Leap Wireless is teaming with Pocket Communications to expand its footprint in South Texas in an apparent effort to primp for potential dance partners as the move toward consolidation continues in mobile. The companies said today that Leap will control a new joint venture that will acquire both companies’ licenses and operating assets in markets including San Antonio, Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley. Leap will own a 76 percent stake in the venture and will buy some of Pocket’s South Texas assets for about $38 million in cash before the deal closes, then will contribute to the business with its own related assets.
Pocket, a regional flat-rate service provider that also operates a network in New England, claims 320,000 customers in South Texas while Leap’s Cricket provides prepaid service to about 400,000 users in the region and 5 million nationwide. The companies believe the move will result in additional contribution to Leap’s OIBDA (operating income before depreciation and amortization) in the range of $50-$60 million within two years.
Notably, the deal includes a provision that forces Pocket to sell its stake in the joint venture to Cricket should Leap change hands. That’s a scenario that’s increasingly likely given that Leap has hired advisers to explore a sale or merger in the face of an increasingly brutal prepaid market. A tie-up with MetroPCS has been rumored recently, and the Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that Leap had reached out to both AT&T and Verizon Wireless. So like a lonely girl hoping someone will ask her to dance, Leap is doing everything it can to make itself a little prettier as the industry continues to move toward consolidation.
Skyhook Wireless today announced that Gowalla, the location-based social networking service, has added its Core Engine to its Android application for location results. Up until now, Gowalla officials have been disappointed with location-based apps on Android, but they say that’s changed.
“Location-aware social networking apps cannot succeed without reliable positioning results,” Kate Imbach, vice president of marketing at Skyhook Wireless, said in a statement announcing the deal acquisition. “Gowalla’s disappointment with Android location is a common frustration that can only be resolved by integrating Skyhook.”
Gowalla’s Android app is currently in beta and will be widely released to the public in March. Skyhook also offers a publicly available SDK for Android developers, available here.
Meanwhile, in Austin last night, Stacey caught up with Ted Morgan, CEO of Skyhook and Josh Williams, CEO of Gowalla, from Skyhook for a chat about check-in and location features in social networking apps. See their thoughts in the video below.
Handango, one of the original mobile app distributors, has been acquired by PocketGear in a deal announced this morning, the terms of which were not disclosed. An 11-year-old Dallas-area firm, Handango — like its rival Handmark — helped pioneer the app store model by distributing apps to devices running Palm, Windows Mobile, BlackBerry and Symbian before expanding to Android. PocketGear in 2008 was founded as a spinoff from Motricity, which is now hoping to raise $250 million through an initial public offering.
The combined company hopes to better compete with Apple’s App Store and the Android Market as well as content aggregators such as GetJar, which delivers titles to a wide variety of devices. But the move also scores how dramatically the mobile app space has evolved in the last few years thanks to Apple and its rivals, which have made it much make it easier for consumers to find and download mobile apps. Early players like Handmark gained traction among some tech-savvy smartphone users, but because their storefronts were never embedded on devices most users were blind to them. And users who were aware of them had to create standalone credit card accounts and jump through other hoops to download apps to their handsets, which often weren’t great at running apps anyway.
The Federal Communications Commission this morning released results from its national broadband consumer survey, and the findings will surprise no one. The FCC, which will officially present the document in Washington on Tuesday morning, found that affordability and a lack of digital literacy are the primary reasons one-third of Americans don’t have high-speed Internet access at home.
According to the survey, 6 percent of Americans use the Internet but have no access at home, while another 6 percent use a dial-up connection at home. Twenty-two percent said they simply don’t access the Internet at all. More than one-third of those who don’t have high-speed web access at home cited the cost of a computer or Internet service, or said they wanted to avoid a long-term contract. Others said they lack digital skill or were fearful of potential online hazards or — astoundingly — that the web “is just a waste of time.”
The FCC is hoping to help address cost concerns by giving schools more flexibility to allow the public to use broadband services (PDF) during non-operating hours. And the Department of Commerce’s National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA) this week awarded $357 million in grants to bring high-speed Internet to public housing developments, community colleges and underserved rural areas.
But bringing high-speed access to those who fear the web or don’t understand its value is likely to be even more difficult than addressing the affordability gap. Which is why it is up to developers and online publishers to continue to offer innovative, immersive experiences and applications to draw new users to the web. E-mail is largely credited with driving the demand for dial-up Internet services more than a decade ago, and the rise of Apple’s iTunes and other entertainment offerings fueled the move to high-speed connections. Online social networks may be able to help close the broadband gap by making it even easier for users to upload photos, for instance, and share content with friends. Because while the FCC can certainly help bring broadband to those who don’t yet have it, there isn’t much the agency can do to convince people to use it.
Canada’s former position as a leader in the deployment of fixed-line and mobile broadband has disappeared, according to new data from Harvard University’s Berkman Center. So maybe it’s time our neighbors to the north developed a national broadband plan that encourages competition.
