Category: Mobile

Nokia's Ovi Maps

In an attempt to ward off competition from the likes of Google, Nokia, the largest maker of mobile phones, has released the latest version of its Ovi Maps software and made the app available for free. Nokia, despite an early start in the mobile phone-focused maps and navigation space, has lost attention to Google and Apple’s mapping and navigation efforts.

With the new Ovi Maps app, the company is hitting back, especially at Google. More importantly, it’s Nokia’s big chance to become the GPS device maker of choice in countries where standalone navigation devices are still hard to find.

“Maps and navigation are as core and natural in a phone as digital cameras,” Tero Ojanperä, Nokia’s EVP of services, said to me about Nokia’s new release. “We think that the mobile phone-based navigation market is about to take off in a big way. GPS is now commonplace and average consumers are perfectly comfortable with navigation systems, but more importantly complete solutions are finally coming to market.”

I would agree — and I think it’s further bad news for the standalone GPS companies such as Tom Tom and Garmin. As I said earlier, 2010 is shaping up to be the year of location.

In an interview last year, Ojanperä said, “We want maps to be part of everyday life, and as a result, we are working on building a richer experience on top of the map…I think it is going to become obvious that companies with mapping assets are at an advantage.” Nokia bought gate5 and Navteq as part of its efforts to get a toehold in mapping and location-based services.

If gate5 gave the company the ability to build maps into mobile phones, Navteq is giving it a lot of contextual information and up-to-the minute maps. Ojanperä said that while it’s easy to build a mapping navigation, there needs to be enough intelligence built into the mapping and navigation systems to provide context to location. Navteq provides exactly that.

For instance, he pointed out that the new Ovi Maps have the ability to add location context to your Facebook status messages. This feature is called Share Location via Ovi Maps. How it works is that if I’m eating at Delfina Pizzeria on 18th Street in San Francisco and say so on Facebook, my friends would know exactly where I am, instead of seeing a bunch of numbers. The reason Nokia is able to do this is primarily because it’s constantly collecting local data via its Navteq division.

“Coordinates don’t mean anything, but social location makes everything interesting,” Ojanperä said. With the new software, Ojanperä believes that Nokia is pushing mapping and location into a new phase, one in which advertising will also become part of the whole experience.

During our conversation, Ojanperä made no bones of hiding about his scorn for Google. For starters he pointed out that Nokia has over 84 million GPS-enabled devices in the market.  Google Maps Navigation, he said, is only available for a handful of device in one country in one language.

In comparison, he said that the new Ovi Maps includes essential car and pedestrian navigation features, such as turn-by-turn voice guidance for 74 countries in 46 languages, traffic information for more than 10 countries and detailed maps for more than 180 countries.

As of March, the new Nokia GPS-enabled smartphones will include the new version of Ovi Maps along with Lonely Planet and Michelin travel guides at no extra cost. More importantly, Ojanperä said that Nokia’s software was superior to Google because the company used hybrid vector maps, which are high-quality vectors that are stored into the device.

In comparison, Google Maps Navigation has to download maps constantly over a network connection.  It doesn’t matter if your don’t have a 3G connection or have lost data connectivity, the basic functionality of Ovi Maps will work, Nokia claims. This low data consumption model is something carriers are going to love, Ojanperä said. Why? Because it will save them money on network costs, as explained by this image.

Another reason why carriers are going to love Ovi Maps: It will help them sell data upgrades to voice-centric customers, even in emerging markets such as India and China where standalone GPS devices have yet to become commonplace, unlike in the U.S. and Europe. To me, this is Nokia’s big opportunity.

Amazon, displaying a sense of urgency that is perhaps driven by the pending launch of Apple’s tablet-style computer, is turning its Kindle device into a platform. The Seattle-based company has announced that it will allow software developers to “build and upload active content” and distribute it through the Kindle Store “later this year.” Amazon will be giving out a Kindle Development Kit that will give “developers access to programming interfaces, tools and documentation to build active content for Kindle.” The company will launch a limited beta effort next month. From the press release:

“We’ve heard from lots of developers over the past two years who are excited to build on top of Kindle,” said Ian Freed, Vice President, Amazon Kindle. “The Kindle Development Kit opens many possibilities–we look forward to being surprised by what developers invent.”

I would also like to see what developers come up with. An Electronics Arts executive in Amazon’s press release says that company is looking to develop games for the Kindle platform. I wonder how much can you do with the limited hardware that is a Kindle. Screen refresh rates are low, the inbuilt processor is puny and of course, no color. Unless Amazon is planning to launch a beefier and color version of the device, game developers are unlikely to be able to create great experiences on the Kindle.

