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For the longest time, the only two entities that made money from a mobile phone were the carrier and the handset manufacturer. Open and shut [1].

No longer. Not only are more mobile phones being sold now than ever before, there are more types of folks making money off it. For smartphones with an ecosystem such as iPhone, there is

- Apple, the iPhone manufacturer

- AT&T (in the U.S.) that provides cell phone connectivity

- tens of thousands of developers who sell their iPhone applications through the App Store (with Apple getting a cut). And this is not just indie developers. Amazon stands to make a huge bundle through book sales via its Kindle Reader app for iPhone [2]

- businesses that create free iPhone applications but make money off ads within their applications [3]

- record labels that offer their music for sales on the iTunes Music Store

- television networks and Hollywood studios that offer their TV shows and movies (respectively) for sale/rent, also on the iTunes Music Store

Of course, this runaway success has inspired every smartphone label to scramble to bake its own pie. Witness the plethora of application stores (Palm, Nokia, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Android) [4], and Nokia’s attempts to sell music.

 

Open or closed?

The more mature a product category gets, the more players there are that stand to make money off it. That’s because the pioneer quickly realizes that for true scale, it must “open up”  the product to entities other than itself. And that’s where it seems we have from history, a clear lesson: IBM opened up the specs of its original PC, and hordes of beige box manufacturers crowded Big Blue out of its own market. Apple itself nearly destroyed all that the Macintosh stood for when it licensed the Mac to other manufacturers.

“Opening up” a successful product and creating an open ecosystem divides the pie into so many slices that the pioneer is left picking up only crumbs. Apple’s iPhone ecosystem has been “opened up” to all those players above through the iPhone OS developer API, the iTunes Music Store and the iPhone App Store, but the ecosystem itself remains tightly closed.

 

[1] OK, so there were (are) electronic component manufacturers on the source side and advertising agencies on the sell side. But let’s limit ourselves to those that gained directly from the mobile phone. 

[2] Also with iPhone OS 3.0, developers can now charge for features within the application (unlocking extra weapons and purchasing weaponry within games being the most commonly cited examples), so you could have a free basic application with paid features if you like. Before OS 3.0, the best that developers could do was offer separate “free” basic and “paid” full-featured apps.

[3] Take Twitterific, for instance. The free version of the application inserts ads into your tweetstream.

[4] With comical attempts to make them sound different (Palm Software Store, Nokia Ovi Store, Blackberry App World, Windows Mobile Marketplace, Android Market). 

When it comes to the Internet in India, the low-hanging fruit has beeen picked, across sectors. Think Travel. Books. Jobs. Dating. Electronics. Money. In his post today, Rajesh Jain lists a few more: Search (dominated by Google), News (Rediff, NDTV, CNN-IBN), Email (Yahoo, Google, Microsoft, Rediff), Cricket (Cricinfo/ESPN), Video (YouTube/Google).

Online pioneers have lapped up the biggest brands and most popular goods: the largest cities, the biggest hotel chains, the most popular travel destinations, the widest marriageable demography, the most desirable gadgets, the most viral videos, the news everybody reads, the the matches everyone watches.

Now comes the hard part. The cities only a few want to travel to [1], the outliers for whom it isn’t easy finding a match [2] , books in regional languages, people with odd skills, niche but tremendously useful gadgets, highly technical videos. There’s a market for all those. In aggregate, they’re as large and lucrative as those that have already been monetized [3].

Then there’s an even larger market – for individual professional services. The mother of all yellow pages, with a location-based and rating-based component. One that connects me to the nearest puncture shop when my car has a flat on a stretch of highway (and takes Rs. 10 for that connection), directs me to the nearest ATM in any city, to the most reliable service center for my phone.

There is no technological barrier to setting up these businesses anymore (you really don’t need broadband for most of this – just plain Internet access, and in some cases, a cellphone). What makes this hard is convincing small businesses/individuals to sign on. Building trust and credibility. Selling to Jet Airways is much easier than to Pravin Puncturewalla on a random national highway. If you’re willing to tackle that, you have a successful business.

Finally, Rajesh has a compelling vision of the “now-new-near” web, which you should read. I think that “niche” is about as much the future as the others. I also think that “now” and “new” are synonymous for the vast majority of cases, so I propose that tomorrow’s web will be the “now-near-niche” web (built around the evolving Internet Operating System)

[1] RedBus.in is doing a spectacular job with that, by my estimates. Driving to work today I spotted a travel service that did a Hyderabad-Kolhapur (!) bus route. And hey presto, Redbus.in has that route listed.

[2] Secondshaadi barely scratches the surface, but hey, it’s a start.

[3] Yes, yes. It’s the same old tired Long Tail phenomenon. Let’s set aside discussions of how cool the phenomenon itself is and why it works, and explore how you can build businesses in India with it.

The Silicon Alley Insider recently calculated that the New York Times could actually cut down its costs in half by gifting all its subscribers a free Kindle. The immediate conclusion seems to be that the Kindle is the end to the U.S. newspaper industry’s woes. Get everyone a Kindle, you’re back in business.

Or not.

The article’s conclusion is probably right (this is what this post is about; the Kindle could indeed help the U.S. newspaper industry) but its reasoning is entirely incorrect.

Costs (printing, distribution or others) were never the newspaper industry’s biggest problem; it was revenues. Readers have been moving online in droves, resulting in plummeting print sales and print advertising revenues. Also as newspapers have found out, generating revenue from online advertising wasn’t easy. Advertising on the web works fundamentally differently from print. As Nicholas Carr points out:

A print newspaper provides an array of content—local stories, national and international reports, news analyses, editorials and opinion columns, photographs, sports scores, stock tables, TV listings, cartoons, and a variety of classified and display advertising—all bundled together into a single product. People subscribe to the bundle, or buy it at a newsstand, and advertisers pay to catch readers’ eyes as they thumb through the pages. The publisher’s goal is to make the entire package as attractive as possible to a broad set of readers and advertisers. The newspaper as a whole is what matters, and as a product it’s worth more than the sum of its parts.

When a newspaper moves online, the bundle falls apart. Readers don’t flip through a mix of stories, advertisements, and other bits of content. They go directly to a particular story that interests them, often ignoring everything else. In many cases, they bypass the newspaper’s “front page” altogether, using search engines, feed readers, or headline aggregators like Google News, Digg, and Daylife to leap directly to an individual story.

In other words, the true value of the newspaper – the bundle – is lost once online. It becomes a set of standalone articles, each responsible for its own revenue.

Here is where the Kindle can change the game back in favor of print. Since newspapers on the Kindle are subscription-based – just as in print – the bundle can now be restored. Only the medium will have changed, from paper to e-ink. In fact, if Amazon can track the location of a Kindle, it could even display local advertisements, in exactly the same way that local editions of a national newspaper do.