The Berkman Center last week submitted a study on broadband policies and practices around the world to the U.S. Federal Communications Commission, which is scheduled to deliver its national broadband plan next month. The report, which can be downloaded here, indicates that while Canada made early strides with DSL and cable in the late 1990s it has been “a weak performer” in terms of prices, speeds and 3G mobile broadband penetration. From the report:
“Canada opened the decade as an extremely strong performer on broadband. Over the course of the decade, its penetration rates have grown more slowly than those of other countries, its prices have remained high, and its speeds are still low in comparison to other OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development)… Canada continues to see itself as a high performer in broadband, as it was early in the decade, but current benchmarks suggest that this is no longer a realistic picture of its comparative performance on several relevant measures.”
The report blames Canadian limits on foreign ownership, among other things, and calls for open access policies that would encourage network operators to grant competitors access to their infrastructure (others have called for similar programs in the U.S., which has its own competition problems). The document prompted a kind of call to arms from The Globe and Mail, which this morning called for new regulatory policies and a “national collective will to compete” lest Canada get left behind in the worldwide digital economy.
Canada’s immense geographic size but relatively small population poses a huge problem, of course, and the government is providing subsidies to private and public organizations to extend broadband infrastructure to every Canadian community by the end of this year. But the country could also help itself immensely by adopting a national broadband plan that allows foreign investment and encourages more competition.
Steve Jobs has been bad-mouthing Adobe’s Flash once again, according to a recent Business Insider report. The Apple head honcho recently visited the Wall Street Journal to demonstrate the iPad. During his stay he allegedly criticized Adobe’s Flash technology, with the intent to move the popular broadsheet newspaper away from using the web display technology.
The report details that Apple’s CEO attempted to convince the Journal by downplaying Flash, describing it as a “CPU hog” that has “security holes.” He then added that Apple does not “spend a lot of energy on old technology” comparing Flash to other dead technologies, including Floppies, Firewire and even the humble CD. This continued dislike for Flash comes after Jobs downplayed Adobe’s technology at a town hall meeting with Apple employees earlier this month.
But could the typically forward-thinking Steve Jobs, and in turn Apple, be acting too quickly in disregarding Flash? It’s commonly accepted that Adobe’s Flash does not run as effectively on Mac platforms as it does on Windows, with Adobe’s CTO Kevin Lynch even accepting that there are some problems. However, due to Flash’s widespread adoption, it seems that labeling it as a dead technology now is a premature move.
The iPad’s widely reported lack of Flash means you can’t watch your favorite shows on Hulu, crop your corn on FarmVille or watch the latest video on the New York Times. Of course these are just a few examples of what a future without Flash would be like. But with hundreds of thousands of web sites playing host to flash content, it could be years before Apple’s desire becomes reality and a move away from the format is seen. So what alternatives could Apple be hoping to replace Adobe’s prevalent plugin with?
HTML5 is the immediately obvious choice for replacing Flash, with Apple itself already using it. But as TheNextWeb points out, the technology is not quite ready yet, with a number of issues holding it back. Currently only a few browsers support it, and full integration is not in sight. Feedback from early experiments have also not been overly positive, with users of YouTube’s HTML5 demo claiming it to be unsatisfactory and slow.
Beyond HTML5, Apple is also known for its love affair with the H.264 video standard. The video compression format is what makes YouTube work on your iPhone, and is also integrated into QuickTime. However due to hefty licensing rules imposed by MPEG-LA, the standard is not going to become mainstream anytime soon.
So, with other standards not quite ready to step up to the mark and Flash not disappearing anytime soon, it seems that Jobs’ campaign of hate will have to remain just that, purely vocal. It seems that iPhone and future iPad users will just have to get used to those blue Lego bricks.
Sprint will launch its fist WiMAX-enabled handset in the first half of this year, several months earlier than expected, according to a Forbes story this morning — an HTC Supersonic, a dual-mode, Android-enabled device that boasts a 4.3-inch LCD display and Wi-Fi connectivity. But does Sprint really need a WiMAX phone yet?
The phone will reportedly switch automatically switch between Sprint’s 3G EV-DO network and the 4G infrastructure it’s building with Clearwire, enabling it to take advantage of average download speeds of 3-6 Mbps. But that’s only when it can find a WiMAX network, which covers some 10 percent of the U.S. population and doesn’t yet include cities such as New York, San Francisco and Washington.
Just as importantly, the industry has yet to agree on a handover for voice between 3G and WiMAX which — like LTE — is all-IP. Depending on how Sprint decides to handle voice on its WiMAX network, folks making a call on its WiMAX phone could find themselves unable to use the 4G data services while on a call. Sprint will obviously need to produce phones that leverage WiMAX as it builds out its new footprint and as the industry addresses the technical problems involved in moving to 4G from 3G. But rushing a WiMAX phone to market in the next few months doesn’t seem to make much sense.
Amazon delivered today a beta version of its free Kindle for BlackBerry e-book app, a quick download that provides access to more than 420,000 books. It marks just the latest example of how the publishing industry is facing seminal changes. Will the end result be the death of quality content?
Amazon has been in the crosshairs of the traditional publishing industry for some time now, with regard to numerous issues. Its standard $9.99-per-title charge for e-books is the same kind of clear and present threat to existing business models in the publishing industry that the music industry faced as low-priced music became available on ubiquitous digital players. The music industry continues to reel from the effects of that revolution, and instead of reaching for workable digital business strategies, aims laterally for questionable solutions such as slapping a performance tax on radio stations.
