Buffy the Facebook Mobile Slayer?

Will Facebook’s ‘Buffy’ be the vampire mobile slayer or a step too far?

Facebook are widely reported to be working with HTC to create its own Android smartphone, which is due out in 12 to 18 months. According to The Wall Street Journal the Facebook phone project has been codenamed, ‘Buffy’.

However why does it need to have its own hardware? Facebook is already tightly integrated into many Android smartphones and it is very questionable exactly what Facebook would gain over the wide adoption it already has. If Facebook believe that ‘Buffy’ could tightly integrate other Facebook services such as their email it could turn many off if all their all email and messaging from the phone have to be done through Facebook?

Facebook isn't a hardware company and perhaps they should stick to what they are good at. Even the likes of Google have struggled with the hardware and ended up buying Motorola and launching a Nexus with Samsung and Microsoft has many hardware nightmares most notably with their Zune player.

Ironically HTC, the world's fourth-biggest smartphone brand shares have fallen by 7%, which is the maximum allowed in one day. The fall has been driven by a cut its growth forecast. HTC had earlier forecast growth of 20% to 30% but despite a booming market now expected revenues for the final three months of 2011 to be little changed from a year earlier. This demonstrates the growth of Android adoption by many players.

Equally interesting is the news that Google and Samsung have confirmed that there are volume issues with their flagship mobile phone the Galaxy Nexus and Apple and that the battery problem that has dogged the new iOS 5 Apple operating system remains unfixed.

However, the one thing that is clear is that smartphones remain at the core of mobile technology, Android is now leading the wave and the more platforms tightly integrate applications and services the more the smartphone will become the device of choice. This has a significant bearing on how media providers, channels and cloud based services must adapt.

Nokia In Free-fall or Just Wobbly?

Yesterday we had to get our HTC Android mobile sent for a repair and were lent a ‘old device’ which may have some fancy links and gives us access to the essential Skype service but was like going back to the dark ages.

Today Nokia reflects the gulf that has been created between the old mobile giants and the new iPhone and Android players. The reality is that Nokia like other technology companies before them believed that they had a licence to print money but the truth was they were only as good as their last phone.

Nokia’s CEO, Stephen Elop, says in a note to staff which was published by Engadget, that the company is standing on a "burning platform" surrounded by innovative competitors who are grabbing its market share…The first iPhone shipped in 2007, and we still don't have a product that is close to their experience," He accepts that Android has now taken their number one position.

Nokia has also stopped developing its devices for its MeeGo operating system.
This is no surprise as it was a late move and one ill conceived Elop is quoted,"We thought MeeGo would be a platform for winning high-end smartphones. However, at this rate, by the end of 2011, we might have only one MeeGo product in the market."
Nokia Chairman Jorma Ollila brought in Elop from Microsoft last September and on Friday Elop will deliver his strategy for turning Nokia around.

The main challenge Nokia face is not at the device level but over the operating system and applications. The problem is not about can MeeGo get a kick start but what to do once it is buried?

India: Control versus Commerce, Terror versus Traffic

It makes us wonder if India really wants to be a digital powerhouse. First the bring back tax on IT which could add a hefty 25% on all that is digital, then it turned its focus on Blackberry and now is demanding "access to everything". They want "any company with a telecoms network should be accessible". It could be Google or Skype next and you can’t rule out government access to any virtual private networks.

Increased fears of terrorism is one thing, but chopping the legs from under the industry that make its growth today, is another.

Blackberry has been given 60 days to come up with a way to open up its data to Indian law enforcement authorities and is reported to be setting up a server in India as part of the solution. Some cynics would suggest the 60 delay is so not to upset the Commonwealth Games in Delhi in October in a country that has 1.1 million customers.

Its goingto be interesting to see who follows the Indian lead and whether the new measures and tax issues simply move the business further offshore.

Blackberry Enters a Blackhole?

Research in Motion (RIM) continues to attempt to fight off Apple and Android and retain its position as the must have for all business folk and the alternative for all consumers. Ask those business folk who have two phones, one for private use and the company Blackberry. However the recent shift in power to these two relatively new comers has forced many to start to choose one over two.



As Blackberies continue to be launched, the latest being the BlackBerry Torch 9800 which has a touch screen and slide-out keyboard, as well as a faster Web browser and launches in the U.S. on Aug. 12. Somehow one is reminded of technologies which were great in their day but fundamentally staered from the wrong place for today’s market. Email is so simple on the iPhone or Android it begs the question why a Blackberry counts? According to research firm Gartner, RIM's market share dropped 14% to 41.4% in the first quarter from a year ago. Importantly, BlackBerry only has a fraction of the apps available to the iPhone or Android devices and in today’s Appworld that can be a big negative. RIM are now opening up the platform and providing easrier to use tools for developers but is it too late?