But not so fast. Newspapers (and their partner, Amazon) also need to understand why users moved online in the first place: the convenience of having unlimited news accessible instantly for free. This is what they need to deliver. For the bundle to work, the Kindle must make all its newspapers available for free, instead of charging an arbitrary subscription fee. Revenue from advertisements (on a per-impression basis, since per-click makes no sense in the absence of a web browser) should be split between Amazon (the medium) and the newspapers (the content).

Of course, we still don’t know how many online readers will bite and make the move to the Kindle. But the U.S. newspaper industry sure can’t afford to not try.

Microsoft will lay off 5000 staff over the next 18 months. This is partly due to an 8% decline in client revenue attributed to “continued shift to lower priced netbooks”. Netbook sales have been robust. Buyers prefer Windows XP over Vista on netbooks because of performance issues, but Microsoft makes lower margins on XP. This is essentially the problem. Industry analysts are awaiting Windows 7, its Windows release.

But it won’t help.

Microsoft says Windows 7 is netbook-friendly (and it might well be), but that’s irrelevant. The issue is higher margins. If Microsoft prices Windows 7 like Vista, it’s going to raise the total price of netbooks. That is unacceptable. After all, the USP of the netbook is Cheap.

Now, I think the company’s realized the underlying problem: Mobile and Desktop are moving towards each other.

The company is more likely to make higher margins on its Mobile Operating System than on its Desktop Operating System. High-priced smartphones are becoming increasingly popular and also more sophisticated. On the other hand, PCs are getting smaller and lighter – and cheaper.

Most commentators have already identified Mobile and the Cloud as the defining markets for the immediate future and they’re probably right. Microsoft has plays (albeit relatively weak ones) in both these in the form of Windows Mobile and Windows Live.

I think we’re going to see a shift in investment toward these two markets, and away from the PC market. At the minimum, expect a quick rollout of Office Live soon (either free or monetized) and Windows Mobile 6.5.

At an engagement ceremony I attended this October, every one of the guests was a photographer, clicking away at this, that or the other all the time. Not only have you seen this; over the past couple of years you’ve clicked your way through a few ceremonies/parties/gatherings too.

Except that things have changed somewhat: in 2006, your fellow shutterbugs probably used point-and-shoot digital cameras. Chances are they were using their mobile phones at that last ceremony. Chances are that you were too.

No surprise; consider this. The current installed base of mobile phone cameras is 1.9 billion, up from nearly zero 5 years ago. In contrast, the camera industry only ships 100 million (one-tenth of a billion) devices a year.

Whatever happened to the standalone camera industry? And how long, you might also ask, before they fade into oblivion?

I think the answer to the first, discussed in this post, is that the camera industry stopped innovating.

For years, the Megapixel ruled. Consumers bought a new digital camera based solely on “how many MP it had”, fed by copious advertising  by manufacturers promoting this very lust. So, roughly, 3 Megapixels in 2002 went to 5 in 2004 to 7 in 2006 to 8 now (perhaps even 10) – and stopped.

At some point – perhaps a couple of years ago – folks began to realize that the pictures they were clicking with their existing digital camera were good enough. When they wanted an upgrade and looked around, all they saw were more Megapixels. Clearly, no one was listening to them. Camera manufacturers – Sony, Nikon, Kodak, Olympus and others – probably thought they didn’t have to. Even if existing owners didn’t upgrade, there were so many first-time camera buyers out there. You didn’t have to own a larger slide of the pie if the pie itself was expanding.

This is where the camera manufacturers made their big mistake. At that very time, mobile phone manufacturers were busy embedding tiny 1 and 2 megapixels cameras into their devices. Millions of would-be-first-time-digital-camera buyers bought Rs. 9000 phones and suddenly found themselves with a ready digital camera. The photos were grainy and often out-of-focus, but hey – the camera now fit into their pocket, and was always with them to capture moments with friends, on the bus, in the train, on the street, at home, at outings, gatherings, ceremonies, parties, everywhere. Suddenly, the lure of the Megapixel didn’t hold sway at all. What mattered was that this little camera was always there. It also helped that the same block of plastic was, often, a music player, video player and recorder, radio and, occasionally, Internet browser.

Guts.

By this time, the camera manufacturers had had their first “uh-oh” moment, as sales of phone-enabled cameras shot through the roof. They scrambled back to appeal to their base of existing owners, attempting to sell them on something other than MP. So you began to hear noises about everything ranging from image stabilization to multiple face-recognition.

But the mobile phone industry wasn’t idle either. While the first generation of mobile phone cameras were dreadful, the second wasn’t. Mobile phones that cost around Rs. 15000 to Rs. 20000 – the price range of a good point-and-shoot digital camera – were now sporting 5 megapixel cameras (more than what consumers wanted), advanced lens technology (for instance, the Carl-Zeiss lenses in the top-end Nokia Nseries cameras), great flash (the Xenon flash in the Nokia N82) and customizable settings on par with their standalone counterparts. In other words, phone cameras were as good as standalone digital point-and-shoot cameras. The choice for buyers was now between i.) their existing camera plus a few incremental features, and ii.) their existing camera +  music + web + maps + video + kitchen sink. Making that choice was easy.

The female of the species is deadlier than the male. Unquestionably.

Next – what the camera industry can do to stay relevant in the coming years.

On my N82: spent some time with Opera Mini after a while – had been using Nokia’s built-in S60 Browser exclusively over  the past few months.

Here’s a list of peeves and loves about each browser.

 

Opera Mini Good

• Faster page load times
• Snappier controls
• Smoother scrolling
• Slightly better font rendering (all of above relative to S60 Browser)
• Address TLD auto-complete: (type www.opera. and  a drop-down list appears with opera.com, opera.org , opera.net)
• Speed Dial-like shortcuts for bookmarks

Opera Mini Bad

• No support for multiple tabs
• “Small” font too small, “Medium” too big
• Screen does not occupy entire width when phone tilted (in portrait mode). I don’t think the browser is accelerometer-aware
• Not possible to copy URL

S60 Browser Good

• Does not ask for permission to connect; allows selection of default access point. This is because, unlike Opera Mini, which is a Java app, the S60 browser is a native S60 app.
• Page overview – a shrunk view of the current page which you can quickly scroll around on.
• Attractive Back/Forward implementation. Page previews flip forward and back, like moving your mouse across the OS X dock.

S60 Browser Bad

• Supports multiple tabs but cannot open new one!
• No “top”, “bottom”, “pgup”, “pgdn” keypad shortcuts
• Tedious process to copy URL. Bookmark current page, navigate to Edit bookmarks, copy URL, delete bookmark.

What else

Haven’t had a chance to check out Skyfire yet; the founders have decided, in a sadly common blinkered move, to limit launch to the US. A mobile browser from Mozilla’s been “just around the corner” for a while now (and won’t show up on S60 first). Google’s promised a mobile version of Chrome, but my guess is that Android will get it before S60 does. I don’t see mobile Safari on S60 ever. And it hurts to even speak of mobile IE.