I got into a discussion on a videocast yesterday with Dan Goodin, one of the best writers over at The Register, about the equally seismic shifts we’re seeing in book distribution and the publishing industry. He made the point that with the low pricing models for digital books, and more devices for reading them, the ultimate effect may be that the quality of written content suffers. Authors, in addition to publishers, stand to have their livelihoods threatened under the new e-book regime, he noted:
“Do we want to live in a world where content providers can’t support themselves? That is exactly where we are moving with the Kindle and the iPad because people suddenly want books for $9.99. I’ve got news: It takes about a year to write a book, you have to travel extensively, you have to do a lot of fact-checking. What Amazon and Apple are trying to do is significantly decrease the amount of money that publishers, and specifically authors, can make.”
“The quality of books and other types of published material is going to significantly deteriorate,” he added. He’s not the first person to allege that the sweeping changes in the publishing industry threaten quality content. Warren Buffett, for example, has predicted that with newspapers dying and reporters losing their jobs, widespread dishonesty will ensue.
I’m inclined to agree — up to a point — with both of them, and I say that as a book author who has always worked in the publishing industry. However, it also seems clear that new publishing models will arise amidst the carnage. For example, Mathew recently noted that some authors are signing exclusive Kindle deals with Amazon. One popular author, Stephen Covey, has struck a deal with Amazon where he gets about 50 percent of the revenues from his Kindle-delivered books, far above the royalty deals that most authors get. Perhaps the very providers of digital content and distribution devices will end up being the ones to make the publishing industry work again.
Let’s not forget that we’re seeing exciting new kinds of devices arrive for reading. I suspect that devices such as the iPad will be both a blessing and a curse for the publishing industry, creating short-term chaos but also long-term promise. Om has noted that the instant he laid his hands on the iPad, he had visions of exciting new content types that will surely take shape for it. Apple may also introduce higher pricing models for content on the iPad than we’ve seen from Amazon for the Kindle. For a visual tour of how the iPad might be a promising trend for publishing, I recommend watching the video below of Wired Magazine’s concept app for the iPad, which looks quite slick.
The ubiquitous availability of e-books may also usher in more reading, and it’s a fact that readers of e-books buy more books. As a BlackBerry user, I already like the free Kindle for BlackBerry app, and I can see myself using it to read on the train when I might otherwise busy myself with other things. One way or another, quality content will make its way to interested readers on digital platforms, and new types of rewards for authors will arrive, too. In the meantime, though, anyone who writes better prepare for a bumpy — though never boring — ride.
Motorola got a much-needed lift this morning with the news that AT&T will begin selling its Android -based Backflip handset next month. The carrier will finally join the crowded Android bandwagon March 7 with the release of the gadget, which rocks a 3.1-inch color touchscreen, Wi-Fi, 7.2 HSPA technology and the Motoblur interface. The gadget, which is the first of five Android handsets AT&T plans to release by June, will sell for $100 with the usual two-year contract and $100 rebate.
The move is a welcome boost for Motorola, which has struggled in recent weeks following Verizon Wireless’s successful launch of the Droid. “Motorola’s coming out party appears to be short lived as the success of Nexus One has impacted Motorola’s share at Verizon,” Ashok Kumar of Northeast Securities wrote in a research note yesterday before AT&T’s announcement. “Due to weaker sell through, we are beginning to set negative revisions to production targets. Refresh of the Android platform from HTC, LG, and Samsung will add to competitive pressures later on in the year.”
AT&T’s move could be especially beneficial if the carrier opts to heavily market the device, as Verizon did with the Droid. But Motorola will have to move quickly to leverage its status as the only Android device on the nation’s second-largest carrier before AT&T rolls out other Android handsets in coming months.
Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week has produced some eye-catching developments, from Microsoft’s unveiling of its new mobile OS to the Skype/Verizon partnership to increasing tension between Google and network operators. But the show’s overriding theme has been the ever-increasing data consumption across mobile networks — and the crush of companies looking to help carriers offload that traffic.
The surge in smartphone sales has fueled a dramatic increase in the demand for mobile data, which in turn has brought some networks to their knees. And as Stacey noted last week, that demand will increase exponentially over the next few years as phones become more sophisticated and connectivity comes to a wide range of devices. Which is why carriers are scrambling to find alternative ways to deliver data to users in ways that don’t bog down the network.
Swantee’s remarks were echoed this week by CEOs from both Vodafone and RIM, who used the event to warn that smartphone users will soon demand more data than networks can deliver. Of course, both companies have skin in the game: RIM is touting its gadgets as bandwidth misers that generate minimal traffic on the network, and Vodafone — like its competitors — is scrambling to find a way to get heavy data users to pay more. But that urgency explains why players such as Accuris Networks, BelAir Networks, Bridgewater Systems, picoChip and Tellabs (s tlab) unveiled hardware and software in the last few days designed to help network operators use non-cellular technologies to move data.