Now comes the real bad news that the European Union Commission have ditched their Blackberrys in favour of devices from Apple and HTC (Android). Saudi Arabia, who have some 700,000 Blackberry users, has also ordered a ban of the services starting Friday and the United Arab Emirates, India and other countries for greater access to the encrypted information sent by BlackBerry devices. The U.A.E. will prohibit most BlackBerry services starting Oct. 11.

The moves are over concerns on RIM's message encryption security which is considered by some governments and agencies as too tight and prohibit them from being able to spy on its users. RIM says it can't give access to encrypted data and doesn't give any one government special treatment. "Any claims that we provide, or have ever provided, something unique to the government of one country that we have not offered to the governments of all countries, are unfounded," However, US law enforcement officials told Reuters that they can "tap into emails and other conversations" conducted through Blackberrys, just as long as they have the appropriate court order.

A Bit of Everything Mobile

The Toshiba Biblio handheld reader has been announced. Is it a mobile phone, a reader and mini notebook or a hybrid looking for a home? Maybe they used the name Biblio to appeal to readers.

Toshiba Biblio has a 3.5-inch LCD touchscreen with 960×480 resolutions, Wi-Fi connectivity, 7GB of storage, a 5.1 megapixels camera and a horizontal sliding Qwerty keyboard.

iPhone Goes Orange in the UK

Orange is to sell Apple's iPhone in the UK. This move which has been widely expected clearly ends the exclusive deal Apple had with O2 which has been good for O2 but some would argue bad for Apple.

If the planned merger between Orange and Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile goes through and creates a 28.4 million customer business and becomes the UK's largest provider, it certainly would open the flood gates to many more iPhones being taken up.
It is estimated that some 75% of the UK market would be able to have an iPhone and with the Pre and other competitors struggling to catch up the iPhone could become a category killer in the UK.

It has also been announced today that the iPhone app store has just clocked up its 2 billionth download. It is only a few months since they announced that they achieved 1 billion! The others are clearly way back in the dust.

The other interesting thing to watch is the reaction of the other non iPhone carriers who are already struggling to offer exciting models and now find themselves squeezed by the big boys. Some suggest you will be able to get an iPhone through the other carriers on a ‘special deal’ and that these exist already. Whatever the case the iPhone could be the phone most people are using this Christmas and New Year to phone friends and family.

iPhone Goes Orange in the UK

Orange is to sell Apple's iPhone in the UK. This move which has been widely expected clearly ends the exclusive deal Apple had with O2 which has been good for O2 but some would argue bad for Apple.

If the planned merger between Orange and Deutsche Telekom's T-Mobile goes through and creates a 28.4 million customer business and becomes the UK's largest provider, it certainly would open the flood gates to many more iPhones being taken up.
It is estimated that some 75% of the UK market would be able to have an iPhone and with the Pre and other competitors struggling to catch up the iPhone could become a category killer in the UK.

The other interesting thing to watch is the reaction of the other non iPhone carriers who are already struggling to offer exciting models and now find themselves squeezed by the big boys. Some suggest you will be able to get an iPhone through the other carriers on a ‘special deal’ and that these exist already. Whatever the case the iPhone could be the phone most people are using this Christmas and New Year to phone friends and family.

Mobile World Just got a Lot Harder at the Top

Who would you blame for a 90% drop in profits? The world’s largest mobile manufacturer only made £108 million compared to £1.08billion for the same quarter last year. Nokia have already announced 1,700 job cuts but is it enough?

Some of it down to the economic climate and reluctance to change handsets but it still sold 93 million handsets compared to 115 million certainly not a 90% drop in units sold.

The problem is not the numbers of units sold but the mix of units sold. At the lower end they are losing out to cheaper phones which is not as profitable for Nokia. At the high end they have Apple, Samsung, RIM all eating from their table.

However Nokia aren’t the only big player feeling the cold. Sony Ericsson reported their third consecutive loss with a $387 loss in the 1st quarter of 2009 on falling sales and has also announced 2000 job cuts. They shipped 14.5 million units in the quarter down 35% year on year.

So both mobile giants are missing out on the low end and face increasing pressure at the high end. There has to be casualties in this crowded market and without continued profit the research may so down and dry up and that’s just as potentially dangerous as not keeping up with the Apple’s.

Mobile Books are Here

The NYT reported that Google will make their 1.5 million public domain books, that are available for free on PCs and now also make these accessible on mobiles. The same article also reported that Amazon was working on making the titles for its popular e-book reader, the Kindle, available on a variety of mobile phones.