Last week Nokia announced that its Mail for Exchange application would now be available for any Nokia phone that ran the Series60 3rd Edition platform. Immediately, about 80 million users across forty-three S60v3 phones can now integrate into a Microsoft Exchange environment.

Also, a few months ago, Nokia released the E71 smartphone. Sporting a QWERTY keyboard, a thin form factor, and attractive metal casing, the E71 is Nokia’s first serious enterprise phone. Its predecessor, the E61i, was a capable phone hobbled by a miserable plastic body, poor build quality and bad branding (the E61, E61i, E62 [1]). The E71, in contrast, is simply beautiful.

A combination of the application and the phone, then, is supposed to demonstrate that Nokia is now serious about the Enterprise. That it is the first choice when a company’s IT department chooses a smartphone to mobilize its workforce.

Not so fast. Research in Motion’s Blackberry series of phones rule the roost in that space. And it doesn’t look like Nokia’s in a position yet to unseat RIM.

Nokia’s Enterprise Problem

 

 

Nokia’s problem are two-fold. One, any enterprise phone has to have a physical QWERTY keyboard, since it’ll mostly be used for email on the go. Nokia only has one device in this form factor. Its history with such phones, as we saw, doesn’t inspire confidence. And it doesn’t have a product roadmap around its QWERTY phones. No organization’s IT department is going to fit its executives with a phone like that. Not when the alternative is Blackberry [2].

Nokia has also never tried to seriously sell to the Enterprise. Sources tell me that in India, the phone is mostly being sold via the retail channel; corporate deals have been non-existent. It doesn’t surprise me. Most of Nokia’s previous Eseries phones had been pretty, Wifi-equipped toys with all sorts of form factors (candybar, clamshell, slider), and tiny 9-button dialpads [3]. Not the sort of product line a sales guy would be proud demonstrating to a firm’s CIO.

Blackberry’s massive brand is also going to be tough to compete with. As things stand today, given a choice, an executive would almost always choose a Blackberry over an E71. Features don’t even matter; just that he/she wants to be seen carrying a Blackberry. RIM has achieved what even Apple hasn’t been able to – ubiquity as well as desirability.

How can Nokia compete in the Enterprise?

1. Concentrate on winning accounts at companies that haven’t set up a mobile device infrastructure for their workforce, instead of converting existing WinMobile/Blackberry accounts. Few IT departments want to support more than one device family. But a surprising number of large firms haven’t gone mobile yet, and there’s where Nokia can leverage one crucial advantage: Price.

2. Reduce price through reduced margins. Nokia commands massive margins on its Eseries phones currently, I’ve learnt. It could win any bidding war by cutting those margins. Blackberry will make it a neck-and-neck affair on features, but Nokia could win on price.

3. Over the next 18 months, build a product portfolio around mobile devices with QWERTY keypads, with a 3-tier low-end, medium and flagship strategy. Nokia’s own Nseries 7x, 8x and 9x models are a good example of this. And retire the 9-button keypad Eseries models [4]. They aren’t going to win Nokia any accounts.

Conclusion

Nokia’s crafted a brilliant entertainment devices strategy around its Nseries branded phones. Not so with its enterprise strategy. While the Eseries brand is strong, Nokia has problems both with its Eseries phones as well as the marketing around them.

Either the company can pull along anaemically, selling “business” phones through its retail channels, or it can take on Blackberry by winning more corporate accounts. That’s going to require changes in its product, pricing and marketing strategy. Tall ask, tall results.

 

Footnotes:

[1] There were 3 models, nearly indistinguishable externally. The E61 did not sport a camera but had WiFi and 3G. The E62 had neither a camera nor WiFi/3G. The E61i had both. And all 3 were ugly. (back)

[2] Of course there’s Windows Mobile, which runs QWERTY phones by Samsung, Motorola and Palm. Nokia’s E71, in my opinion, trumps Samsung’s Blackjack II and Motorola’s Q9c. Palm practically invented the smartphone market but is now in a dead slump. Then there’s iPhone. Unless it gets a physical keyboard, Apple isn’t winning any deals. Open and shut. I’ve used both the iPod Touch and the Blackberry Curve, and there’s no contest when it comes to doing email. Neither of these are game-changers in the Enterprise smartphone market. (back)

[3] Ironically, with the release of the Blackberry Pearl Flip 8220, RIM has decided to go the other way and test the clamshell market. (back)

[4] There have been repeated calls among the Nokia enthusiast community to bring some Eseries-only features to Nseries devices, notably the ability to display additional information and notifications on the home screen, ability to define “modes” – a collection of active standby shortcuts and themes, the enhanced calendar, a fully functional version of Quickoffice, among others. The E51 and E66 with enhanced cameras (they’re cheap to put into a phone) and standard 3.5mm audio jacks could function admirably as Nseries devices with the above features.

Alternatively (and controversially), it could create another brand for small businesses, (Eseries Lite? Ugh.) that need the business capabilities of Eseries, but for whom the E71 and its ilk are too expensive. (back)

Yesterday, Apple pulled an application named Podcaster from the iPhone App Store. With Podcaster, iPhone/iPod Touch users could “update podcasts directly on the device over wifi.” Apple rejected the application because

Podcaster assists in the distribution of podcasts, it duplicates the functionality of the Podcast section of iTunes.

This is about as anti-competitive as it gets – applications that threaten iTunes’s monopoly over loading content to/from iPhone/iPod Touch will not be allowed on to Apple’s iPhone App Store. John Gruber of Daring Fireball fame has more to say about Apple’s exclusionary policies.

So some apps are banned. So what?

This is a big deal because App Stores are becoming an important way (and for iPhone/iPod Touch, the only way) to add functionality to a mobile device – whether it’s from Apple or Nokia or Android. Installing applications on your mobile phone is tricky at best and throw-your-hands-up-it’s-impossible at worst, which is why such App Stores (which make the job much simpler) will gain a lot of traction in the months to come. This places enormous power in the hands of App Store owner – either the handset or mobile OS manufacturer.

Simultaneously, as mobile devices become ubiquitous, more capable and more functional (because of these apps), an application ecosystem will begin to form – there are already over 3000 applications for iPhone/iPod Touch on Apple’s App Store, with small startups entirely dependent on the money they make from sales through the Store. Indeed, Kleiner Perkins has set up an iFund to invest in startups that make apps for iPhone, and there’s a RIM-backed Blackberry Fund too. How much longer before we start seeing the same interest in Nokia/Android application startups?

But this rosy picture could be in jeopardy if such rejections – either arbitrary or anti-competitive – become more commonplace. It’ll scare application developers, and drive away investors. And a multi-billion dollar (because of the sheer numbers of mobile devices) global opportunity could be lost, lost even to the party behind the App Store itself.

What are mobile app startups and users likely to do?

There are two things, both of which are likely to happen:

1.) Web apps that try to offer the same functionality will pick up speed. No App Store will be able to restrict what web-based applications users choose to use. Tomorrow, the Twitter client Twitterrific might be in the soup (because it has a built-in browser and mimics the functionality of Apple’s own Mobile Safari browser – you never know),  but the web-based Hahlo twitter client for iPhone/iPod Touch will face no such problems because Apple has nothing to do with it (and vice versa).

