This booth tour of Imagination technology, the makers of the PowerVR chip that powers the Motorola Droid is fascinating. They announced that the chip they are currently designing and that will be found in mobile phones will provide “graphics comparable to the PlayStation 3 in three years”.

Apparently Verizon will be offering a Skype Option to their data plans for Skype use. Still “coming soon” on Verizon’s dedicated site.

Icrossing released a retty interesting map with the market share of mobile web browsers worldwide.
Dominic Parker from iconnect comments:

This map shows the popularity of different mobile browsing platforms country by country, with some interesting results.
Apple’s dominance can clearly be seen, with the iPhone and iTouch accounting for over half the market in the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany and Japan.
The Android platform has its largest share in the US and the UK, but has a much weaker share in other countries. This could change in the near future as new phones emerge that run Android, such as the Nexus One.
Docomo and KDDI are the largest mobile phone operators in Japan, and account for 12% of the mobile browser share platforms.
Canada seems to like the iPhone and iTouch, with 86% of mobile internet users using this platform to access the internet.

Also interesting to see that in southern america Nokia still rules, and I have no explanation for Opera’s domination in Nigeria… any thoughts ?

I’m back from MWC 2010 and finally found some time to settle down and write a few notes about my feelings about this year’s show. Apart from the cold and rain (unusual in Barcelona), a few main points were very striking during this MWC:

• All the phones manufacturers have now taken the smartphone angle and are heavily basing their strategy on Android. LG, and Motorola and 100% Android and Samsung came up with Bada, his home-cooked linux mobile which is  very impressive. Nokia now has a clear roadmap about Symbian evolving for decent touch-screen support and it’s now clear that maemo will not be for smartphones.
  They ALL focus on the UX a lot and understood the lesson from apple – End Users want easy and smooth.
  We are heading back to a device space with a homogeneous split between the device manufacturers, and this also means the slow death of Feature Phones.
• Social is key. The whole Samsung Wave presentation was about its social integration, Motorola is pushing its own suite “Blur” ahead. Everyone ate MWC was talking about social address-book and social presence.
• Mobile payment is finally leaping ahead with Visa for instance teaming up with Micro-SD manufacturers to embed RFID payment tags in their memory card thus trying to limit the current amount of stakeholders slowing up the project (and thus bypassing phone manufacturers and operators)
• SIM Card manufacturers are struggling to protect the value in their business (Sagem adds a wifi hotspot to the SIM Card and SK telecom runs Android on a sim)

Despite the Foursquare / Gowalla hype, Mobile LBS really isn’t a new thing. But, it seems like this time are buying it ! Yet there’s nothing innovative in Foursquare’s service. The confidentiality issues remain, but apparently the fact that firing up the application lets you win mayorships or medals or points somewhat make things acceptable by those who have been criticizing previous LBS service.
Yet the market, fueled by local ads, is a completely new territory to address which may be as big as Google’s Adwords. As usual it’s chicken and egg, nobody really invested in building up local ad networks while there were no real source of traffic for such ads, apparently this is starting to change. It may be the time to start reconsidering the viability of Local Advertisements, which will have special needs in terms of salesforce and sales mechanism that are very different from legacy Internet-based advertisements.
In France, “PagesJaunes” may be on of the few ready for this challenge, with an ability to list and upsale services to local business.

is limited to 500Mb… and I keep breaking the limit faster and faster !

Mobile Trends 2020

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The Mobile world has been forever a very fragmented space. Nevertheless, now you can start making some real bucks there : Mobile Ads is taking off, Mobile apps can be sold in one-click app-stores and delivered to a big mass of user in a glimpse… The mobile world is getting mature enough so that we can safely say that 2010 is going to be the year of all brands and generally all software getting mobile.
Innovative brands and solutions providers have already invested (a lot) to get in the mobile, often taking expensive and unproven approaches to get into the mobile.
I still remember Fauchon’s gold and silver eclairs being sold in 2005 (!!) from the mobile and that we built at Kamayo (that was really ahead of the curve but it was an impressive achievement for 2005 o have a big brand such as Fauchon go that road)!

The decision process on how to build mobile application isn’t much easier now than it was in 2005 but a few ground rules have become clearer now :

• When working with a major brand, a communication agency or an operator in most cases you will be compelled in supporting a very large number of handsets. Those guys usually don’t like to push a message to their customers that only a fraction would be able to benefit from. At a proof of concept phase you may be able to limit to one or two platforms but you will need to should you’re able to scale and support all platforms.
• If you’re an indie developer or a startup, you should focus on making money. Today making money happens in those platforms in that order :
  iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Java, Palm Pre
  You should address each platform one after another trying to do the best job you can so end-users see you care. More important than just developing a great app, you should spend time marketing it on the dedicated channels. You do *not* need to cover all platforms, actually it’s really a 80/20 strategy, most you money will probably come from the iphone or maybe android. So you should rather focus on one platform and do it perfectly than spend time on developing all platforms and not having the means to market them. From that prospective, Evernote is a perfect case to watch, they first did a cool iPhone app, then moved in a 1year time to android and blackberry and finally Symbian.

When it comes to massifying your production, it’s always the same story, either you use a tool to address all platforms or you use manpower. Both have pros and cons. Tools such as Streamezzo or J2MEPolish have become great over time but going for them binds your product to their IP and impacts your business model. This may not be acceptable in all cases and sometimes you may want to go in hidden areas where the tool may not go (yet).
In my opinion, manpower is a real option. There are lots of experienced developers and mobile companies out there that can help you reach all platforms at once at a relatively low cost. It all comes down to your ability of managing projects to make sure everything is on track in terms of time, cost and quality.

This new product from Google is quite stunning. The android app is available as we speak and analyzes a picture you take with your phone to perform a search on it. Basically it has some shape recognition algorithm that will either recognize special shapes (a book, the eiffel tower, a bridge) and some OCR algorithms to read what’s written on the object, and search for it.

Les Systèmes Mobiles Avancés – Ericsson France

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