So this tells us that the consumer is certainly going to have a mobile ebook experience and in the case of Google a free one. But before everyone around the world rushes, as we did, to experience Book Search on a mobile, it appears to be limited to those operating under Android (Google’s own mobile operating system) and the iPhone.
It certainly wasn’t working under Symbian, the system used by Nokia. Also although 1.5 million is the figure quoted, this only applies to the US and outside of there only around 620,000 titles currently available. Still a large number by anyone’s standards!

While these books were already available on Google Book Search, these new mobile editions are not image but text files, enabling a better reading experience and download performance to a small screen. To try it out, open up your iphone or Android phone and go to http://books.google.com/m.

Google said it would extend the service to include out-of-print titles and current books. This then extends their land grabbing settlement benefit sales and licensing opportunities.

Amazon who are expected to unveil the Kindle 2 next week, did not say when Kindle titles would be available on mobile phones, or importantly what the implications would be. The Kindle currently offers about 230,000 titles.

Amazon’s move onto the mobile is a no brainer. If they stay marooned in Kindleland they may well end up with the content, but on a device no one wants. What many forget is that they also own Mobibook and could easily move onto the mobile using a tweek of the mobi format. Some would question whether Amazon would open itself up by using the standard mobi format or that its more likely that the files will remain Amazon only but mobi exclusively restricted. It is as unlikely that they will embrace epub for delivery as to see them loosing their grip on their digital content.


Some say that the reading experience on a small screen will never take off stating that the printed page and ereaders have been optimised for reading. Others will point to the Blackberry and emails that are being read all around us today, the Keitai novels in Japan, texts and also the great variance of quality and size that exists in print that some of which some would say is just as hard to read! The reality is that the market will decide what and when they read.

What is clear is that Google now has arrived in the market and given the treasure trove they have potentially acquired for chump change, they are certainly going to have an increasing impact on the market. Secondly those who doubted the mobile platform would work for books better start to think again! Whatever happens it's certainly interesting times on the mobile platform and with Plastic Logic and K2 coming on the 9th, a hard choice time for many today.

Mobile News

Many believe as we do that the mobile platform will dominate the digital world along with the ‘heavier’ Laptop and that everything else, including the clunky Kindle and Sony readers are just transient noise.

We bring you some more interesting news this week from the world of mobile.
The one thing any technology aspires to is universal mass adoption. Can you imagine one country adding 2.05 million new mobile subscribers in January and in doing so taking the total number of users to 36.4 million? The country is one of the world's fastest growing mobile markets, but is one often viewed as impoverished country of over 140 million people. They also predict that the number of mobile phone users will be around 50 million at the end of 2009. The country is Bangladesh.

Convergence continues at a pace with devices and functionality morphing to offer the user everything in a single device. Sony has just announced that it would add a Skype Web phone function to its PlayStation Portable later this month in Japan. This move is not only an attempt to gain back market share in the games market, but a recognition that technology convergence is inevitable. Many believed that the game market would be one of the last to cede to the mobile phone platform, but Sony’s plans to start selling the microphone to enable Skype over their Playstation clearly shows that convergence is key. How long before the single dimension and transient ebook readers get the message?

The next key battleground is the mobile browser. We now see an explosion of wireless mobile broadband modems which start to question the broadband landline and importantly open up the full potential of ‘always connected’. Yahoo have now have unveiled ‘ OnePlace’, a mobile phone tool to bookmark links, news feeds or search results on the move. This gives them access to the latest information and feeds on travel, sports and even social network postings. Users will be able to mark their favourite websites on their PC and then synchronize these with their cell phone, or directly on the mobile phone itself. What this tells us is that we are at the start of a battle for mobile search, advertising and the browser world. Apple are actively encouraging developers to create applications for the iPhone and Google are hovering in the wings. Adobe obviously recognise the weakness of imaged based text on the small screen and the need for reflowable text and are actively shifting ground.
Email has long been available via mobiles but it took the Blackberry to bring this home and create a tool that is now used by millions of business people today. Now Apple have regonised that they need to present an alternative to the Blackberry keyboard and eyestrain and have taken the step of announcing that the next update to its iPhone software will support Microsoft’s Exchange email software. Will this fatally wound Blackberry? Probably not but as RIM scramble to wider the use of the Blackberry the vultures are starting to circle.

Finally, we have long argued that Content is content and is not locked into one format. The book trade publishers ‘books’ that are sold by booksellers as ‘books’ and loved by bookreaders as ‘books’. But are book publishers restricted to books or are the content publishers and owners or as an old friend once said ‘rights managers’? If we think of books then its hard to see the content lending itself to the mobile platform. But if we see content then it may do so tomorrow. The Japanese are already seeing significant changes in this direction through their Keitai novels and although these may not work today in other markets, it is certain that they will in some form in the future.