Category: Mobile

Sling Media’s Sling Touch Control 100

In the past decade, few design trends for electronic devices have had such a seismic impact as the revolution of smallness. It’s not just that the sizes of devices have shrunk; the mindsets of designers and the whole culture of design have shifted toward all things Lilliputian.

I’ve been an industrial designer for many years, and recently, while I was attending a medical device conference, I began to think about downsized designs and the effect that they’ve had on designers and device users. While medical device developers, as well as some others, have largely continued to observe the “form-follows-function” mantra of yesterday, I am spending most of my time focused on the mantra of smallness. Many of us designers are now dealing with problems that scale down to one-tenth of a millimeter, and our clients are, too.

Great skill at design and development of diminutive things is seen as a novelty by some, but is in fact rare — and in high demand. The types of decision-making and talents required to do effective design of small things differ quite widely from norms in the overall design field. Increasingly, these talents are differentiating the design leaders from the losers.

To get a sense of how companies and designers alike are affected by this trend, consider, for example, a design problem involving integrating electronics, batteries, an antenna and other components into the slimmest possible product possible. Is this just an engineering task? No, it’s a company-wide problem to solve, affecting product branding and more. Designers must develop the best possible relationships with clients and employers to solve such problems in a holistic way.

Here are some bottom-up ideas for designers and those who work with them to consider, especially when optimizing work done at the small scale:

• Management of vendors and manufacturers that you work with is critical. These are collaborative relationships where it may be very important for, say, a part provider to actually deliver products at below tenth-of-a-millimeter accuracy. Accuracy and skill at these kinds of tasks are rare. These days, a supplier who delivers “OK” quality can actually be a strategic impediment to an entire organization.
• Off-the-shelf part selection is essentially over. If you’re in need of a strategic part, you’d better secure a good source for it and work collaboratively with that source. Customization is in high demand. Components in devices now need to be nested optimally alongside others, which almost always rules out the use of off-the-shelf parts.
• Establishing a collaborative product design process means new kinds of interdependencies within organizations. No longer is it fine to just say, “First, let’s define the core of our technology, then let’s productize it with some secondary technology and then we’ll package it and ship it.” Customizing and optimizing parts and designs that are tiny and perfect requires that core technology and design teams work effectively with marketing, sales, and operations teams on branding and many more issues.
• Management has to adjust to new design paradigms that go on at the small scale. Executives overseeing the production of devices and components implemented at the small scale can’t get by with half-hearted, uninvolved managerial gestures. They may need to know exactly how a piece of detail done at the sub-millimeter level affects an overall product, or know when an engineering team has reached physical limits.

These days, device designers are used to hearing the annoying refrain that “This device is going to be bigger than the iPhone.” More likely than not, if a product really is going to be that big, it’s because shrewd people were thinking about small things.

Gadi Amit is president of NewDealDesign.

In-post image courtesy of Sling Media, thumbnail of Glide TV.

A few weeks ago I got a chance to catch up with Hosain Rahman, founder and CEO of Aliph, the San Francisco-based company that makes the hot-selling headset, Jawbone. He outlined how and why he wanted to turn his device into a platform for what he described as “the most precious real estate on the human body.” That is the ear, Rahman said.

By offering optimized apps for this “platform” he can turn what is essentially a dumb device into a smart one. What Aliph has done is essentially bundled an OS on a very tiny chip inside the device and made it capable of receiving “intelligence” on the outside. This also allows the company to stand out from its competitors, such as Plantronics, who have started to flood the market with Jawbone-inspired headsets.

The platform, called MyTalk, allows you to do a few things. For instance, if you pair the Jawbone icon with an Apple iPhone, then you get an icon telling you Jawbone’s battery status (as seen here). If you connect the Jawbone via a USB cable and log into the MyTalk web site, you can customize the device by adding audio apps such as Voice Dial, Directory Assistance via 1800Free411, Jott, and Dial2Do. You can also download six different voice personas that let you know incoming caller IDs via speech. It is good to see Aliph attempting new things with the device, though I am not sure how the average user is going to take to this new platform.