Ordinarily, I’m a strong proponent of native applications for mobile devices (at this stage of the industry). But circumstances are going to push app developers harder to write Good Web Apps.

2.) More jailbroken iPhones. Ironically, this warranty-voiding way of installing third-party applications is also the most open, offering several more native applications with fewer Apple-enforced restrictions. Developers will work harder to make it easier for customers to jailbreak their iPhones and iPods Touch.

Both these trends will represent a move away from the App Store.

Conclusion

As the technology industry becomes more open than ever (open software and hardware standards, community-based platforms for communication, convergence of desktop and mobile), this move towards closed application ecosystems is an anachronism.

More restrictions will mean more effotrs to circumvent (or just abandon) the App Store – whether from Apple or Nokia or Google’s Android. From the App Store owner’s ponit of view, this will be killing the golden goose – and the loss of possibly billions of dollars in revenue.

At the outset, I’d like to clarify I’m no iPhone or Apple zealot. My interest in mobile touchscreen interfaces has been piqued by my recent purchase of an iPod Touch.

I was playing around with a colleague’s HTC Touch Cruise the other day. The Touch runs Windows Mobile 6.1, and, in summary, is a full-featured smartphone with decent multimedia capabilities. That’s not what this post about though.

It’s about two clear observations I made – that we’re stuck in the late 90s when it comes to mobile touch-based input devices, and that UI designers still use the desktop paradigm when designing for mobile touch screens. While Windows Mobile is what triggered this post, with PalmOS, and UIQ too.

Poke, poke

Turns out that it’s a huge pain navigating the WinMobile interface on the 2.8″ touchscreen with your fingers. The buttons are tiny, the menu options are awkward, and it’s next to impossible to grab and drag a scrollbar. I gave up.  It’s clear – the best way to navigate a Windows Mobile is using the accompanying stylus. 

But a stylus is a hopelessly outdated tool. Along with the physical QWERTY keyboard for desktops/laptops, the stylus is a tool for mobiles that stubbornly refuses to die. Perhaps it’s easier – and commercially attractive – for touchscreen phone manufacturers to add applications and features than to rework a familiar, though suboptimal interface.

iPhone/iPod Touch have changed that. iPhone may not pack the sheer number of applications the HTC Touch Cruise does, but its interface is revolutionary. It lost the stylus. In fact, with multitouch – flicking, pinching, dragging with multiple fingertips – your hand is more effective than a stylus. You may not agree with iPhone the device (I don’t) – but you have to admit iPhone’s set the benchmark for all touchscreen interfaces.

Honey, I shrunk the desktop

Windows Mobile 6.1 has a task bar, a system tray, a Start button and a drop-down Start Menu. With nested menus. On that tiny 240×320 pixel screen.  

After spending a while with the device, I realized that Windows Mobile is essentially a shrunk-down version of the desktop Windows interface. The widgets are smaller, but the paradigm is the same. The result is a cluttered interface and a frustrating navigation experience.

Someone’s psyched the WinMobile team into believing that their biggest strength is that their mobile interface looks just like their desktop interface. That may have been true when mobile applications were very simple, but it doesn’t hold true any longer. It’s hurting usability and innovation.

There have been several calls for this, and I’m going to say it here again – the WinMobile team will do themselves and their legions of developers and enterprise customers a world of good if they rethink their interface. 
 

Note: I think Samsung and LG also have very good touchscreen interfaces. But this is merely an observation from Google Image Search results. Haven’t tried them out first-hand, so no comparisons.

Arrington on Techcrunch talks about the possibility of Amazon licensing its Kindle ebook reader hardware specs and trademark to third-party manufacturers:

…a licensing program that gave hardware manufacturers the ability to build Kindle clones, along with an incentive to sell them at near-zero margins. Amazon would give those manufacturers access to the core Kindle hardware specs (there’s no real magic there anyway) and the right to call it a Kindle device so long as they also put the core Kindle software on the device. That software links the device to Amazon’s store, meaning downloads revenue flows through Amazon.

Amazon would then share a percentage of net margin generated from downloads with the hardware manufacturers.

Techcrunch has put into words what I’ve felt since the day the Kindle was announced. After all, Amazon isn’t in the hardware business at all; it’s in the product and content retail business. I can imagine that in the initial days of the Kindle launch, Amazon needed its own device to build a strong association between Amazon’s brand and the mobile ebook model. Now that that purpose is served, manufacturing and selling the Kindle hardware is an overhead that Amazon could avoid.

Just like Associates?

This isn’t very different from the masterstroke that Amazon played years ago with its Associates affiliate program. Before Affiliate Marketing became the wild jungle that it is today, Amazon launched a series of innovative tools – aStore, Omakase Links, Product Previews – to let publishers (people who owned websites/blogs/suchlike) add links to Amazon’s content onto their web pages. These publishers then earned a cut of the sale generated by clicks from the links on their web pages.

Kindle is Associates all over again, except instead of web-based tools, we’re talking hardware specs.

For instance, Amazon’s aStore let developers build their own focused online “stores” (which displayed Amazon’s books). (A religion-focused website would be able to draw viewers and sell that category of books better than Amazon.com itself.) In the same vein, a student version of Kindle with access to e-textbooks and additional bookmarking features would be better marketed and sold by a third party which is focused on only that market.

With such an Affiliate/Franchise/Licensing model, manufacturers would fall over themselves for a chance to access Amazon’s massive ebook and newspapers database – and a cut of the subsequent revenues.

The Mobile Opportunity

Once third party manufacturers have licensed the Kindle specs, they are no longer restricted to building anything that looks like the Kindle today. I can readily think of well-designed iPhone/iPod Touch ebook applications like the New York Times app. This fits in with American universities doling out iPods Touch and iPhones to their incoming freshmen.  A market for Nokia’s S60 devices would be many times larger.

What do you think? Would you purchase a Kindle application for your mobile device?

Aside: Of course, manufacturers would then be free to choose the carrier of their choice for wireless content delivery. That sure isn’t going to make Sprint-Nextel happy.

Recent smartphones from Samsung, HTC and LG indicate that Nokia’s finally got competition in the high-end space. However, it’s going to take more than engineering skills to succeed in India’s tough mobile market. Consistent phone branding, clear messaging and a solid distribution network are as important, and that’s where Nokia’s streets ahead. Can the competition catch up?

It isn’t about features

There was a time when the only competition Nokia’s smartphones had was from the odd, super-expensive PDA-phone that was more the former than the latter. Over the last year though, the competition has dramatically upped the ante in terms of what it packs into a handset.

