Can Nokia pull it off?

Today marked the day of the launch of the Ovi Store, the Nokia answer to the Apple AppStore. Symbian has been around for years and years, and so have the Symbian apps. However, it took a year after Apple announced its store, for Nokia to realize they needed one...

Being second is not always a bad thing. You can learn from the first one (or second one, since Android Marketplace has been live for a few months) and make adjustments.

Or you can screw it completely...

TechCrunch has been pretty quick to call the launch "A complete disaster". Maybe they were even too quick and too harsh (I could get to the Funambol app on the store pretty easily), but the initial meltdown highlights one thing, a key one: maybe Nokia is not good at running services...

Or better: maybe they have never done it, they are trying (Ovi has been up and running for a while now) but they do not know how to manage a peak of interest. They are learning.

This is the tough part: they are a hardware company. They have always been (although they were selling very different hardware in the years before mobile telephony, like galoshes...) and they have decided to morph into a cloud services company. They have to. But it is not easy.

The question is: can they pull it off? Can a company change its DNA, and reposition itself as a software and services battleship?

Apple was started as a software company with a superbly engineered hardware around it. The difference was the UI, although they have been innovative on the HW side as well. And they still are. The iPhone is a superb piece of good looking hardware but the difference is inside. So much that everyone is catching up on the HW part, but nobody has matched them on the SW (Palm excluded, I think they surpassed them, actually). Apple knows software and they translated it pretty easily to services, starting with iTunes and playing with .Mac for years before going into MobileMe.

RIM was started as a software company with a very usable HW. The core, though, is the push email mechanism and the service behind it. The HW has been good looking enough (ugly, in most cases ;-) but very reliable. They know services.

Nokia is different. They are a hardware company. They bought software companies and they destroyed them (Intellisync being the last one coming to mind). They have to make a huge effort to turn the boat around. But they have to.

If I have to bet, knowing the resilience of the guys in Helsinki, I would say they will make it. It will be painful, they will need to get more help outside of the company (you do not change your DNA, you get some new from the outside and you recombine it) but eventually they will pull it off. It will just take a long time.

The worry is that they might not have that much time because the competition is moving extremely fast and they are out to kill them... We'll see.

The Palm gamble

I am a big Palm fan. I have always been and I will always be. Or so I hope, if they do not let me down. They did not let me down with the Pre. It is a fantastic device, beautifully engineered, sporting the best synchronization engine on the planet, really (and for the first time) giving iPhone a run for its money.

Now it is official: it will be out on June 6th and it will cost $199. Both numbers are interesting.

Why is $199 interesting? Because it is the right price to be competitive with the current iPhone.

Why is June 6th interesting? Because it is two days (two) before Apple WWDC, the developer conference when Apple is expected to announce a new lineup of iPhones (rumors abound: from new colored iPhones, to an iPhone mini, to an iPhone tablet, to new pricing, to....).

It is a huge gamble. Palm is announcing their make-it-or-break-it device two days before Apple is announcing something. They always do. Hard to believe they won't do it this time.

In any case, Palm will benefit from two days of huge marketing, pumped up by the expectation of the new iPhone two days later (expect the press to go berserk).

If Apple has something spectacular in store, though, the wind will be gone. Two days and Palm will be history in the press. Everybody will talk about how Apple did it again, how they killed the competition and so on...

If Apple disappoints, though, Palm is going to be on a trajectory towards the moon. The company that challenged Apple, the company that is ahead of Apple, the company that will kill the iPhone, and so on...

If Apple comes out in the middle, then Palm will be in the news anyway. They will have a big marketing push for free, lifted by the Apple marketing machine. They will be the challenger anyway, at least because they put themselves in front of the guns. They do not need to sell 10 millions devices in a month, they need to do ok to survive and grow.

It is a gamble. But a smart one. One I would have taken. The probability of Apple hitting out of the park are there, but the probability of something in the middle is higher (also, I have a feeling Palm knows more about Apple than we do...).

If they get it right, this might be remembered as one of the best marketing stunt in the history of mankind...

Do we really need another OSS mobile stack?