MyTalk, which launched today as a private beta, works only with company’s new Jawbone Icon headset. The most diminutive of all Jawbone headsets, the device  seems to be very good at its job — making it possible to have noise-free conversations. Aliph has made some big improvements in its design and ease of use, even as it has shrunk it further. I played around with it for a few minutes, so I have only had limited exposure to the device. It does seem that other gadget-reviewers like it.

I didn’t really want to review it – mostly because I am more of a plain old wired headset kinda guy, and mostly because talking on bluetooth headsets can easily convince people that you’re a crazy person.

The growing popularity of smartphones and high-speed wireless broadband networks are proving to be two major catalysts for the wireless industry. As a result, expect its revenues to barrel past the $1 trillion-mark by 2013, says Informa Telecom’s & Media, a London-based market research group. That compares to revenues of $208 billion in 2008 and $330 billion in 2009. By 2014, global mobile penetration will hit 92 percent with about 6.7 billion subscribers, the firm predicts.

Such numbers make clear why the industry is so focused on data. According to Informa’s predictions, nearly 30 percent of the world’s wireless connections are going to be using 3G or higher wireless broadband technologies and by 2014, nearly half of the world’s 6.7 billion mobile users will be using some combination of 3G and 3.5G+ technologies and about 33 percent of the total mobile users will be using 3.5 G+ technologies such as WiMAX and LTE (see related GigaOM Pro research, sub. required: 4G State of the Union).

To me this is just further proof that wireless broadband is a massive opportunity, of which we have only barely scratched the surface.

Image courtesy of Flickr user Ed Yourdon

Tuesday’s 7.0 earthquake in Haiti knocked out the country’s only direct submarine cable system, according to TeleGeography, leaving it to rely largely on satellite communications and damaged mobile networks for international communications. The undersea fiber-optic link has a transmission capacity of 1.92 terabytes per second and connects Port-au-Prince to the Bahamas and then to the U.S. Because the link came online two years ago, though, much of Haiti’s international communications still depends on satellite systems that have likely been strained in the aftermath of the catastrophe.

While most Internet service providers are still operational, a lack of electricity has limited fixed-line access for the majority of the country’s residents. Digicel, Haiti’s largest mobile network operator, said its network was damaged but is still operational. The carrier is trying to send technicians to the island to ease congestion and allow more users on the network. And emergency satellite firms such as France’s TSF are establishing secure Internet and voice systems for aid agencies, as well as setting up call centers for those affected by the earthquake.

In related news, T-Mobile USA said that it will allow free international long distance calls to Haiti through January 31, 2010, and retroactive to the earthquake on January 12, 2010. The company said that T-Mobile customers who may already be in Haiti will be able to roam on T-Mobile’s partner networks in Haiti (operated locally in Haiti under the names Voila and Digicel) free-of-charge through the end of the month.

Image courtesy Flickr user Victor Chapa.

Verizon today finally unveiled new pricing plans that reduce the cost of voice while keeping a customer’s overall bill about the same, thanks to making data plans mandatory on many popular phones. The carrier also said it plans to reduce the number of devices it carries to 50 from more than 80 today, and to further reduce that number as time goes on. The goal of these pricing changes is to get more people hooked on data in advance of Verizon rolling out its next-generation Long Term Evolution (LTE) network.

Beginning Jan. 18, Verizon customers will be able to get an unlimited nationwide voice plan for $69.99. Unlimited voice, texts, pictures and video messages will cost $89.99, and prepaid versions of those plans will cost $5 more a month. When it comes to data, Verizon has divided its handsets into three categories (see slide): smartphones, multimedia phones and feature phones. Smartphones have needed a data plan for a while, and now Verizon is requiring a data plan at $9.99 for 25 MB (40 cents a MB) for its multimedia phones, as we previously reported.