Many of the new products use gear designed for fixed mobile convergence (FMC) through Wi-Fi and femtocells, and a few are beginning to include support for 4G technologies. Tellabs, like the 6-year-old startup Stoke, offers a gateway designed to offload Internet-bound traffic before it reaches the carrier’s first core gateway. And Kineto Wireless markets a smartphone client that automatically routes traffic to Wi-Fi networks.
The need to offload data traffic has spurred a femtocell industry that until recently had seen lackluster activity. Wi-Fi’s massive worldwide footprint makes it the offloading technology of choice for carriers, and network operators can encourage their customers to ease network congestion by using voluntarily using Wi-Fi when it’s available. The carriers will have to do a better job of supporting Wi-Fi and creating a seamless experience for users, though, if they hope to fully leverage the technology, Informa analyst Thomas Wehmeier wrote this week:
“A key hurdle that we still see is the need to overcome the issues of authentication and providing a better user experience for the customer when switching between cellular and WiFi networks. The days of logging in and out of hotspots need to go if operators really want to offload greater proportions of traffic onto WiFi. That being said, it seems that even with today’s pretty average WiFi experience on a typical smartphone, consumers are favouring WiFi over cellular.”
That demand for Wi-Fi is something carriers must meet if they’re to keep their customers happy — and if they hope to keep their networks running smoothly — as femtocells and other alternatives gain traction in the market.
Android has quickly become a force to be reckoned with in mobile, as anyone following Mobile World Congress in Barcelona this week can tell you. Google has recognized that the future growth engine of the Internet is the mobile web — and the ad revenues that it generates — and it’s effectively laying the foundation for those revenues with the growth of its mobile operating system. And that’s making carriers very nervous.
Android was designed as a tool to make the mobile web accessible and enable Google to take its search and advertising business to the wireless world. And the platform continues to gain traction at an impressive clip. AdMarvel this morning became the latest mobile ad business to join the Android bandwagon, unveiling a toolkit at MWC designed to help developers deliver ads through their mobile applications. The new Opera Software subsidiary joins fellow mobile ad firm Smaato, which last week announced support for Android, as well as Greystripe, AdMob and a host of other competitors looking for a piece of the Android advertising pie.
That pie is getting bigger very quickly: AdMob recently said ad requests from Android devices had doubled in just two months, while Smaato reported Android’s clickthrough rates surpassed those of the iPhone in January. ComScore echoes those findings, indicating Android’s smartphone market share more than doubled from the third quarter of 2009 to the fourth quarter of last year. Those figures will surely increase, too, thanks to the fact that Android is now shipping on 60,000 handsets a day, as Google CEO Eric Schmidt noted in his keynote speech yesterday in Barcelona.
That remarkable traction has spooked network operators, which fear Google may already control too much of the mobile advertising market. Vodafone CEO Vittorio Colao yesterday told MWC attendees that regulators must intervene and boost competition “before it’s too late,” claiming Google holds up to 80 percent of the mobile search and advertising market in Europe. Colao’s comments came a week after Telefonica Chairman Cesar Alierta said the telco might charge search engines for network use, citing the dominance of Google and other prominent web sites.
Those fears are justified in light of a report released yesterday by iSuppli. The market research firm said Google may actually reshape the industry, replacing calling plans with ad revenues as the foundation of the business.
“While all the facets of this multipronged strategy will not be successful, it is clear that Google is pushing toward the strategy of monetizing mobile search by leveraging its leadership in Internet search with relevant location-based services and mobile advertising,” Dr. Jagdish Rebello of iSuppli said in a prepared statement. “iSuppli believes that if the company executes this strategy correctly — by working with and not against the rest of the mobile value chain — the wireless industry will be well positioned to unlock the next trillion dollars of value by the end of this decade.”
That would be a huge win for all sorts of players in the value chain, from handset manufacturers to app developers to major media brands. But it might leave carriers on the outside looking in.
Despite apologies from Google, and changes to the inner workings of its Buzz social networking service, a high-profile privacy group has taken its complaints to the Federal Trade Commission. The Electronic Privacy Information Center (EPIC) has urged the FTC to open an investigation into Buzz.
EPIC in its complaint (PDF) charges that Google has contradicted its own privacy policy, engaged in unfair and deceptive trade practices, failed to give up to 37 million Gmail users “meaningful control over personal information,” and may have violated federal wiretap laws.
Buzz has been scrutinized heavily due to privacy concerns in recent days, leading Google to make numerous changes to the service. EPIC’s opposition to Buzz isn’t its first disagreement with Google’s practices regarding the cloud. In March of 2009, EPIC urged the FTC to investigate Google’s cloud policies, and warned that the company had failed to safeguard the privacy and security of users.
Among specific requests that EPIC is making to the FTC, it is asking for it to compel Google to:
Make Google Buzz a fully opt-in service for Gmail users;
Cease using Gmail users’ private address book contacts to compile social networking lists;
Give Google Buzz users more control over their information by allowing them to accept or reject followers from the outset.