There is one reason Linux has been successful as a mainstream server OS: RedHat. It is not the company behind it that made it good, it is the fact that one company made the Linux enterprise distribution. There are few more distros, but one is mainstream. The rest is noise.

The market does not like noise, it likes mainstream. Early adopters are a nice bunch of people, but they are not that many... You need the Early Majority and the Late Majority to step in, to make something mainstream. Crossing the chasm happens when there is a clear leader.

Now look at Mobile Linux today. It is a mess. And I am upset about it because I am one of the big supporters of mobile open source, as you might have noticed. And if I am confused, imagine the rest of the world...

We have Android (open source dictatorship), LiMo (open source oligarchy) and Symbian (open source to be). Then you have Maemo (a Nokia effort for the tablets, which somehow clashes with the acquisition of Trolltech) and Moblin (an Intel effort for MIDs, Mobile Internet Devices, which seems not be going anywhere).

Too many initiatives?

Nope, now we have a new one. Nokia and Intel (wow) announced oFono today. I do not think it is an OS, probably more of a stack. But it is meant to do all the things an OS does on a mobile device (telephony, for once).

The description of the project is a geek dream and a journalist nightmare:

oFono.org is a place to bring developers together around designing an infrastructure for building mobile telephony (GSM/UMTS) applications. oFono.org is licensed under GPLv2, and it includes a high-level D-Bus API for use by telephony applications of any license. oFono.org also includes a low-level plug-in API for integrating with open source as well as third party telephony stacks, cellular modems and storage back-ends. The plug-in API functionality is modeled on public standards, in particular 3GPP TS 27.007 "AT command set for User Equipment (UE)."

I mean, the answer to "what is oFono?" is "A plug-in API functionality modeled on 3GPP TS 27.007"... Aahhh, now it is clear ;-)

Anyway, it is just another confusing effort in the mobile open source space. I do understand this is a hot market and everyone is jumping on it, but I think we are trying to do too much and it is not helping anyone.

Or maybe I should just look at it and celebrate yet another success of mobile open source, which attracts the bigger players, committed to make it the mobile platform of the future.

If I just could understand what they do, maybe I could make up my mind...

I am an art dealer

Yesterday I attended the third Venice Sessions event. It is an event promoted by Telecom Italia and held at their Future Centre in Venice. Spectacular location. The invitation by Telecom Italia to attend the event was the main reason for my last European trip, although as usual I packed the trip with a million of other things...

The topic was "Technology and modern art". Very interesting, because if there is something Italians are famous for, that is art (ok, ok, for the Garfields out there... pizza is a close second). In particular when you are talking about that topic inside that building inside that city... Art is everywhere, even overwhelming at times.

At first, I was a bit puzzled. Why was I there? Why did they invite me? I sell software for mobile phones, I had little in common with most of the speakers, beside personal interest. When the museum people were talking about paintings, exhibitions, modern art, I was just listening in awe. They were speaking a language I barely understood. I felt way out of my league.

And then, along the day, someone started talking about creativity.

Boom, lights on.

I always talk about Italy as the perfect spot for high tech innovation, software in particular. My usual argument is that software is pure creativity, a fine product of the brain. That Italians are masters of creativity, from paintings to sculptures to fashion to design to clothing to furniture to food. That software is just another representation of creativity, that is in the country DNA (in kilos). It is what made Italy a success worldwide, for centuries. Italians are meant to build great software.

I then realized, with the microphone in my hand, that software is actually a form of modern art. I realized that software developers are modern artists.

I always insisted to call my guys software designers, instead of developers, because they deserve to be considered at the same level of clothes designers, or architects: people that are known to be cool. Software design has not been considered cool in Italy. But it should, because it is a form of art. Artists are cool. And software developers are artists.

And now that makes me an art dealer, I guess.

Looks what happens when you listen to smart people in a beautiful place: you walk in as a software salesman, you walk out with a sense a coolness.

The content trap

In a world where mash-up is the buzzword (or was it? Web 2.0 is not that cool anymore...), you would assume content is freely available to anyone. That you can take some data from Google, mash it up with something coming out of Facebook, Yahoo and so on.

