-way SMS number which they can use to keep fully tracked SMS conversations with staff, and customers.

You can buy SMS credits to use on envelos or you can use the SMS credits from your regular mobile phone plan. Either way you're going to be sending better messages". envelos - making the most of SMS!"

That is my effort for the 1 minute pitch. But now I want to take it one further and make it the 1 message pitch. Thats right, 160 characters. Here goes:-

Rather than using a handful of words for an SMS, use envelos.com to spread your news. envelos, is a fully featured, cost effective desktop SMS, productivity app

Finally, here is the Twitter pitch, 140 characters:-

Don't use just a handful of words in an SMS, use envelos to spread your news. Be more effective with messaging and save money at envelos.com

envelos is live at www.envelos.com

As mentioned in a previous entry Dialogue has re-created an easy to use SMS product from a decade ago called envelos. This product went live earlier today. I'm hoping we can get some customers during this early phase so we can get feedback on what is good and what could be better. So please check it out at www.envelos.com.