The Mobile Web Tablet

What happened to video telephony? It was supposed to be the Big Thing about 3G, wasn’t it?

Well, now video telephony of a different kind is emerging. I wrote about it in a blog post about emotional bandwidth and Swedish startup Bambuser over at the GlocalReach blog.

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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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Not much happening on this blog at the moment, but you can read my post on emotional bandwidth over at the GlocalReach blog. Short excerpt:

Humans are social creatures. When meeting someone face to face there’s a huge amount of emotional data transfered between you and the person you meet. Sweaty palms, how you move your arms and legs, what your eyes look at, a smile or a frown, if your face blushes or what your voice sounds like. Even how you smell. They are all signs of your emotional state Рlet’s call them emotional datapoints.

Accessing this emotional state of another person connects you to that person. By looking at a smiling person, you feel a little happier. A child crying makes you feel sad. The ability of a communication technology to transmit those emotions constitutes its’ emotional bandwidth.

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