Verizon has simplified its pricing to six single line plans and eight family plans from a total of 40 plans, which should make comparisons among them all a little bit easier. Lowell McAdam, president and CEO of Verizon Wireless, said the company will also allow tethering with its smartphones, and would make an announcement related to that capability sometime in the future. He stressed that Verizon’s efforts with pricing were to get more people to use data. Such data use won’t harm the company’s network, he said. It will also bring in more revenue and keep the average revenue per user at the carrier on the rise.

For those seeing a chance for savings, you actually need to call Big Red or go online to change your current plans. And no word at all on what pricing for LTE plans will look like, or what the deal is with Verizon’s CEO’s love of bundled plans while its CTO touts usage-based plans.

Related GigaOM Pro Research:

Metered Mobile Data is Coming — Here’s How
4G: State of the Union

The tech earnings season kicked off with a bang this afternoon, as Intel reported much higher-than-expected fourth-quarter profits of $2.3 billion vs. just $234 million for the comparable period the year before, and revenue of $10.6 billion, up 29 percent. ”Our ability to weather this business cycle demonstrates that microprocessors are indispensable in our modern world,” said President and CEO Paul Otellini. Still, for the decade ahead, Intel can’t count on high PC market growth and other familiar benefactors.

Among notable results for the company’s various divisions, Data Center Group revenue was up 21 percent year-over-year (there have been predictions that better times lie ahead for companies selling high-margin servers and producing chips for them), and average selling price for chips came in higher as well (so the company is selling more than just low-priced Atom chips). Intel does continue to benefit from growth in netbook sales with its Atom chips, and a possible coming wave of upgrades to Windows 7 at businesses could benefit it as well.

Nevertheless, as this decade begins, things are different for Intel compared to the start of the previous two. At the onset of the 90s and the Naughts, dramatic growth potential for PCs made it obvious that Intel’s fortunes would rise significantly with them. Although a solid rebound in the PC market helped it in the fourth quarter (keeping in mind that the fourth quarter of 2008 was abysmal for the PC market), the company no longer has the same long-term, PC-driven wind at its back to look forward to for the next decade — and even Intel’s presence inside Apple systems can’t make up for that problem.

Phones on Fire, PCs — Not So Much

Researchers at Gartner have just predicted that by 2013, mobile phones will handily outpace PCs as the predominant way for people to interact with the web. Gartner foresees the total number of PCs at 1.78 billion in three years, while the number of smartphones and web-ready phones will sit at 1.82 billion units, with rapid  growth ahead for mobile phones. The trend toward mobile usage will change the whole infrastructure of the web, and web design.

Meanwhile, despite good notices for its CES demo of the LG GW990 smartphone running Intel’s new Moorestown chip and the Moblin OS, the fact is that Intel, like Microsoft, just doesn’t have enough equity in the rise of smartphones. As ARM CEO Warren East told Computerworld this week:

“We’ve been saying that the 100 percent share of applications processors in phones that we have can’t continue. We don’t really see Intel making meaningful inroads into it, not for many years, probably never. In order [for device makers] to switch architectures, the Intel product has to be significantly better to outweigh the cost of switching.”

ARM chips are headed beyond mobile phones and will make it into netbooks, smartbooks, and many new kinds of portable devices, where Qualcomm is becoming an increasingly significant player, in addition to its existing presence in mobile phones. Qualcomm is also leaping past Intel’s 32-nanometer manufacturing technology, and will produce 28-nanometer chips. In phones and in many new types of mobile devices, that advantage could help deliver faster chips that cost less than Intel’s. AMD is behind Intel in 32-nanometer chip manufacturing, giving Intel a short-term advantage, but will catch up next year, increasing competition between the companies.

In the Crosshairs

In addition to these issues, Intel is under intense scrutiny for any exclusionary or anti-competitive practices that regulators can dredge up, and is ensconced in a wave of bad PR. Nvidia had to be dancing in the streets as the FTC recently sued Intel, claiming that it abused its market power and cut competitors out of the marketplace. Nvidia wants to make sure vendors can buy and use its Ion processors that accelerate graphics inside netbooks containing Intel’s Atom chips without paying a higher price for the Atom chip.