Notably, EPIC’s complaint also quotes numerous bloggers who have written about the privacy issues surrounding Buzz, as well as a Yahoo Fellow at the Institute for the Study of Diplomacy at Georgetown University, who wrote:
I am extremely concerned about hundreds of activists in authoritarian countries who would neveer want to reveal a list of their interlocutors to the outside world…many of their contacts are other activists…and democracy promoters.
Google may well have an international problem on its hands with Buzz, and other privacy groups are entering the fray. Canada’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner is investigating the service, and The Electronic Frontier Foundation has leveled criticism against Buzz.
Alcatel-Lucent has achieved rocket fast 80Mbps downstream peak speeds on China Mobile’s TD-LTE (time division duplex) trial network, the company said today at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. In the meantime, Verizon said its U.S. 4G plans remain on track.
China Mobile’s TD-LTE network is being put in place to serve the 2010 World Expo in Shanghai, a showcase for global technology achievements, that kicks off May 1st and for which 70 million visitors are expected. According to Alcatel-Lucent, the TD-LTE peak rates were achieved by using a single 20-MHz spectrum band, carrying both the upstream and downstream traffic. TD-LTE uses half the spectrum of FDD-LTE (frequency division duplex) networks. You can find more on Alcatel-Lucent’s LTE projects here, including its involvement with a trial LTE-connected car.
Alcatel-Lucent’s LTE trials are also spreading out globally. The company said today that, in conjunction with Orange, the first phase of an LTE mobile broadband technology trial is underway with a live network in France. It’s expected to serve many types of multimedia mobile applications, including VoIP calls with streaming video. Alain Maloberti, group VP for networks, architecture and design for France Telecom-Orange, was quoted as saying that so far, “the user experience and the quality are very good inside the buildings as well as on the move.” Alcatel-Lucent also has LTE testing underway in Latin America.
Meanwile, Verizon CTO Dick Lynch confirmed that it’s on track with its LTE network rollout, which is in fourth-phase testing and due in 25-30 U.S. cities this year, potentially reaching 100 million people. Verizon expects to deliver 5-12Mbps downstream and 2-5Mbps upstream. Ericsson and Alcatel-Lucent are building out the network, part of a partnership between Verizon and Vodafone.
As varying standards for LTE take shape, and some regions get it while others don’t, the fourth-generation wireless technology should produce much competition, and is likely to challenge the dominion of fixed broadband services. In households and for many business users, LTE wireless broadband could begin to supplant fixed broadband, potentially causing millions of users to switch. In the U.S., as we’ve noted before, it definitely looks like Verizon’s service will reach the most people this year, and the company’s announcements at Mobile World Congress back that up.
Tech circles are buzzing this morning with news that Apple has been ambushed by a consortium of carriers and handset manufacturers that have declared war on its App Store. But nobody in Cupertino is going to lose any sleep over the move.
The Wholesale Applications Community (WAC), as the group calls itself, is looking to “unite a fragmented marketplace” by creating an open industry platform that will serve as a single path to market for mobile developers, regardless of which platform their apps run on. The WAC plans to create standards to ensure apps run on all platforms, enabling developers to create a single build of an app that could be accessed on a broad swath of handsets. The group boasts some of the planet’s most powerful carriers, including AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DoCoMo and Verizon Wireless, as well as three major OEMs.
While that may sound like a panacea for an industry that admittedly is crippled by a plethora of mobile operating systems, the initiative is nonetheless doomed from the start. Carriers have a well-earned reputation for not playing nice with one another, and it will be impossible to herd all those cats, which operate a wide variety of different networks and platforms. And carriers have never been able to effectively cultivate developer communities or distribute apps, which led to the rise of Apple’s App Store in the first place.
More important, though, is the fact that some platforms are already hopelessly fragmented. Windows for years has struggled with the splintering of Windows Mobile, and Google is already suffering from the emergence of multiple versions of Android. Those fragmentation challenges have sometimes made it increasingly difficult — if not impossible — for developers to address a broad swath of devices within a single OS. Such problems will increase exponentially as the WAC tries to find a way to deliver apps to countless devices running any of a half-dozen (or more) operating systems. And they will only multiply with each new OS — or version of an established OS — that comes to market.
The concept of “write once, run anywhere” is a compelling one, but it’s one that’s never come close to being realized in mobile. And thanks to the proliferation of new smartphone operating systems and an ever-increasing number of superphones on the market, there’s no chance the WAC will be able to change that.
Microsoft unveiled the long-awaited upgrade to its venerable mobile operating system this morning, and — so far, at least — the results are pretty impressive. The company has finally scrapped the cumbersome look and feel of Windows Mobile in favor of a more intuitive, streamlined user interface, and – much like HTC — is focusing on consumers by emphasizing the personalized nature of mobile phones in addition to productivity features. (See video below.)
Windows Phone 7 Series, as the new OS is dubbed, is built on the Zune HD interface and enables users to navigate the device via a series of integrated “hubs” (Office, pictures, games, music and video) and widgets. And Microsoft has wisely enlisted the help of industry heavyweights such as Qualcomm and AT&T to help it regain its lost relevance in the ultra-competitive smartphone space.