The New York Times, which it seems was exclusively briefed before the news announcement, has some more details on Amazon’s plans:

Ian Freed, Amazon’s vice president for the Kindle, said there would be three different categories of active content: free applications, one-time paid applications, and applications that require a monthly subscription. Kindles that have already been sold will be able to run these programs once Amazon has remotely upgraded their software.

Developers will get to suggest their own prices for their programs, but they will have to shoulder the cost of wireless delivery at a rate of 15 cents a megabyte. After those costs are covered, developers keep 70 percent of the revenue from the sale of the app, while Amazon keeps 30 percent. (Remember that unlike smartphones, the Kindle does not require a monthly wireless fee.)

What I suspect will happen is that a lot of content-focused apps are going to be created for the Kindle platform. Amazon has been enjoying amazing success with the Kindle, though it’s still not clear how many of the devices the company has sold. Forrester Research estimates that nearly 3 million e-readers were sold in 2009, but it doesn’t say how many of them were Kindles. According to some estimates, the Amazon Kindle will bring in $310 million in revenue for 2009 and $2 billion in 2012. In order to attract developers, the company needs a lot of Kindles in the market. Perhaps that’s why Amazon is trying to tempt consumers by allowing them to try its Kindle and return it if they don’t like it.

My initial skepticism aside, Amazon is making the right move by opening up the Kindle. I’m sure even the company, like many others, does have to be worried about Apple’s tablet — which could quickly become a competitor for single-purpose e-readers. Like the Kindle, the new tablet is also aiming to become an all-purpose content consumption device. As I wrote back in March 2009:

“First of all, people are looking for a cheap, connected Internet device that is ‘not a laptop.’ I was recently watching an interview with Amazon’s Jeff Bezos on ‘Charlie Rose’ in which he talked about the Kindle being flexible enough to encourage new kinds of media consumption, including multimedia books and newspapers with immersive content and interactivity. I think he is spot on — and just from that perspective, Apple has to be thinking really hard about this looming opportunity.”

Yesterday, Amazon had announced that it would be giving away 70 percent of its digital content sales to the owners of the content, clearly a sign that it wants to attract and retain the content industry. The New York Times adds:

Apple representatives have been in New York this week talking to the largest trade publishers, according to industry executives. They said Apple had proposed an arrangement under which publishers would get to set the price of their books, with Apple taking a 30 percent commission and the publishers keeping the rest.

“There’s a battle going on for what is the value of a digital book,” said a publishing executive who did not want to be quoted by name because of the delicacy of discussions with Apple. “In that battle, Apple has put an offer together that helps publishers and, by extension, authors.”

There you have it — the reason for Amazon’s sense of urgency.

Related Research from GigaOM Pro (subscription required.):

• The Evolution of the e-Book Market

• Irrational Exuberance Over e-Books.

Ever since we first tried out Sherpa, a location-based services application, we became fans of Geodelic, the Santa Monica, Calif.-based company behind it. The app, which automatically learns a cell phone user’s favorite locations and lifestyle behavior and was initially launched exclusively for T-Mobile’s myTouch phone, has been downloaded some 350,000 times. Adding to that user base are the recently released versions of Geodelic for Android devices as well as the iPhone. (Click here to download from the iTunes App Store.)

In the meantime, Geodelic has just signed a deal with Korea Telecom that will see the company create a Seoul-specific application for Korean iPhone users. The move is expected to bring in revenues in the “high seven figures,” CEO Rahul Sonnad told me. Korea Telecom, an iPhone distributor in South Korea, signed a multiyear deal with Geodelic.

This revenue boost will prove to be quite significant for Geodelic, which is hoping to put some distance between itself and a growing number of competitors including Foursquare and Gowalla. Sonnad explained that the reason his company is able to build Seoul Tour is because of its publishing platform. Using it, Geodelic has worked with Universal Studios Theme Parks and Best Buy Stores to create what Sonnad calls “experiences.” It’s also worked with Greenopia, which has created an experience around “green shopping” across the U.S. The company now plans to create airport experiences, which will not only show flight information and airport maps, but will also be able to showcase location-based promotions.

“The publishing system makes us unique,” Sonnad said, “allowing major brands to create hyper-local experiences around it.” But that’s not all. The company is hoping to open up this publishing system to consumers sometime later this year. “Much as Ning made it easy to create social networks for everyone, with Geodelic you will soon be able to create your own location-based, hyper-local experiences,” he said.