The FTC’s move follows a huge fine from Europe last year, and Intel also paid out $1.25 billion last year to settle long-standing disputes over business practices with AMD. The company is even drawing criticism for what many people feel are exclusionary practices toward proposed industry wide-standards such as USB 3.0.  The new standard is much faster than USB 2.0, but Intel has guaranteed its slow adoption by pledging not to support it until next year.  Why would it do that? The answer is that it favors its own LightPeak connectivity technology, which has little industry traction.

As long-time Intel CEO Andy Grove used to say when the soaring PC market was guaranteeing Intel quarter after quarter of success, “only the paranoid survive.” With mobile phones reshaping tech usage and the web itself, the PC market growing more slowly now, scrutiny from regulators, and more, Intel’s sterling results from today certainly don’t mean the company shouldn’t be paranoid about tomorrow.

Image courtesy of Intel.

Updated: Verizon has made an art form of sending mixed messages, but it raised things to a whole new level last week when two of its senior executives made public statements that made clear the company hasn’t decided what its new mobile data pricing strategy will be. CTO Dick Lynch told the Washington Post on Thursday that the carrier was looking at some form of usage-based pricing for its next-generation wireless data service.

However, Verizon’s CEO Ivan Seidenberg told an audience of investors the day before that the carrier will focus on selling more mobile data bundles as it tries to make up for declining voice revenue. Well, Verizon, which is it? Will wireless data be bundled or will it be usage-based?

Lynch said Verizon would likely introduce a pricing scheme in which customers will be charged a base rate for using the upcoming next-generation Long Term Evolution wireless network, and then charged another fee based on how much bandwidth they use. Yet when Seidenberg was asked about the opportunity to grow data revenue, he replied by saying that Verizon was experimenting with ways to segment pricing for data consumption. He added (emphasis mine):

Frankly, we have to address this issue long term because in the final analysis, voice dilution will continue, and we either sell bundles of data or we don’t make up that difference. So I think if you look at the drivers of it, data, 35%, should go to 50% to 60% of revenues over a reasonable period of time.

I think the unmeasured aspect of data will be video. The experts would suggest that maybe in five years, 50% to 60% of mobile traffic could be video. Even if that’s off by a little bit, it’s still a big number, so I think the drivers of more data and more bundles are there.

The key for us is to get out in front of the architecture issues, the distribution issues, and to make sure that the market — the customer is conditioned correctly to pay for the value of that. That’s been the biggest difficulty there. But I think that’s happening.

I asked spokesman Jeff Nelson about the apparent contradiction, who said: “Dick Lynch discussed potential pricing in a 4G LTE environment. We have not rolled out a 4G network, and won’t until late 2010.” He then referred me to another spokesperson who handles pricing, who didn’t return my email.

I find it hard to believe that Seidenberg is tying five-year predictions on mobile video growth to selling data bundles without taking into account the rollout of the carrier’s LTE network, planned for later this year. Seidenberg is clearly telling Wall Street that data bundles are profitable, and that if the carrier doesn’t create bundled plans it can’t offset the decline in voice revenue.

So what’s likely going to happen is that Verizon, seeking to keep data revenues high, will come up with a plan that it calls usage-based, but is really just a misuse of the term to deliver tiered pricing in the form of data bundles. We’ve seen this before as wireline and wireless ISPs attempt to implement tiered pricing under the guise that it forces people to actually pay for what they use. Time Warner Cable made this argument the linchpin of its efforts to implement tiered pricing for broadband.

So when Lynch talks about charging customers based on how much bandwidth they use, there’s no guarantee that those charges will be on a per-gigabyte or per-megabyte basis. Customers may get stuck paying a base LTE subscription fee and then have to add on an extra data bundle so they can pay for the bandwidth they use. In fact, judging by the recent data plan pricing rumors, the cost per MB for the user will go up.