But producing a knockout mobile operating system won’t be enough to get back in the game, as Palm can tell you. For Microsoft to challenge platforms like Android and iPhone, it will have to address these three primary challenges before its new devices come to market in the fourth quarter of 2010:
Build a better app store. Smartphone users already have the luxury of browsing through tens of thousands of apps in the Android Market or Apple’s App Store, so Microsoft will have to quickly find a way to build an impressive library of offerings for its new Phone 7 Series. CEO Steve Ballmer today quashed speculation that the company might make its OS freely available to developers, so the company must find other ways to attract the attention of developers who already have lots of attractive platforms on which to build their mobile apps.
Build a better brand. Forrester’s Charles S. Golvin noted this morning that 24 percent of Windows Mobile users in North America say their phone was made by Apple or RIM, and more than one-third of European Windows Mobile users said Nokia made their phone. And the Windows brand isn’t linked to phones that use the OS on any carrier’s web site, Golvin said. So Microsoft will have to leverage its partnerships and invest heavily in promoting its brand if Windows Phone 7 Series is to be a hit with consumers.
Understand the mobile web. Microsoft’s inability to become a major player on the Internet is well documented, and is a key reason the company has failed to connect with consumers. Apps are great, and Microsoft’s apparent progress in tearing down the siloed world of mobile apps to create a more integrated experience is impressive. (That progress was illustrated this morning by the company’s success in integrating Bing and social networking sites with the mobile experience.) If the overhauled OS is to find an audience, though, Microsoft must prove that it understands how consumers want to use the web while they’re on the phone. That will be a particularly difficult hurdle for a company that has always been about software — not consumer experiences.
It’s easy to get excited after a single demonstration, of course, and Windows Mobile will surely continue to lose market share before Windows Phone 7 comes to market late this year. Meanwhile, those competing platforms will only become more so in the coming months. And while Microsoft’s move to give network operators flexibility to tweak the OS is commendable, it runs the risk of carriers damaging the platform as they put their own stamp on it. But the smartphone space is a wide-open field, and Windows Phone 7 Series indicates that Redmond might finally be getting a clue. If it can continue to execute in the coming months, Microsoft may just find itself back in the game.
Apple, ever since its birth in the 1970s, has enjoyed special favor and even zealous worship from members of the open source community, self-proclaimed free thinkers and supporters of open standards. And yet, with each new step it takes, the company becomes more closed. But while closed practices are currently cranking the cash registers in Cupertino, peril lies ahead.
From the early days of development of its Unix-based operating system to its battles with purportedly Orwellian companies like IBM and Microsoft to the jeans-wearing corporate culture it has always nurtured, Apple has always had an easy time wooing the freewheeling computing counterculture, including the open source community. In recent years, though, even as it has (deservedly) earned “company of the decade” accolades, Apple has become more and more closed.
Tom Foremski recently noted that Apple is actually becoming more closed with every new device it delivers. As he writes:
“Since the introduction of the iPod, iPhone, and now the iPad, Apple is becoming less and less open, it is using fewer standard components and chips, and far fewer Internet technologies common to Mac/PC desktop and laptop systems.”
Foremski also notes that Apple’s upcoming iPad is “a much more closed system than any of Apple’s products from the past 10 years.” It runs only the A4 processor — a chip that other companies can’t buy. It runs a restrictive, non-multitasking operating system: the iPhone OS. Even its connectivity is very limited, and, presumably, ongoing dongles and hardware connectivity options for it will be available mostly just from Apple. Citing “zero-sum maneuvering against hated rivals,” the Wall Street Journal recently took the iPad to task for not supporting common platforms such as Adobe Flash and Microsoft Silverlight (locking users into iTunes-only content).
Picking up the thread, newly crowned Canonical COO and open source blogger Matt Asay wonders if Apple is the new Microsoft. He asks whether “Apple is the company that creates insanely great business strategies for locking customers into its walled-garden content emporium.”
Proprietary strategies have paid off big time for Apple. Its revenues exploded and its stock soared even as many people questioned its closed practices with the iPod, iTunes and the iPhone. But I predict that the iPad, aggressively closed as it is, will illustrate the folly of remaining strictly closed over the long run.
On a tablet-style device as slick as the iPad is, people will not be content with only the types of applications made available thus far for the iPhone. In fact, Om has predicted that we may see brand new types of applications and web sites crop up specifically for the iPad. If the device becomes popular, people will clamor for an open development environment, and, as I’ve pointed out, they will reach beyond the iPhone OS on the iPad by virtualizing other operating systems that extend to more applications.
As one reader of my post on Citrix’s virtualization software, which will let iPad users run Windows 7 applications, pointed out, “Most of the REAL work I do happens on remote servers that I access remotely through Citrix.” That’s not true for everyone, but, indeed, there are numerous bridges that require no virtualization that iPad users will take advantage of to reach for cloud-based applications. They’ll use applications in the cloud in the same way that users of Google’s Chrome OS will. What they won’t do is just lie down and accept total OS and application lock-down from Apple.
Years ago, when Apple delivered Boot Camp, which allows many Mac users to dual-boot the Mac OS with Microsoft Windows, some observers argued that Hell had frozen over. It hadn’t, though. Apple had no choice but to open its kimono and make a Windows-friendly move in a world teeming with virtualization options. Virtualization was arriving for free in other operating systems.