It’s a clever idea. Imagine, for example, an experience that centers entirely around the best pizza joints in a particular city. Now imagine thousands of such “experiences.” Geodelic, thanks to the efforts of others, will end up with a fairly deep and accurate database of many different places around the country. I especially like the fact that it’s using location as a way to provide context to local information.

However in order for this plan to succeed, the company needs to do two things: substantially increase the number of its users and get those users to use the service more often. At present, some 100,000 folks check out Geodelic’s Android-specific application once a month and a mere 10 percent of those 100,000 check it out five times or more every month.

In my opinion, in order for one to judge the success and value of a location-based application, one needs to measure the intensity of engagement in addition to the number of downloads. The higher the engagement, the more valuable a location-based application!

Sonnad is betting that with the release of an iPhone app, as well as more city-specific versions of Sherpa, his company will get the big bump it really needs. Let’s hope so -– if not, he will soon be watching one of its competitors take the lead.

They say that those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it. That’s why one part of me is wondering why Truphone today announced an Mobile Virtual Network Operator (MVNO) effort with Vodafone UK (PDF). The move dovetails with a second Truphone product, also announced today (PDF) — the Truphone Local Anywhere service. Targeted towards the international jet-setter, Local Anywhere offers significant cost savings thanks to local rates for calls made outside of one’s home country. “A single, smart SIM” provides the local numbers and rates, according to the company.

For example, a U.S. resident could call home from the UK for 12 cents per minute on the Local Anywhere service. That same call for an AT&T customer with international roaming would cost nearly 10 times that amount. I see the benefit if you live in or travel to the initially supported countries — Truphone expects to expand the service this year across Europe, in Australia, Hong Kong and South Africa. So Truphone Local Anywhere makes financial sense — just like having a local Google Voice number geographically close to those who call you the most. But what about that MVNO business? How can Truphone succeed where so many before them have failed?

Let’s face it: With the notable exception of Virgin Mobile, very few mobile operators can even say “MVNO” without grimacing in pain. Odds are that this arrangement won’t be profitable in the traditional sense. Truphone isn’t looking to buy cellular service at wholesale and directly resell it at retail to eke out a small profit. Instead of that direct sell method, it appears to be one of indirect sales, in that Truphone hopes the arrangement will increase demand for its services and thus put money in the bank.

At the end of the day, it still looks like a standard yet slightly tweaked MVNO business model — and that’s not a model filled with optimism. In the meantime, it highlights one of the biggest challenges that Truphone and other competing services have to face: lack of control. The company may have an MVNO deal with Vodafone UK, but ultimately, who’s in control of the pipe, the data in it and pricing for it? Not Truphone.

This same lack of control is evident with the company’s VoIP offerings, too. To Truphone’s credit, the company earlier this week discussed its voice services over Wi-Fi vs. those over 3G and noted this very constraint. Karl Good, Truphone’s director of applications, put it this way:

“[U]nlike some of our competitors who have made VoIP calling available over 3G, we will not be doing so until we have developed a solution that will give our users a level of call quality that we are proud of.”

Without direct ownership and a stake in the level of call quality, Truphone simply can’t control the experience. And while I have high hopes for VoIP services — I use them myself on a daily basis — the ultimate issue is that these services are simply here ahead of their time. Voice is indeed a dying business in favor of data, as the numbers clearly show. But voice as data — on your pipe or someone else’s — is currently more advanced than the infrastructure on which it must rely. We’ll have to let history be the judge, of course, but voice isn’t the business I’d want to be in these days.

Even as Mozilla rolls out Release Candidate 2 of its Firefox 3.6 browser update, and is only days away from the official release, some are convinced that the upstart open source browser is doomed. However, Mozilla’s director of Firefox, Mike Beltzner, provides some good reasons why it isn’t.

According to a post from InfoWorld, Google Chrome’s momentum and the “immovable object” of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer browser spell trouble for Firefox. The post also points to changes in Firefox’s development model:

“Now we hear that Mozilla is abandoning its traditional major release cycle model in favor of smaller, incremental changes that it will slipstream through security patches and other maintenance updates. Basically, Mozilla’s developers are admitting that they can no longer deliver a fully baked and tested Firefox release in a timely fashion. So they’re switching to an incremental model where they can deliver progress in more manageable chunks, thus bypassing the lengthy external beta/feedback process altogether.”