A case in point is the near-simultaneous release of Nokia’s new flagship phone, the N96, and Samsung’s Innov8. The Innov8 outclasses the N96 on nearly every count, making it a widely-awaited contest. And that’s not the only notable example: the Samsung Blackjack II is a very capable Windows Mobile QWERTY phone, matching Nokia’s E61i. The Samsung Instinct was hailed the iPhone killer, offering a full-face touchscreen with touch feedback – touchscreens are something Nokia doesn’t even have in the market yet. LG’s not far behind in the race either. The LG Viewty, released around the same time as the N95 sported a 5MP camera with “image stabilization”, and a touchscreen.

Yet, in spite of these releases, both Samsung and LG lag far, far behind Nokia in the Indian smartphone market. Admob’s June 2008 Mobile Metrics review states that 97% of ad requests from smartphones were from Nokia handsets. It’s more or less clear that Nokia’s built a solid reputation in India as *the* smartphone brand. And at the heart of that is its N and E series branding strategy.

Nokia’s smartphone strategy: Product, Brand, Distribution

Nokia’s strategy of creating two lines of positioning for entertainment (Nseries, with advanced imaging, video, internet and gaming capabilities) and business (Eseries, with focus on connectivity, productivity and email) certainly seems to have paid off over the last 3 years.

Nokia’s used these brands to create multiple, successive communications campaigns around the terms “Nseries” and “Eseries”, which marked a break from the number-oriented labeling custom. Consider Nokia’s own phones; could you infer anything at all about the 3650 from its name? The 7610? The 9200? Contrast that with, say, the N81 – I can tell at a minimum (because its an Nseries) that it’s a phone with reasonably good looks, stereo music, large storage capacity and a 2MP+ camera. Here’s a decent article about Nokia’s efforts to build the Nseries brand. Ditto for the Eseries.

Finally, think about the massive investment Nokia’s made in its dedicated priority and concept stores. While it already has an extensive distribution network for its low-end line (see the section “The Distribution Edge” in this article on Knowledge@Wharton – free reg. req’d), these stores are a great way of showcasing your top-line phones to people for whom the purchase is a high-involvement decision.

Samsung’s strategy (or the lack of it)

While this is a discussion about Samsung, it holds equally – if not more – true for other handset manufacturers.

In contrast, Samsung’s strategy seems to be all over the place. No, let me correct that – I don’t think they have a strategy. They know at a minimum that their phones need to do music, video, photos, the Internet, and that touchscreens are good to have. That’s about it.

From a product perspective, there doesn’t seem to be any great deal of thought on timing launches (relative to market conditions or relative to previous releases). Further up the development cycle, what features go into which product (or, more importantly, what features to leave out). Or even further up the cycle, what OS to use on their phone (they use several).

On the marketing side, from a branding perspective, each phone seems to be a brand unto itself. What can explain names like Innov8, Instinct, Glyde, Blackjack, F-480, SGH-i780, U900 Soul? (All are recent releases packed with features). There’s no consistent product look (you can, in one look “tell” that a phone is an Eseries device, can’t you), color or name.

If your phones don’t use a consistent Operating System (the way Nokia uses Symbian+S60), it’s impossible to develop an active developer community. If you don’t have a consistent brand identity, it’s difficult to develop ambassadors for your phones. If you keep developing a different website for each of your phones, its impossible to build communities online.

What markets is Samsung chasing? What positioning is it considering for its phones to gain share in these markets? More abstractly, what do Samsung’s phones “stand for”? What is the message they’re trying to get out? Even SonyEricsson has a rudimentary strategy that says “We make entertainment-centric phones. Some of them make great music devices – the Walkman series, other are great for photography – the Cybershot series”. HTC has a less clear strategy around its Touch line of phones, but at least they’ve got a consistent name and OS in place.

From an advertising perspective, the only shred of consistency I’ve seen over the past months is the “Next is What?” Samsung campaign. However, I don’t see the campaign tied to a product that anyone will remember. Nokia, on the other hand, has run periodic campaigns for each generation of devices it releases – in print, on TV, online.

From a distribution perspective, I don’t see why Samsung doesn’t leverage its extensive distribution network for its home appliances and entertainment devices – it’s a channel where it has one heck of a headstart on Nokia. I see digital cameras and Indian-manufactured laptops sold in those sorts of electronics stores. Phones seem to make just as much sense.

Conclusion

While the Indian mobile market is (still) seeing explosive growth, the high-end of the market is maturing. The implication is that features are no longer the USP for a smartphone; brand is. And how well you communicate that brand to your audience. Nokia has done a stellar job since 2005 by investing in its Nseries and Eseries strategy – in product design, marketing and branding, advertising and distribution. The competition seems to already have the engineering capability to match Nokia. But it needs to get its act together if it needs to take on Nokia in the marketplace.

(This post began as a reply to a comment question on my previous blog post about iPhone 3G. It’s also a complete re-write of an earlier post.)

My experience with the Internet on my Nokia N82 has been more than satisfying, but that might well be a result of my usage pattern. Your mileage may vary. And yes, my ideal internet-access device would be iPhone, but I’ve already written about why iPhone is a no-no for me.

Email

During my commute, I process email I received the previous evening and overnight. Since the ride is frequently too bumpy to type fast, I avoid replying until I’m in my office (though I send the occasional one-sentence reply through the app). I use the Gmail App to label, star, archive and delete email.

Bulk processing email like this is faster on the Gmail App than it is on the desktop! The Gmail App has handy shortcuts (press 7 twice to delete, 8 twice to mark as spam and delete, 9 twice to archive, “*” to mark as star. It also pre-fetches email so you don’t wait for minutes on end for pages to load.

Feeds and updates

The Google Reader interface for iPhone works just as fine on the S60 browser. With prefetching, ability to star, share, share with notes, and mark entire feeds and folders as read, I can process feeds as fast on my phone as I can from my laptop. I also catch up on Twitter with the S60 browser. m.twitter.com is fast, and doesn’t feel like you’re compromising on the experience because you’re using a mobile-adapted interface.

Microblogging

The same S60 browser and m.twitter.com let me send tweets while on the go. I’d love to post via SMS, but the facility seems to be “unavailable temporarily” since May at least.

News

I use Google News India and the New York Times mobile page for Indian and World news respectively. Both sites have awesome mobile interfaces, and render very well on the S60 browser.

Incidentally, you can view pages either in landscape or portrait mode by just tilting the phone using the built-in accelerometer on the N82. I scan tweets in portrait mode and my feeds and news in landscape mode.

Social Networking

A few months ago, Google release a mobile-adapted interface for Orkut. Like all of Google’s mobile services, Orkut mobile is simple and well-designed, with support for viewing profiles, photos, scrapbooks, birthday reminders and activity updates – all of what you’d use on the web. I don’t see much support for communities or applications, and I’d prefer it stay that way. I don’t like Orkut’s implementation of either.

Instant Messaging

I’m not a big fan of instant messaging, and certainly not one of those who’s online but “Busy” all day long. If I do have to ping someone on Google Talk, though, Fring is the app I use. The competition (apart from Ebuddy) tends to be either horribly designed or terribly engineered. Or both. Fring lacks notification on the phone’s front screen (For Nokia, I can imagine using Active Standby to display “New IM from so-and-so”. Google’s managed it with their Search Box).