And that’s exactly the kind of free, open trend that will increasingly foil Apple if it doesn’t pursue more open policies. Virtualization and cloud computing will both, increasingly, usher in a world where it’s commonplace to run multiple operating systems, opening up robust types of choices in applications. Google’s Chrome OS embraces all of this so fully that its users will run all their applications in the cloud. In the epic square-off between Apple and Google, Google is embracing openness much more than Apple is, and is making lots of money. Open source guru Dana Blankenhorn has noted that Red Hat’s new operating system, virtualization and open cloud initiatives — delivered this week — stand a good chance of stripping away proprietary advantages pursued by Microsoft and Oracle.
Free, open tools will arrive for circumventing and complementing Apple’s proprietary platforms. They’ll function as detours around oppressive obstructions. I’ve heard the arguments against this, such as “Apple designs beautiful products that just work together, and that’s what users want” and “Apple is making tons of money with closed practices” and so on. The company does have to open its policies and practices, though, even as its closed moves keep causing cash registers to ring. Otherwise, new products that reach out to multiple operating systems and much larger appscapes will arrive. And tech history has shown that he who delivers the largest appscape wins.
The iPhone OS is pitched as the entire Internet in your pocket…minus Flash. This works most of the time, but what if you just want to design a site or form that looks like a native iPhone App?
This is where iWebKit comes in. iWebKit is a free framework package for creating websites and applications that are optimized for the iPod Touch, iPhone & iPad. The bulk of the framework is CSS3 which can work its magic to makeover any dreadful site and make it look fresh.
I will be covering the web-form aspect of creating an optimized site, but iWebKit has many deeper features that can communicate directly with the OS. Its documentation is excellent, so dig around or check out the demo site on your iPhone to get inspiration.
When designing for the iPhone OS, you should use the iPhone simulator available in the SDK to get an idea of where your design is heading. You can also use Safari to get a pretty close representation, but nothing beats using a real physical device. It’s amazing how cool it feels and you really do get the impression it’s a native application.
Getting Started
Here is what the form looks like on the iPhone before we optimize it.
It’s pretty dull looking, to say the least. Below is the original HTML code being used. We’re going to get Apple-blood running through it and give it a makeover.
These lines tell the iPhone browser that this page is designed for it. It also references the CSS, JavaScript and images for the iPhone Home Screen and a startup image.
To create the top title bar we need to enter the following code immediately after the <body> tag.
If you load up the page in your iPhone simulator browser you will see this bar at the top.
Now we need to start our main content with the following <div> tag.
<div id="content">
All the form fields will be inside of this <div> and we won’t close it till the end of the form. The first form fields we want are the Name and Password fields.
Our Name and Password fields have now been transformed.
The <ul> container represents the white box while the <li> tag is to signify separate sections inside of the white box. You could also put each of these fields in their own <ul> containers and they would look like two separate boxes. To save screen space, I group similar items together. Now lets replace those old fashioned radio buttons from the Gender question.
Now close the content <div> tag with the following:
</div>
Finally, we may want to put a footer at the bottom of our page. It’s nice to also support the iWebKit folks.
<div id="footer">
<a href="http://iwebkit.net">Powered by iWebKit</a>
</div>
That’s it for the HTML portion. Two nice little touches you can do are for when someone adds the page to their home screen. When browsing the page, click the “+” button and select the Add to Home Screen option. You will see an icon that, by default, is a screenshot of the page. You can customize this by making your own 58×58 pixel image and referring to it in the <head> section. Mine is named homescreen.png and I’ve already included the code at the beginning of the article.
Now when this page is added to the Home Screen, it will look and feel like a native app. Why not have a startup screen displayed while the page loads? iWebKit also has this feature and you simply need a 320×460 pixel image that again, is referenced in the <head> section. I have called mine startup.png.
That’s it, we’re done! iWebKit has many other features that you should check out. You may get some inspiration for an app or at least look good to your boss when you pretty up that old form that’s been around for years. All the files used in this article are also attached for your viewing pleasure along with a short video walkthrough of this tutorial.
The mobile browser startup Skyfire is joining the increasingly crowded WebKit bandwagon by buying kolbysoft, maker of Steel, a WebKit-based Android browser that appears to have cultivated a tiny but dedicated base of fans who’ve downloaded the app from Android Market. Like the popular Opera Mini browser, Skyfire, which currently supports Windows Mobile and Nokia S60 devices, uses a server to deliver fully rendered web pages. The company hopes to combine WebKit’s ability to “mobilize” basic Internet content with its own cloud-based rendering technology.
“I think, generally and philosophically, WebKit as a movement is doing a really nice job of solving basic HTML-type browsing,” Skyfire CEO Jeff Glueck told me yesterday. “What it isn’t doing well is solving the problem of all the rich media on the Internet that’s in these very fat files — bandwidth-hogging files and proprietary plug-ins like Flash and Quicktime and Silverlight.”