While it’s true that Mozilla can’t continue to deliver major updates to Firefox at a machine-gun pace anymore, a talk I had with Mozilla’s Beltzner leads me to believe that it will continue to strip market share from Internet Explorer, in particular. Historically, a large part of the reason for Firefox’s success has been the thriving ecosystem of useful extensions available for the browser. The active community of extension developers helps make the browser better than the competition, and Internet Explorer and Chrome have not caught up in that area.

Mozilla has drawn criticism for possibly moving to an app store model for paid extensions, which could hurt the ecosystem of free extensions. Beltzner told me, though, that there is as of yet “no decision about moving to a paid model or not.”

He also said:

“It doesn’t really intersect with our community values because it’s at odds with open source and openness.”

He stressed that Mozilla is seeking to retain core open values for Firefox development. I asked him, for example, about the arguments going on regarding HTML 5 for video within browsers as opposed to other plug-in and proprietary solutions. “Video needs to be part of dynamic web pages, and that’s why we think the HTML 5 tag is inevitable,” he said. “Plug-ins aren’t as efficient. We shouldn’t have to wait for vendors to create plug-ins, and wrestle with situations like no Flash being available for the iPhone. We look to open source for solutions, and that’s why we chose OGG [an open source video format].”

In a demo of the Firefox 3.6 release candidate, Beltzner emphasized that Mozilla wants Firefox to be the best browser at efficiently running web applications. “Web apps need to understand files, and so does the browser,” he said. He also showed off how Firefox will increasingly allow users to drag and drop files and widgets directly to the browser from the desktop. And he stressed that Mozilla is very focused on Firefox’s ability to work efficiently with HD video.

Over the long haul, I expect Mozilla is going to continue to see its greatest competition for Firefox — at least in terms of browser innovation – -come from Google Chrome, which is also open source. Google is focused on efficiently running web applications in Chrome, and has created a very stable browser for them.

But until we see the very enthusiastic open source community surrounding Firefox failing to help its advancement, I don’t think we’re anywhere near Firefox being “doomed.” Mozilla’s own additions to the browser may come slower as Firefox’s size and popularity increase, but there is no browser that draws the same level of useful participation from the open source community as Firefox — not Google’s, and not Microsoft’s.

Related GigaOM Pro Research:

• Google Chrome OS: What to Expect
• What Does the Future Hold For Browsers?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Johnath.

Opera Software has joined the mobile advertising crowd, shelling out as much as $23 million to acquire AdMarvel in an effort to create a new way to drive revenues through its highly popular mobile browsers. The Norwegian developer will pay $8 million in cash and up to $15 million more if certain financial targets are met over the next two years. The move comes amid a flurry of M&A activity in the space in recent weeks.

A San Mateo, Calif.-based startup, AdMarvel helps publishers and carriers to source, manage and track advertising across ad networks. The company last year launched an iPhone advertising toolkit designed to enable app developers to integrate ads from ad networks into their applications. AdMarvel was founded in 2006 under the name Frengo and has reportedly raised $8 million in funding.

While much of the recent activity in the mobile ad space has focused on smartphones, Opera’s entry to the market could help boost ad revenues on feature phones. The company has seen tremendous success with Opera Mini, a mobile browser designed primarily to format web content for mass-market handsets. Opera two months ago claimed 41.7 million users have downloaded Opera Mini, more than doubling the browser’s user base in a year. Ramping up advertising on those phones through Opera Mini would give the overall mobile ad market a major lift (GigaOM Pro, sub. required).

Image courtesy Flickr user andyket.

Google, it seems, is having some teething problems with its foray into the topsy-turvy world of mobile handsets. From unhappy partners to unhappy customers, the search giant has been having a rough time with its Nexus One, currently the best Android phone on the market. So much so that GigaOM Pro Mobile curator Colin Gibbs wondered if it was time for Google to kill Nexus One. (Related from GigaOM Pro, sub. required: Google’s Mobile Strategy: Understanding the Nexus One.)

On the opposite end of the argument are analysts from Citigroup, who think that the device could be a monster hit and sell somewhere between 1 and 3 million units. It would become a massive revenue generator, Citigroup analysts including Internet Mark Mahaney predict. In a research note this morning, he writes:

Based on its first week sales traction, our review of comparable 1st-year SmartPhone unit sales, and input from CIRA Wireless Handset Analyst Jim Suva, we estimate Nexus One could potentially see between 1MM and 3MM unit sales in 2010, generating between $500MM and $1.6B in incremental revenue (3% to 8% accretive).