It’s also a VoIP client. Rohan writes in: “My phone is WiFi-enabled and I have a Skype unlimited connection. I’ve configured Skype within Fring, so when I connect my mobile through WiFi to the local LAN, I can make almost free voice calls (VoIP calls) to 32 countries using Skype on Fring.”

The Series 60 Browser

All of my mobile web access is now through the default vanilla yet stunningly capable S60 browser. It has support for multiple windows – invaluable for opening links to websites from Twitter, support for SSL (when I check Gmail from the browser), one-click zoom in/zoom out, and the mini-map feature – viewing the entire page, reduced, on your screen, and scrolling through it instead. Invaluable for scrolling through long pages.

What’s your mobile applications list? And how does it fit into your daily lifestyle?

Your contact list and calendar events on your mobile phone have nothing to do with the contacts and calendar items on your Outlook, even though most of them are the same. For instance, you store contact numbers in your phone and email info in Outlook’s contacts. Shouldn’t they both be connected? Shouldn’t the reminders/events you set on your phone, or the meetings you enter in your Outlook calendar be available at your desk and while you’re on the go?

This HowTo will teach you to keep your Contacts, Calendar events and Notes in sync between Outlook and your Nokia smartphone. I have tested this with Outlook 2003 and 2007, and it should work with all Nseries and Eseries phones plus several phones that run S60. If your phone came with a Nokia PC Suite installation CD, it’ll work.

Setting things up for the first time

Install Nokia PC Suite on your computer. Using either Bluetooth or the USB-based cable, connect your phone to your computer, and start up PC Suite. Launch the Nokia PC Sync application. This is roughly how things should look (things may differ slightly depending on your PC Suite version):

Click the Setup icon, bottom center. Select Microsoft Outlook as your email application (this HowTo should also be applicable if you have been condemned to use Lotus Notes at work):

Next, choose what you want synchronized, and how far back and forward you want calendar events synced. If you’ve chosen to synchronize bookmarks too, choose your preferred browser. The list below should be enough for most people:

Synchronizing

Once you’re done with the Setup Wizard, click the “Synchronize Now” button:

It’ll take a while the first time, depending on how many contacts and calendar events you’ve stored in both Outlook and your smartphone:

That’s all you need to do. Once the synchronization’s done, a short summary will be displayed on the home screen:

Conclusion

Take a look at your Outlook calendar and contacts – it’ll be filled with birthday entries and sundry tasks/TODOs, while your phone’s calendar will be filled with your meetings/appointments and your contacts will have their email addresses entered along with their phone numbers.

Notes

1. You might have to weed out significant amounts of duplicate entries if you stored the same contact under slightly different names in your phone and Outlook

2. Reminders are transferred both ways, so you can create an alarm or a reminder on Outlook and have it ring on your phone (and vice versa).

3. If you’re using Bluetooth, you can also set your phone and Outlook to sync automatically periodically.

(This post is a follow-up to “Why did Mowser fail?“)

An iPhone in every hand will not ignite a mobile web revolution. That much is certain.

Both Michael Arrington and Russell Beattie make this mistake. Perhaps that comes from living in a echo chamber for too long – both likely have iPhones, are heavy web users on their devices, have friends who have iPhones, and therefore think all would be well if only everyone had one like them. Arrington is shockingly naïve when he says “…it will be much better to push prices down so that today’s iPhone is available for next to nothing in the third world.” Of course, I bet he hasn’t lived for too long in the “third world”.

Blaming puny hardware and tiny screens as the primary causes for poor mobile web adoption is thinking along very narrow lines indeed. As I outlined in the previous post, we could build much better applications today, using hardware and screen sizes available today – we aren’t building software that’s good enough because we haven’t yet understood how people use the web on their phones.

But that’s not all. Russell points out that “…in the US 85% of iPhone owners browsed the web vs. 58% of smartphone users, and only 13% of the overall mobile market” and uses that to conclude that as iPhone reaches more users, all problems will vanish (“better devices and full browsers”, as he says).

That’s not necessarily true and it more likely isn’t. iPhone targets a specific segment of the mobile user market – users who were likely to be heavy users of the Internet on their phones – people who would use their phone to browse the Internet. (Not that these users purchased a phone just for the Internet experience). It will continue to capture that market as it’s introduced in more countries.  Therefore it’s unlikely that those numbers Russell quoted would jump up substantially if everyone had an iPhone.

What does iPhone mean for the future of the mobile phone? I predict that while it’ll be a strong influence on broad design principles, it’s unlikely that every phone of the future will be like iPhone. For instance, Apple has shown how to design software that truly takes advantage of a touchscreen. More phones will have touchscreens in the future than they would have if it weren’t for iPhone, but maybe not with pinch-drag features. More phones will have full-screen applications. More phones will have smarter menus and make more data available across applications. And so on.

But the verdict is clear. It is designing better software, not praying for better hardware, that will truly get the mobile web rolling.

According to Mowser’s founder Russell Beattie, the “Mobile Web” is dead. As is his startup Mowser.  I think he’s partially wrong. Russell hasn’t quite figured out how the Internet on mobile devices is likely to work.

Mowser is (was?) an intermediary between a mobile browser and the web. It processed a “regular” web page to display better on a mobile browser (which is the way Opera Mini functions). It made money by inserting its own ads into these rendered pages. Apparently things didn’t work out. There weren’t enough users (and porn made up 80% of traffic), and hardly anyone clicked on the ads.

Which isn’t surprising. Because that isn’t at all how users interact with the web on their mobile devices.

Above all, Intent drives all usage on the mobile phone. Users don’t “browse” or “surf” the Internet on their mobile phones. Rather, they access particular services with a definite intent.  That means that as things stand now, a successful mobile web application would best be a native phone application that pulls data from the Internet but does the rendering locally. For example, a mobile-based Facebook would work best as a native Series 60 application (for Nokia phones) – or a cross-platform Java app.  When a user’s travelling and wants to Facebook a bit, he/she could launch the Facebook application, and it’ll connect to the Internet in the background, pull your mini-feed and other paraphernalia  and display that data on your screen. That way, the application doesn’t need to pull display code (HTML et al) making it faster and the user enjoys a much better experience (including all the AJAX-y effects you want).