That is true, up to a certain point.

The trick is that who owns the content (even the User Generated Content...) owns the content. It is as simple as that. If you do not own the content, you have to get it from somewhere else. The company that owns it can shut you down whenever they want. They do not even have to ask for your permission... You might have the APIs to technically access their content, but that is not nearly enough.

One example is what happened today at Facebook. They shut down an application that was simply creating an RSS feed of your stream. Granted, the app was overstepping some boundaries on Facebook privacy rules, but they could have just changed the rules, had they not like it.

This is exactly what happened in the Instant Messaging world (at least in mobile). Do you know any mobile IM company that made it? I don't... You can easily build a Yahoo Messenger integration, but when you go and sell it to a mobile operator they will ask you "do you have permission from Yahoo?". Nope? Go ask them and they will charge you. Everyone will do the same. The economics will never work when you are trying to sell a free app and you have to pay hard dollars to the content owner.

I could go on and on with examples. If you do not own the content and you are trying to build an application accessing it, you are putting your foot in a trap. As soon as you are successful, you sell it to someone or you get a lot of users, be sure the content owner will knock at your door asking for money. They will say you use too much of their bandwidth for free or that they changed their privacy rules or whatever. Bottom line: they will ask for money (rightly so, they own the content after all) and you will be screwed.

If you are a mobile operator and you do not own the content, you are also screwed... It is exactly the same thing as above. Build an integration and they will come after you. Your only option is to actually be the content owner. Take the user generated content first (it is easy and it is free, with no copyright issues), then you can add more. But be very careful on avoiding the content trap. The Internet Portals are just waiting for you to put your foot in the trap...

Apple made AT&T a pipe

There is a war the device manufacturers are waging against the carriers. A scary one for the mobile operators, in particular because they are attacked by Internet Portals as well, at the same time...

It all started with RIM. They took over the relationship with the customer. The carrier disappeared. The only thing that reminds me of AT&T on my BlackBerry is a plastic sticker on the front. Nothing else. While I am roaming around the world, the BlackBerry still works and I do not even remember which carrier I am using. My email is synced with the BlackBerry Internet Service, AT&T is just a pipe.

RIM was not a big problem for carriers. They could manage it. It was a niche in the enterprise, and a very lucrative one (BlackBerry users do not mind paying big bucks). Then RIM started moving into the consumer market... Now they have more BIS users than BES users (70-30 ratio), so more consumers than enterprises. They are eating in the carriers plate.

Still, the carriers can take it. RIM is a small threat. Still a niche.

What is scary is Nokia with Ovi, in particular in Europe and Asia. In some countries, they have 50% and more of market share. They are just coming in and taking over. The operators are fighting back, but some are tempted by the shortcut ("I can make some money fast, let's launch Nokia Messaging and we'll see what happens later") and will commit suicide. The smart ones are resisting and looking at alternatives (I know one...). They still can fight.

Overall, Nokia is a risk, a very big one. But it has not materialized yet. They have not proved they can create data services that people use. As of now, they are just a device manufacturers. They do not know how to deal with services. Exactly as the carriers. They are a scary player to deal with, but not right now right here.

Then there is Apple. Same game as above, but a lot worst. They know services. They own music, the app store, MobileMe and more. They have proven they can do it, with one billion apps downloaded.

On my iPhone, AT&T is not even a sticker. Not even a physical object... It is a bunch of pixels on the top left. So virtual it can disappear in a second.

Want some proof?

Check the leak about Verizon and Apple talking. Who do you think leaked the news? I have my ideas... They did not leak it to a technology magazine, they went all the way, to a consumer outlet like USA Today!

It just puts an enormous pressure on AT&T, who needs to renew the contract with Apple. Best way to get a good deal? Work with the competition and let everyone know it.

The sad story: AT&T needs Apple way more than Apple needs AT&T. The Verizon leak is a living proof. They can walk away when they want. Why?

Because Apple OWNS their customers. They own the AT&T consumers...

Guess what? They have already made AT&T a pipe...

