The Mobile Web Tablet

Platform battles… aren’t they fun?

Actually, they’re not. They keep a lot of innovation from happening. Will Google’s move to launch the alliance make the platform battle finish sooner than it otherwise would? Probably not. From that perspective, the Open Handset Alliance was a disappointment.

If you expected a cool device from Google, you should be also disappointed. What we got was yet another mobile linux initiative. Problem is, there are many mobile linux alliances out there, we don’t need another one.

It makes sense for a company like Google not to start building devices. As I wrote before, Nokia pumps out 11 phones per second and distributes them worldwide. They’ve probably sold a couple of hundred phones before you’ve finished reading this blog post. Feel like competing with that?

If it takes you one hour to decide, they’ve sold 40’000 devices.

Still feel like competing with that?

I didn’t think so.

No, Google is a software company and should remain a software company. Any software company that survives for some time becomes a platform company. Any platform company that survives for some time becomes an OS company. Maybe that’s where Google is today.

If anything good comes out of this, that would be a set of java applications or maybe even a java framework on top of MIDP. Can we hope for that? On November the 12th maybe we’ll know. Until then, disappointment is the word I’ll use to describe what Google launched.

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…and it’s a… web page?

With… robots. And a dog.

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Your OpenSocial network.

It’s Google and partners against Facebook (and Microsoft) now.

The address book in your mobile phone is a very simple social networking application that has remained basically unchanged since it first arrived. Adding OpenSocial to the Google Phone might bring some innovation to this application (which probably is amongst the most used applications in the world). Will be interesting to see what Google comes up with.

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Spent the afternoon at the Daytona Session here in Stockholm. A mini-conference focusing on the future of the internet. One of the speakers was Stefan Waldeck from Yahoo! Sweden. He talked about mobile (which by the way was a common theme amongst the speakers – seems that’s where the future of the web is) and mentioned that the Yahoo! Go Mobile client will soon be preinstalled in available for (?) more than 200 devices from all the five major device manufacturers.

Sounds like news to me. At least I’ve missed it.

I wonder what the deal is between Yahoo! and the manufacturers. A not too wild guess would be revenue sharing of ads shown in the application. Consequence: your next phone might be subsidized not only by the operator but also by Yahoo!. In other words, mobile advertising is coming and it will take the shape of value added applications in your phone.

Another example of this: Yahoo! is also the search engine that pays for you to use Opera Mini (you didn’t think it was really free, did you?). Together with Yahoo! Go Mobile in 200 devices, Yahoo! can take a significant chunk out of that mobile revenue that Google wants with their as-of-yet-non-existing GPhone.

Microsoft has been trying to break in to the telecom market for years with Windows Mobile but they will most likely join the advertising war. They’re just a little late for the game.

Microsoft, Google Phone, Yahoo! Go Mobile… looks like the future of the web really is in mobile.

Pictures from the event here.

Updated: Lotta Holmstr??m at Citizen Watch also wrote about the Yahoo! presentation:

Yahoo! Go is a small java applet which lets the user access email, flickr, search and more. It will be in 200 cellphone models at the end of the year.

What does “in” mean? Preinstalled or available for?

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The pieces of the Google Phone, gphone, puzzle is coming together. After acquiring Voice 2.0 company GrandCentral a couple of months ago they now extend to microblogging and presence with the acquisition of Jaiku (similar to Twitter but more mobile oriented).

I’ve said it a before: good mobile 2.0 services requires good web services in the back. Well, Google is building one heck of a backbone of services to complement their upcoming phones (or phone OS). Interesting to see what they come up with in the end.

Anyway, congratulations to Jyri and the rest of the Jaiku team!

Updated: Techcrunch UK has more.

Tim O’Reilly has a good overview of Jaiku here. This sentence sums up why this is related to the GPhone:

This is the way a phone address book ought to work. I continue to think that the address book is one of the great untapped Web 2.0 opportunities, and that the phone, even more than email and IM, and certainly more than an outside-in, invitation-driven “social networking application” represents my real social network.

My own company, GlocalReach, will solve a slightly different problem in another circle of intimacy but the address book in the phone is definitely one of the untapped goldmines of social networking. The established manufacturers are fumbling with more or less closed and slow moving solutions like Wireless Village that no one uses.

Jaiku was founded in February 2006 and Twitter the month after. Wireless Village has been in standardization groups for years. Google, on the other hand, is an acquisition machine not wasting time eating salmon sandwiches in standardization meetings (believe me, I’ve been to them) but in stead letting innovation happen outside the company and pick the right time to devour integrate it.