The reason a native, single-purpose application will work is because 90% or so of the time, a user wants to interact with only a handful of web applications, but wants a kickass small-screen experience with them. I can imagine shortcuts on my Nokia web-capable phone that say “Gmail” “Facebook”, “Orkut”, “Yahoo Messenger”, “Google Reader”, and “The New York Times”. Which mean “Mail”, “Chat”, “Network”, “News”, “Feeds” (and “Maps”). How many more applications will a user need most of the time? After all, your average user has one email account, one social network, one chat app – you get the drift. (Think how much better the Gmail mobile application works than the web-based m.gmail.com)

Russell is right when he says that applications without a PC equivalent will not work. Take News, for instance. It’s cumbersome to navigate the New York Times on a mobile screen. (Even with iPhone’s pinch-tap-drag-flick wizardry. Admit it. It’s OK.) So I can imagine an NYT mobile application that displays headlines by category and a 5 or 10-line summary for each item (like a partial RSS feed). You can star an item on your phone. When you get to your PC, you click an “Open on Computer” button on your phone application, and Firefox pops up on your computer, opening your starred news items in tabs so you can read them in full. Does that sound better than reading an entire newspaper online on your phone? I can also imagine mobile “portals”, like the Yahoo one Russell pointed out:

Finally, monetization. Of course users won’t click on “interstitial” ads on their Phones. As above, intent is key. And relevance becomes even more important when both bandwidth and screen real estate are at such a premium. The only way someone could monetize ads on a mobile phone is if the ads were relevant to the user’s physical environment. (In a mall? Get ads about offers at stores in that mall. But in the middle of a tiny web page? Not on your life.)

In a follow-up post, I’ll talk about why both Russell and Michael Arrington are mistaken when they latch on to iPhone as the device for the future.

So my Thinkpad’s hard disk (a standard Hitachi 2.5″ 4200 RPM 80GB HDD) died Saturday evening. It began making ghastly noises all of a sudden, signaling imminent mechanical failure. I shut down the computer immediately, and on restarting, a BSOD informed me my boot volume was un-mountable.

I haven’t tried to recover any data yet, but that disk contains my entire music collection, and pretty much everything from my IIMK days. Tremendous loss. However, lessons have been learnt.

I’m going to use this post to chronicle how I’m getting my laptop functional again, the applications I use – both on the desktop and online, and strategies I’m using to move as much data online as possible.

Recovery

I had an external 120GB HDD (the same Hitachi make), which I plugged into the Thinkpad. And installed my copy of Windows Vista on it. After that, I downloaded and installed several Windows Vista device drivers for the Thinkpad R50. It took me about 4 hours from crash to a working (but data-less) machine.

Local Applications

What I installed immediately afterward. All of these are freely download-able applications, most of which I’ve been using for several years now.

• Firefox 3 Beta 5
• PowerPro 4.8 – shell control software
• iTunes 7.6.2
• OpenOffice 2.4
• VLC Player- all-in-one media player
• Nokia PC Suite 6.86 – interfacing with my N73
• Filezilla FTP client
• Paint.NET – midway between MSPaint and Adobe Photoshop
• Foxit Reader – lightweight alternative to Adobe Acrobat Reader
• WinRAR – archiver par excellence

The installers for all of these are now on my SanDisk 2GB USB pen drive (along with all the Thinkpad Vista drivers). I’m going to update these every six months. It’ll take me far less time to get back on my feet in the event of another crash.

The Online Life

Although I was a pretty heavy user of Web-based applications, it’s going to become a way of life now. I’m now going to move as much data as possible online (except for large files like MP3s and videos), given that I usually have access to a high-speed connection – at home, work and on my phone.

PIM – Email, Scheduling, Contacts and Notes

All my email from 2004 onwards is in my Gmail account. I forward email from my RahulGaitonde.org and IIM Kozhikode mailboxes into Gmail. I also used Gmail’s ability to import email via POP3 to pull old email from these accounts too. I had also configured Thunderbird for Gmail via IMAP, but will be using Gmail’sweb interface exclusively now. To send email from other accounts, I use Gmail’s ability to use a custom “from” address.

As an aside, does anyone know of a good Series 60 email client – with IMAP support – that I can use on my N73?

I’ve used Google Calendar extensively, right from its launch. I have three calendars – one for Work, another for Birthdays and Anniversaries and the default calendar for miscellaneous, casual events. I used to sync these calendars with Thunderbird using GCALDaemon, which I highly recommend.

Contacts is where I’ve got a problem. Outlook (and then Thunderbird) used to be my repository for contacts. Over the years, I had built up an extensive database of email addresses, phone numbers, blog URLs and work addresses, and used to sync this database with my N73. Thankfully, that syncing means my contacts are safe.

However, I’m not sure what my future setup will be. Most probably Gmail’s contacts will be my repository. But I don’t know how I’m going to sync that with my smartphone. I’d love to hear suggestions. (I hear GooSync’s paid service can do this)

Google Notebook is my trusty scrapbook. Although I don’t think much of the interface and its questionable integration with Google Bookmarks, it works well enough. I’d use it even more if it had an Offline mode (say, through Google Gears). That’d bring it close to MS Office OneNote (which is an excellent piece of work).

Finally, I use Google Bookmarks through the Google Toolbar, but ever since I’d started using the Firefox 3 Beta, my list of local bookmarks had grown – because you can now tag them and search them using the Address bar. Those recent bookmarks were lost in the crash – ironically, just days after I blogged about the need to integrate Google Bookmarks with Firefox’s local store!

Staying updated

Google Reader is the answer. Apart from friends’ blogs, I follow:

• Tech News and Opinion: GigaOM, Techcrunch, NY Times Bits, BBC’s dot.life, Startup Duniya, WATBlog, Google Blogoscoped.
• Tech Lifestyle: Lifehacker, Lenovo’s Design Matters
• News: RSS Feed for my Google News

There are several other technology bloggers whose blogs I subscribe to. For news and other non-tech material, once a fortnight, I’ll check up on the Economist and BusinessWeek.

To stay in touch with what I find interesting, visit my Google Reader Shared Items page, or subscribe to it via RSS.

Photos

Thankfully, I’ve been fairly regular uploading pictures into my Flickr Pro account. I have about 500 photos on Flickr now, tagged and categorized. In the future, Flickr will become my primary photo repository.

Blogging

RahulGaitonde.org is hosted on Wordpress 2.5 using TheWebBrains‘ hosting service. I’ve been with TWB since 2004, and they haven’t let me down.

I use Filezilla to manage files on the remote server. Here are the Wordpress plugins I use:

• Akismet for spam filtering
• FeedBurner’s FeedSmith to redirect my Wordpress RSS feed to a custom Feedburner one
• Twitter Tools for integration with my Twitter account
• Random Redirect for readers with some time on their hands
• Wordpress Database Backup
• I also have a list of my Google Reader Shared Items on my sidebar. The code for this is easily available through your Google Reader page.

Web traffic monitoring for RahulGaitonde.org is done through Google Analytics. Again, something I’ve used since it was available.

Office

I’ve always used Google Docs and Spreadsheets whenever possible, right since the Writely days. Most of term papers, plans, databases have been composed, created and stored on Google Docs – so they’ve survived the crash.

Whenever I don’t have access to the Internet, it’s always OpenOffice (although Office 2007 is a splendid piece of work, and at least three years ahead of OO.org). From now on, any document I create with OO.org will be imported into Google Docs as soon as I’m connected.

Issues

That’s the rosy bit. But what about my music collection and videos? I can either back them up on external storage (which I don’t trust right now), or on DVD (cumbersome adding files and preserving albums), or on remote bulk storage like Amazon’s S3 (bandwidth too costly in India). So large files are a problem.