As Om noted in 2008, Skyfire’s cloud-based technology impressively renders web content for mobile consumption and — unlike most mobile browsers — allows it to deliver Flash-based content and other rich media. The company currently relies on ad revenues but carriers are “potential customers,” Glueck said.
It’s difficult to gauge just how much traction Skyfire has gained since its launch in late 2008, but recent figures from StatCounter indicate traffic from its browser fails to match even Sony PSP usage. That’s largely due to the fact that the presence of Nokia’s Symbian on the mobile web is waning in Western markets and Windows Mobile traffic borders on nonexistent as Android’s Internet footprint expands — facts that surely helped drive Skyfire’s move toward Google’s platform. Indeed, WebKit technology drives the vast majority of traffic on the mobile web in operating systems such as iPhone and Palm’s webOS; RIM is developing a WebKit browser for the BlackBerry.
Of course, Android has a pretty impressive WebKit browser of its own, so Skyfire will face a challenge in convincing uses to download and use a replacement — as Glueck concedes. “Our most essential competition right now is the default browser on the phone,” he said. “So we have to be better than what comes in the box.”
Snow Leopard has more than its fair share of improvements. If you work in the corporate world then Cisco IPsec VPN is a great addition.
Before Apple added this feature, you had to use Cisco’s client to connect up to its VPN. With Snow Leopard and the iPhone OS, this support is built in. You may need to get together with your Network Admin to get all the correct passwords, group name and such but anything that can be done in the OS versus a third-party app is good by me.
Open up Network in System Preferences.
Click the + sign to create a new connection. Select VPN as the interface, Cisco IPSec as the VPN Type and name it what you want.
The VPN connection will now be in your list. Fill in your Server Address and Account Name. Our VPN checks authentication against Active Directory so my Account name is domain\username. Also be sure to check the Show VPN Status box so you can easily start and stop your VPN connection.
Click Authentication Settings and enter your Shared Secret and Group Name. Once again, your Network Admin should have this information for you.
Go ahead and apply your settings and close System Preferences. You should see a new VPN status icon in the menu bar that when you click, gives a drop-down menu to start your VPN connection.
Click Connect and you should receive a Password prompt.
After you are connected, notice the menu bar icon indicates how long you have been connected. This can be a nice reminder to disconnect if you aren’t using the VPN anymore.
Setting up your iPhone or iPod touch is just as easy.
Launch Settings and then click on General.
Click Network.
Click VPN.
Click Add VPN Configuration.
Click on the IPSec button and fill in all your information just as you did in Snow Leopard. Click Save when you are done.
Try it out by flipping the VPN switch to On.
If all is good, you’ll see you are now connected.
Things to remember when accessing shares over a VPN are that you may need to use fully qualified domain names or IP addresses. Every network is different so get friendly with your Network Admin and he/she will hopefully help you out. It’s nice to see Apple developing things like this on the business side of the market. It does it so simple and to the point, that it puts everyone else to shame.
Google Buzz has received a ton of hype as a potential Twitter/Facebook/Foursquare/Yelp-killer, but it’s only fully available on about 80 percent of Android devices on the market. And that’s got some of those older Android users furious.
As Android and Me pointed out this morning, only devices running Android 2.0 and higher can take full advantage of Buzz, Google’s latest attempt to be all things to all people on the social web. Which means only users with a Motorola Droid or Google Nexus One can enjoy Buzz — the mobile app doesn’t work on Android 1.6, which runs on T-Mobile USA’s G1 and myTouch. And the latest version of Google Maps requires at least Android 1.6, leaving gadgets like the Sprint Hero and Verizon Droid Eris behind.
Astoundingly, the app is fully supported by any iPhone, as Google itself touts here. Irate users have taken to Google Mobile’s online help forum, where the company says full support for Buzz is “coming soon to earlier versions” of Android.
But the backlash underscores a growing problem for Google’s mobile OS: Its open source nature is already giving birth to multiple versions of the platform, requiring developers to tweak applications for each version in order to reach the entire Android community. It’s a danger James over at jkOnTheRun pointed out way back in May, and one that Google acknowledged in December with a device dashboard for Android developers. And it’s a problem that’s only going to grow as Android’s footprint expands over the next few years.
Leap Wireless is teaming with Pocket Communications to expand its footprint in South Texas in an apparent effort to primp for potential dance partners as the move toward consolidation continues in mobile. The companies said today that Leap will control a new joint venture that will acquire both companies’ licenses and operating assets in markets including San Antonio, Laredo and the Rio Grande Valley. Leap will own a 76 percent stake in the venture and will buy some of Pocket’s South Texas assets for about $38 million in cash before the deal closes, then will contribute to the business with its own related assets.
But could the typically forward-thinking Steve Jobs, and in turn Apple, be acting too quickly in disregarding Flash? It’s commonly accepted that Adobe’s Flash does not run as effectively on Mac platforms as it does on Windows, with 
Microsoft 
Windows Phone 7 Series, as the new OS is dubbed, is built on the Zune HD interface and enables users to navigate the device via a series of integrated “hubs” (Office, pictures, games, music and video) and widgets. And Microsoft has wisely enlisted the help of industry heavyweights such as Qualcomm and AT&T to help it regain its 