I bet there are at least five times as many people working with acquisitions than with standardization at Google. I also bet there are fifty times as many people working with standardization than acquisitions at companies like Nokia, Sony Ericsson or Motorola.

Should they change? I don’t know. The telecom way of standardizing everything is not a winning strategy if you want to be innovative. It might be good for a lot of other stuff, like building huge wireless networks or come up with platforms that other can innovate on, but not for innovation.

It boils down to the question: what kind of company do you want to be? The innovative kind or the standardizing kind? The application or the platform? If you’re a successful application, you’re going to end up becoming the platform anyway so I’d say the choice is easy. Just ask Microsoft.

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GigaOm is listing a few “facts” about the so far non-existing Google Phone. The first two are:

1. Google Phone is based on a mobile variant of Linux, and is able to run Java virtual machines.
2. All applications that are supposed to run on the Google Phone are java apps. The OS has ability to run multimedia files, including video clips.

It looks a lot like the kind of phone I would have built if I had the chance to do it from scratch. Linux at the core and Java as the application platform makes a lot of sense for building an open, developer friendly phone with an already existing ecosystem of applications and developers.

I’m sure Google has the engineers to come up with a great mobile phone. The greatest challenge for them is the logistics involved in selling consumer electronics. As mentioned before, that’s a completely different business from selling adwords. Nokia is pumping out 11 phones per second worldwide. You can have all the Ph.D:s in the world in your staff and a supercomputer on top, that’s still a huge challenge.

Nevertheless it’s a telling sign that the two most talked about phones at the moment comes from the internet and computer industry.

Updated: New York Times on how the worlds of software and telecom meet:

Nokia used to be just a cellphone maker. Google used to be just an Internet company.
Now Nokia wants to be an Internet company and Google, according to rampant speculation among bloggers and technology analysts, may be about to enter the mobile phone fray.

“Devices alone are not enough anymore,” Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, chief executive of Nokia, said last week in London as the company announced plans for a digital music store, a game service, social networking links and other mobile Internet initiatives, grouped under a new brand, Ovi. “People want more; they want the complete experience.”

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So the rumours were true: Google has aquired VoIP-pioneers Grandcentral.

Just like the company I am in the process of starting up: GlocalReach, Grandcentral is basically an internet based reach management system for voice communication (back in the 20th century they called it “telephony”).

Their idea is similar yet somewhat different from ours. They believe in the “one number for life” concept but I think it’s a feature, not a restriction, to be able to change number every now and then. In fact, I think every person wants many numbers, for different aspects of ones life: work, hobbies, family, friends etc.. As long as you can manage them easily, many phone numbers is not a problem but rather a way of better controlling how people can reach you.

Anyway. Google seemed to like what they were doing and Grandcentral has clearly shown that telephony and the web go together and has much value to add to each other.

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Been trying out the new Opera Mini beta on my Sony Ericsson M600 today. This is version 4 of the extremely popular java-based (downloadable) web browser for mobile phones.

My first impression was: oh, no, they made the GUI too slow and cumbersome. The clean simplicity of the first versions seemed to be gone. But as I’ve started to use it I got more comfortable with it and I’m beginning to really like it.

The biggest change is that pages are now showed full size (sort of). You navigate around the screen by moving a rectangle over the page. By clicking the square you zoom in to the page and can read it on a tiny mobile phone screen. On an M600 with a pointing device (and fairly large screen) this works really well. Haven’t tried it on a phone without touch screen yet.

Page rendering is also much better than previous versions. Bloglines (the RSS-reader) and Google Mail both worked and Google Calendar seems to have a mobile friendly style sheet which formated the calendar to fit perfectly in to my device.

Bloglines is noteworthy because it uses frames. It has two frames, with the RSS feeds on the left and the posted items on the right. Opera Mini renders the left frame by itself and when I click a link it changes to the right frame. Smooth!

Seems to be a bug in the bookmark manager (the data for the page I was on when clicking “add bookmark” is not filled in to the bookmark manager) but other than that it seems stable.

The Sony Ericsson M600 together with Opera Mini, Google Maps Mobile and Gmail App is a very capable little web tablet. The same applications run on most modern mobile phones – and they’re free. A mobile web tablet experience is only a few joystick clicks away. Download them all! I promise, you won’t look at your phone the same way again.

Updated: major issue: cookies doesn’t work. Oh well, it’s beta…

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