Mobitrends

Over the past few weeks, France has been in a mess regarding the policy to adopt regarding the support of start-ups. The tax privileges have been dismissed but may be on their way back (JEI), and many existing support mechanisms are being reviewed/discussed by the newly born CNN (Numeric National Counsil).That’s fine with me. But they’re not tackling one of the core subject in my opinion.

In France we have built a very scholar and elitist vision of what “Innovative” is. And it is utterly wrong. Unfortunately all the support mechanisms for start ups are built around that definition.
Innovative (n.m) = which is the outcome of ideally years of research, ideally by Ph.Ds and that may have a market application (or not)
Everyone will basically judge your project – and wether it’s innovative or not – according to this definition. For instance, Diveboard would not be innovative. Although we are creating a real-time view of the evolution of the marine species biotope by empowering scuba divers with mobile and pc tools, connecting their dive computers and crunching impressive amounts of data, it’s a social network so it’s not innovation. This is one of the reasons while I decided I won’t be spending even 1 second making a business plan or assembling a file to ask for grands and support : it would just be a waste of time.

This is the big difference between France and US and while France produces amazing tech startups that largely fails (of course and fortunately some succeed) : US focuses on market innovation. The objective is to disrupt a market, and a technology might be the tool that gives you an edge in that disruption. It’s by disrupting a market that you create opportunity, gain momentum and ultimately create a valuable business. That difference also profoundly changes the way research works in France v.s. US where in France we focus on writing papers and staying at a very theoretical level while the US researchers work around innovative use-cases and concrete real-life problems solving (MIT media lab is amazing on that regards).

As a conclusion I’d say that I don’t really expect behaviors to change, France is not really the kind of country where minds can switch to entrepreneurial and consumer oriented spirit that easily… but who knows!

While the smartphone market is structuring around the big OSes that are iPhone, Android, RIM and Windows Mobile, one can wonder where the next powerful ideas will be coming from in terms of killer mobile applications. After the hype with casual games and the usual set of tools (better to-do list, better email client, better… , remotes…), and as the app stores are now super-filled, inventing and promoting relevant mobile application is far from being a breeze.

Yet, mobile apps is probably the most growing field in the computer world today. With all those feature-phones being converted into smartphones, this is the most growing space in the industry yet.

Below are a few themes worth thinking about that have yet to be addressed correctly:

• Convergence : Obviously our life is split between devices, and there even apple fails at offering a perfectly convergent experience (i.e. my iPhone doesn’t sync with 2 iTunes on 2 MACs even while they both are authorized on the same account). Ubiquitous data, ubiquitous usage… 1Password is an excellent example of how a great simple desktop app gets a mobile extension generating lots of value, same for Evernote.
• Productivity : there’s still plenty of space left in this area, all the vendors doing complicated stuf such as office doc editor which are totally not suited to mobile usage.
• Lifelog / LifeTracker : while there are tens of ways of sharing stuff from your mobile, I don’t feel satisfied with any as they all feel limited regarding the verbosity of the infos i want to share or the pertinence of the info I would like to see stored.
• Presence : Presence information is currently poorly used either in the core network or in the way events are being treated. Google Voice did an amazing first step (and they are way ahead rest of the world with this) yet there is still a long way to go before presence information is treated seamlessly and adds value to our live
• Books : Publishing is being reinvented through tactile interfaces, from interactive publishing to cross-media, there is loads to do there.
• Banking : I often wonder what Mint would be like on a cell-phone. Apart from the security issues, finances is a standard theme usually badly addressed. Update: As Jerome pointed out in the comments, the mobile payment is also something hot, but the ecosystem is a huge pain/mess to organize to see this happening.

There are probably lots of other themes that could be added for this list, so I’m open for contributions / ideas of use cases that need to be polished/enhanced / developed !

Let’s face it, since Windows XP, everything consumer from Microsoft (apart from the XBOX) has been lame.

Windows Vista, Windows Mobile, MSN/Hotmail have been performing really badly and can be totally regarded as failures.

Yet it seems this time may be over.

For the first time in a long while, Microsoft is releasing exciting products one after another. Short development cycles, convergence and innovation has enabled them to release an excellent Windows 7, a challenging Bing, improved XBOX 360 experience and insights let us hope for the best with the upcoming Windows Mobile.

It seems that Microsoft managed to make massive changes in their R&D process to be able to regain that flexibility and ability to innovate aiming at shorter production cycles and more iterations, sounds like an interesting case I would love insights on.

Since a few years, if you had an idea the price for creating your first prototype got significantly lower. With a few thousand bucks and a little time you can now come up with a talented team of AD and coders that can turn most of your ideas into working prototypes. I’ve been using this approach now for years letting me rather confront ideas to the market than do old-style market studies that at the end always prove what you want to demonstrate. It’s also a great way to try new business models and validate assumptions.
Apart from my usual subcontractors with whom I built strong bonds over the years, I usually use odesk or rent-a-coder to add new specific skills to my virtual teams. Those services are great but it’s always hard to rely on them for more then a prototyping or proof of concept phase. Usually u get the basics done but the guys there fail when it comes to QA your product decently or meet deadlines. Nevertheless they are a valuable source of cheap workforce !
My point is that today, you can really launch a project with little money and go sell it. This will lead to a new generation of self-funded startups where the entrepreneurs will try to self-finance completely their project and keep a limited burn-rate as long as they can until the customers fund the growth. This is going to reshape completely the entrepreneur job since the “go get funding” stage is no longer compulsory.