For additional context, we note from Kevin Chang, the CIRA Analyst who covers HTC Corporation, that HTC has build plans for 700,000 Nexus One units in Q1:10 and approximately 1.2MM for H1:10. This would seem to suggest a reasonable Year 1 range of 1MM to 3MM…..based in part on Chang’s analysis, we believe the Nexus One may generate a 10%- 15% operating margin, which implies that 1MM to 3MM Nexus One unit sales could generate between $0.12 and $0.55 in incremental ’10 EPS (0%-2% accretive). Finally, we note that given the relatively low Nexus One margin structure, every 1MM units sold would reduce GOOG’s overall operating margin by 1%.

And fourth, there is the obvious opportunity for Google to generate a sizeable new revenue stream in terms of handset sales. We offer our estimates later, but as quick comps, we note that the Motorola Droid is expected to sell almost 8MM units in its first year and that both of the iPhone 3G versions sold or are on track to sell well over 10MM units in their respective first years. Hypothetically, 10MM units of a $529 phone would generate $5.3B, which would be very significant for a company that generated approximately $17.4B in net revenue in 2009. Of course, the incremental operating profit would be much less significant, given the relatively much lower margins of handset sales vs. Google’s core business.

I find these estimates to be way too optimistic. The smartphone market continues to be very dynamic and fluid. The analysis also assumes that Apple and RIM are going to stand still. Other members of the Android ecosystem are going to do their best to keep Google at bay.

Now I’m not one to argue against Google’s capabilities, but we need to temper our enthusiasm around the Nexus One. Also we have to remember the reality: 20,000 Nexus One handsets were sold during the first week it was available, while Andy Rubin, head of Google’s mobile efforts, said he would be happy if Google sold around 150,000 of them.

Related GigaOM Pro Research: Google’s Mobile Strategy: Understanding the Nexus One

Corrected Tuesday 4 p.m. PT. A week after a massive earthquake struck Haiti, the country’s terrible devastation continues to captivate and motivate onlookers — and one of the simplest and best-publicized ways to help is to send a $5 or $10 donation through a text message. Combined, the two major mobile giving platforms, mGive and the Mobile Giving Foundation, have raised $42 $27 million via text message commitments from Americans and Canadians. Initially, as we reported, those mobile donations faced 90-day delays to reach Haiti, based on the emergent industry’s practices of billing subscribers via their carriers during their normal payment cycle.

However now the four major American carriers have all committed to making an exception, passing the donations on to Haiti more quickly. Verizon kicked it off with $2.98 million sent to Haiti on Friday (the total of its customers’ mobile giving at that time). Sprint said, also on Friday, it would send 80 percent of the $1.2 million its customers had donated to Haiti immediately, with the rest to follow. T-Mobile said Monday on a customer support forum that it aimed to get funds to Haiti by “this week.” And a spokesperson for AT&T told us via email, “Yes, we will advance payment of verified texted donations to the Red Cross for Haiti relief as soon as possible.” He said AT&T customers had pledged more than $9 million to the Red Cross via text as of Monday afternoon.

Carriers are also waiving text message fees for the Haiti donation process, in which a user texts a keyword like “Haiti” or “quake” to a short code, then receives a response, confirms the donation, and then receives a thank you — for a total of four text messages.

The Mobile Giving Foundation said in a press release that it continues to see the rate of mobile donations rise, with $3.5 million donated on Sunday alone for a total of more than $20 $27 million raised. mGive said separately it is processing more than $10,000 per minute in text donations at peak, and has seen $22 $23 million pledged to the Red Cross (the vast majority of all American mobile donations). The Haiti fundraising effort is easily the largest mobile giving campaign to date.

After the dust settles, the carriers and the mobile giving facilitators will have to establish better processes for mobile fundraising. While it makes complete sense to expedite desperately needed disaster relief funding, there’s a risk of opening the door to money transfer for unverified causes, and pre-authorizing donations on which subscribers then default.

Correction: This article originally treated the amounts raised by the Mobile Giving Foundation and mGive as two separate figures. However, the Mobile Giving Foundation included mGive’s fundraising totals in the numbers it released. We have corrected the story with new numbers, accurate as of Tuesday afternoon.

Last week, Verizon instituted new pricing plans that discounted its voice plans. Its biggest rival, AT&T, then came out its own cheaper voice offers. The two were simply matching what Sprint and T-Mobile USA have already been selling — cheap voice.

It’s becoming virtually impossible for an average consumer to keep track of all the various deals on offer. Thankfully, a Good Samaritan from BillShrink has put together a graphical overview of all the cell phone plans. Check it out, especially if you’re in the market for a new cell phone service or want to switch carriers.