What about file formats such as PDF and ZIP? Miscellaneous settings and configuration files? Right now the plan is to back them up manually, periodically, on RahulGaitonde.org. But that’s far from ideal; there are too many such files.

Finally, the volume of remote data is already so much (4+ GB in Gmail alone) that downloading all that data locally (should the need ever arise) is impractical. What if I need to move from Flickr to, say, Picasa Web Albums? Or what if I need a few dozen photos to take with me on a USB pen drive? It’s extremely cumbersome to download assorted photos, even in batch mode. It’s the same for documents, spreadsheets, notes, email.

It’s clear that making the move online is adopting a fundamentally different lifestyle – which implies moving back offline is a major task. It’s one that I’ve been driven towards by my recent massive loss of data. The move has been made easier because I was already half-way there. In the weeks to come, I’m going to cross the other half and go completely online.

Questions? Suggestions? Comments? Do let me know.

So I moved from Outlook to Mozilla Thunderbird this weekend. Though I’d been looking for an Outlook replacement for a while, the Nokia Synchronizer app (which I use heavily) worked only with Outlook, so that kept me from moving.

Things came to a head Saturday morning, though, when Outlook 2007 took 15 minutes to download 45 pure-text messages, keeping my (admittedly puny 4200rpm) hard drive spinning all the while. Yes, I auto-archive to a separate archive PST every month and de-fragment my hard drive every couple of months, but performance has been terrible from day one. This could not go on.

Moving to Thunderbird is not an easy task. You need to export all your PST to Outlook Express (which takes forever) and then import all of that into Thunderbird (which doesn’t take all that long). I’m pleased with the results, though.

What’s improved?
* Performance has been very good indeed (and we’re talking well over 10000 emails, most of which are in one massive “Archive” folder).
* Spam filtering is much, much better (Outlook had too many false positives and *yet* spam occasionally landed up in my inbox).
* Less UI clutter. Thunderbird’s interface is far more customizable than Outlook’s. The new Ribbon UI in Office 12 is very useful on Word, PowerPoint and Excel, but is just clutter on Outlook. I longed for the Outlook 2003 look all the time – far less clunky.
* Extensibility. I added the GmailUI, Lightning, Nokia Synchronizer and Duplicate Contact Manager extensions immediately.

What have I had to give up?
* Interoperability with Nokia’s PC Suite! That was the *only* reason I stuck with Outlook for so long. Thunderbird’s Nokia Synchronizer can only sync contacts. I need ToDo lists, Calendar events and Notes.
* The Today, Yesterday, Last Week list views. They were incredibly useful, and I hope Thunderbird 3 incorporates that.
* Flagging messages as tasks.
* The ToDo pane, which listed upcoming calendar events and ToDo tasks.

Will post updates in the weeks to come whether the move’s been successful.

I am very close to dropping Outlook as my email client of choice for my institute mailbox. It is slow, incredibly disk-intensive and requires too much maintenance – the same problems I had with Lotus Notes during my time at IBM.

However, Outlook is a very important tool for me.

It is the only application (apart from Lotus Notes) that will sync contacts, tasks and events with my Nokia Series60 phone (the N73). I use this feature extensively – Outlook today holds my master calendar and contacts database.

There are a few hacks that sync Thunderbird’s contacts with Nokia’s phones, but none for calendar events and tasks.

Can you, dear reader, suggest a way out? Comment or drop me an email at rahul@rahulgaitonde.org.

Why the mobile phone industry today looks a lot like the PC industry 25 years ago:

• Several players selling standalone “boxes” (or bricks). Atari, Commodore, Tandy, Apple back then. Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola, Apple now
• Incompatible software platforms
• Incompatible hardware and peripherals
• Nascent application development industry
• Device seen as replacing several existing devices

Big differences:

• Sheer number of mobile phones, sheer variety in features and, consequently, price points
• Growth markets are in the East
• Carriers could make or break innovation

Game-changers – then and now:

• The IBM PC and its open platform. No current-day equivalent
• Standard operating system and, consequently, standard development environment. Current-day equivalent: Google’s Android, possibly

Yahoo’s been quietly putting into place a set of very high-quality tools and services for mobile phones. From the time it launched Yahoo! Go last year, the company’s been working feverishly at plugging its diverse services (mail, search, instant messaging, news, photos, finance, entertainment) into the mobile platform (or the other way round).

Well, you could say, so has Google. Not quite. Yahoo has understood (much better than Google) that the mobile usage paradigm is different from the PC. That is, users access information differently on mobile devices, even if it is the same information that they access from the PC. Nowhere is this more evident than its recently-launched oneSearch service. (Read this article on searchenginejournal.com for more.) In fact, Yahoo’s been bold enough to present a comparison of its mobile implementation of services with Google’s. And even with the liberal marketing hype, the difference does show through. Finally, Yahoo!’s managed to get Motorola and Cingular on board to advertise their phones’ compatibility with Yahoo! Go (Y! did say a couple of years ago that it was essentially a media company that also did technology!) In comparison, all Google’s done is slap a mobile interface to its mail, search and RSS reader services. That simply won’t work. Again, I recommend you read the article I’ve linked to above for understanding how Yahoo! views mobile search differently.

However, regardless of how Google responds and who wins the battle for mobile content in the US, the stakes are tiny when compared to those halfway around the world. India and China (am I tired of hearing that near-hypenation or what!) keep adding mobile connections at a pace that leaves the US and Europe flabbergasted. India is already the fastest-growing mobile market, and has the lowest mobile tariffs in the world. These two economies are where the real action is, where the real bucks are to be made.They are also by far the most challenging markets – diverse, fragmented, cost-concious, notoriously low-tech, unswayed by hype, and where organized business is almost nonexistent (in India, a mere 8% of the workforce is in the “organized sector”). A mobile user in Bareilly, Utttar Pradesh, for instance, wouldn’t bother about Yahoo! Go – or even Yahoo! mobile web, since he’s/she’s using a black-and-white, text-display-only, Rs. 1500 ($34) mobile phone that can do barely more than send/receive calls and messages and sound alarms. But the same user is passionate about being “connected”, carries the mobile phone everywhere and uses text messaging heavily. And there are more users like him/her in Indian and China than there are people in North America and the EU combined. How do you build winning propositions for them? Something more than ringtones and wallpapers, ideas so disgustingly obsolete now?

Yahoo! India and Google’s India operations need to get into the average Indian mobile user’s mind to glean what his/her purchase intentions currently are, how these goods and services are advertised to him/her today, and how a mobile phone (an always-on, truly personal device) could both change his/her needs, and serve his/her current needs better. Results are likely to be different across Tier 1 and Tier 2/3 cities. Serving the former will be easy – this market is very much like the tried-tested-trusted US market. The latter is where the real volumes are, the real revenue is, but it’s going to take some big risky initiatives to tap into.

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