Update: Maybe we’ll get some answers on this and other rumored Verizon’s price changes during a webcast tomorrow morning when Verizon Wireless President and CEO Lowell McAdam and Verizon Chief Financial Officer John Killian will “discuss wireless strategies to drive continued growth.”  For those that don’t want to get up early, I’ll let you know what they say.

Thumbnail image courtesy of Flickr user caesararum

Between Gmail, Google Docs, Zoho, Facebook, Basecamp, Flickr, Twitter and countless other applications, much of our data now sits in the cloud. But few people ever stop to think about where that data is stored or how it might be accessed or used. So who exactly does own your data and who has access to it? And how much privacy can you expect?

These questions get all the more complex because many web application providers are using cloud services from the likes of Amazon and Google, which means data doesn’t necessarily sit on the app provider’s servers. Additionally, there is an increased use of APIs to facilitate greater interoperability among web apps, meaning that your data may be used in many ways that you don’t expect. How can you learn more about the rights you have to your data, as well as the rights others have to it? GigaOM Pro (subscription required) this week has a great report by Simon Mackie that tackles these questions. The report delves into two main issues:

Data Privacy. When it comes to the U.S., the Fourth Amendment states that people should “be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures…” But web-hosted applications and cloud services are too new for the courts to have been able to provide far-reaching guidance on data privacy online. Issues related to data privacy get even more complex when data is stored outside of the country. Some cloud services, such as Amazon’s, let you choose the region in which you want your data stored; and some, such as Google’s, don’t.

Data Security. There are any number of threats to your data online. Your application or service provider could go belly up, you could fall prey to hackers or you could simply be locked out of your account. The good news is that data portability and security policies are being scrutinized closely by several organizations, and there are steps you can take to reduce your vulnerability in the could.

For much more on these and other issues pertaining to your data and the cloud, see Simon’s full report.

UPDATED: Text-to-give campaigns have gone viral in the two days following the massively destructive 7.0 earthquake in Haiti on Jan. 12. The immediacy of texting makes it incredibly easy for those following the quake from afar to show their support by adding a small amount to their cell phone bills (especially in the U.S., where the two major campaigns are based). But at this point, it’s far from immediate that the $5 you send to Wyclef Jean’s Yele Haiti foundation or $10 to the American Red Cross actually gets to Haiti, because it’s standard practice in the young mobile giving industry for donations to be delayed by 90 days.

The Red Cross, whose campaign is being publicized by the White House and the U.S. State Department, is accepting $10 donations via texting “Haiti” to 90999 in a program powered by Mobile Accord’s mGive. As of this morning, that campaign alone had raised $3 million (see the map image below for a distribution of donations). The State Department had actually been responsible for initiating the Red Cross campaign with a call to Mobile Accord chairman James Eberhard (who had met Secretary Clinton at a dinner earlier this month, but got the call while traveling in Pakistan this week). It was activated at 9 p.m. ET on Tuesday and had raised $800,000 by 3 p.m. Wednesday.

$3 million easily tops mGive’s previous record of $450,000 donated to Alicia Keys’ children foundation, which was publicized through “American Idol.” The Mobile Giving Foundation, which is powering Wyclef’s parallel campaign and has not yet released Haiti totals, said it expected to raise a total of $2 million in all of 2009. Both organizations say neither they nor mobile carriers are taking a cut from the Haiti donations.

However both Mobile Accord (which is a for-profit company, but operates 100 percent pass-through mobile donation campaigns through the mGive Foundation) and the Mobile Giving Foundation admit it usually takes 90 days from the time of donation to the time it is received by the intended charity, in part because they are collected through each customer’s normal cell phone billing cycle. That’s eons in disaster recovery time.

Earlier today mGive posted to Twitter, “We are currently working with the carriers to reduce this window. We will tweet when he have an update on this.” A spokesperson for mGive added via email, “It would be inaccurate to talk about them as ‘carrier’ delays. The delays are just in the business processes that were set up when the mobile giving channel was created. Like all new systems, it will improve as we grow and learn.”

A spokesperson for Verizon — which like most carriers is waiving SMS fees for Haiti donations — told DailyFinance, “We understand the need to get this money into the pipeline ASAP and we’re looking at ways to do that internally. People want to give now, and the money needs to get there as soon as possible.”

Sounds like a plan. C’mon carriers — let’s get cracking!

Update: Around noon PT Friday, Verizon Wireless said it had advanced $2.98 million in mobile donations committed by its customers to Haiti. “Time is of the essence, and it makes sense for us to toss aside our normal financial processes to get money where it can do the most good, in the fastest way possible,” said Verizon Wireless president and CEO Lowell McAdam in a statement.

Haiti-related mobile fundraising campaigns, via Mobile Giving Insider:

• Text HAITI to 90999 to donate $10 to the American Red Cross
• Text HAITI to 25383 to donate $5 to International Rescue Committee
• Text HAITI to 45678 to donate $5 to the Salvation Army in Canada
• Text YELE to 501501 to donation $5 to Yele
• Text RELIEF to 30644 to get automatically connected to Catholic Relief Services and donate money with your credit card
• Text HAITI to 864833 to donate $5 to The United Way
• Text CERF to 90999 to donate $5 to The United Nations Foundation
• Text DISASTER to 90999 to donate $10 to Compassion International

Photo for the feature slot courtesy of mGive. You can send your money using their website as well.

British scribe Paul Carr is not one to mince words. For him, Google’s newfound morality around censorship and China is too little, too late. Four years too late, to be precise. And I agree with him — up to a point. Morality has to be absolute; it cannot be used as a tool of convenience. That said, and despite being a born cynic, I’m actually unable to view Google’s decision through the same lens.

I mean, if as a society we’re all too ready to forgive steroid-enhanced baseball players when they come clean, how is that we can’t give a company a second chance when it finally decides to do the right thing? Moreover, the company is risking a lot of money by adopting what Carr describes as “scorched earth diplomacy” — especially when it comes to Android.

J.P. Morgan estimates that Google’s move is going to cost it some $600 million in 2010 revenues. UBS puts the sales loss forecast in the $400-$500 million range. Others estimate that it could be even lower — between 1 and 1.5 percent of 2010 revenues. Citibank, meanwhile, believes that nearly 1 percent of Google’s profits are at risk.

The wide variance in the loss estimates makes clear that no one really knows how big a financial gamble this decision is. And that alone makes it a brave move.

But while many argue that it isn’t logical for a publicly traded company to take a stance that’s going to hamper its ability to capture the opportunities offered by such a fast-growing Internet market — China currently has 298 million Internet users (and 99.4 million connections) representing just 22 percent of its population — as far as I’m concerned, the biggest impact of Google’s decision will be on its mobile efforts. With more than 638 million wireless users (according to Telegeography), China has already emerged as the world’s largest mobile market. Sales of mobile phones in the country are expected to grow 21 percent this year alone.

The bottom line is that Google’s decision to take on the Chinese political establishment means that it no longer controls Android’s destiny in China. In theory, Android is open source and as such, handled by the Open Handset Alliance. But in reality, it is closely associated with Google. For starters, the banning of Google.cn would close a marketing channel for Google’s Nexus One device, if and when it was launched in China.

The country was well on its way to helping Google grow Android. Chinese handset makers such as Huawei and ZTE have been some of the earliest supporters of the upstart OS. China Mobile already sells its own version of an Android-based phone system called OPhone. Motorola is making a big push into the Chinese market with smartphones based on the Android OS. And China-based Lenovo has developed numerous Android-based products, including the LePhone. Any undue pressure from the establishment would mean that most of these companies would have to abandon Android in favor of other mobile operating environments.

Google’s willingness to risk not only its present (search) but also its future (mobile), shows that as a company it’s willing to go where no Western company has gone before: in China’s face. The next few months will determine whether Carr is being too harsh or I am being too generous in our respective judgments. For now, at least on this one decision, I am on the side of Larry & Sergey.