Oracle + Sun and mobile

I have read quite a lot of comments on the acquisition of Sun by Oracle.

Most have focused the analysis on MySQL, since it is actually a cool story: Oracle is taking off the market the #1 long-term competitor, one they wanted to acquire some time ago (for $850M, some say) before Sun got it for $1B. In a way, Oracle now bought the entire pie, getting the icing for free. Sweet.

Some are focusing on Java, simply because Oracle said that is the main reason for the acquisition. The focus goes quickly on Weblogic, the heavy reliance of Oracle on Java and so on. It makes sense.

However, there is a point nobody is discussing: what about the #1 money generator for Sun on the software side? I mean, JavaME, Java on mobile... Sun has made zero dollars (or so) on Java, outside mobile. It is a little secret, but Sun has made a ton of money of JavaME. Ton for my standards, of course. Some might object they could have made more. But they made a lot.

Moreover, Sun is the de-facto standard development platform on feature phones today. JavaME is on every phone. Yes, you might argue it is a mess (every phone is different) and that they are at risk of losing the battle on the smartphone front. But the smartphone world has way too many operating systems to keep going as it is. Developers are going nuts. The mobile market needs ONE platform.

Sun has been working on it for a while. The JavaFX effort is going in the right direction. They have a foothold in the mobile operators and device manufacturers. They are moving towards smartphones, unifying desktop, mobile and TV.

Yes, the future could be a full web development environment, as I wrote in the past. But, as there is room for Flash on desktops (it is not all Ajax), there is room for JavaFX on mobile. With the market penetration of JavaME, Sun is the company best positioned to make it. And let me remind you that mobile is the future of everything ;-)

Bottom line: acquiring Sun means for Oracle controlling a piece of the future of mobile. They have not been that active on it, beside some Service Delivery Platform offering. They now control a gem, on the client side. They have a critical presence around the future of computing.

I am expecting Oracle not to screw this up, actually the opposite. I believe when they say "We bought Sun for Java" they actually mean more "We bought Sun for JavaFX, and mobile in particular". They will invest in it, even more than Sun has done so far.

I would. Wouldn't you?

Momentum momentum momentum

You keep working and working. You keep signing customers. You keep working and working. You get them live. After they go live, their user base starts growing fast. You are happy.

What do you do next?

You tell the world you did it, so you won't celebrate alone :-)

In technical terms, it is called a momentum release. In layman terms, it is a "hey, look at us, we are growing like crazy! Join the fray...".

So, here it is our momentum release of today, focused on the non-carrier world:

Funambol Open Source Cloud Sync and Push Email Powers Innovative Mobile Services for Tens of Millions of Users
Includes smart self-updating address book, free unlimited text messaging, free national directory, virtual digital content organizer and next-gen voice services

Who are these companies? Some are shy and did not give us permission to use their name (and, as always, they are the largest deployments ;-) :

• a smart self-updating address book with 13 million users
• free unlimited text messages to any mobile phone; mjoy by Venista, www.mjoy.com
• free integrated national address book; tacty by telegate:118000, www.tacty.com
• next-gen telephony for consumers and businesses, JAJAH www.jajah.com
• virtual digital content organizer, ZangbeZang by Key Criteria, www.zangbezang.com
• leading digital phone service provider with millions of subscribers
• best-selling customer management solution with millions of users
• innovative internet services provider, Solcon by Qaleido, www.qaleido.com
• email hosting provider for businesses and resellers, www.fusemail.com

Feel free to check them out. They do have an amazing product... And we are happy.

Skype on the iPhone, fences, and pipes

The only interesting news of CTIA was Skype on the iPhone (and soon on the BlackBerry). The floor was full of people playing around with it and saying "oooohhh, it works!".

It does. It works very well. Over wi-fi, the quality of calls resembles the one of your PC (that is, not perfect but ok, and the price is right).

The limitation? Voice does not work on 3G on AT&T (but chat does, which is nice) and the app cannot be used at all in Germany with Deutsche Telekom (they even said they will cancel your contract if they find you cheating around with Skype, which is doable for the tech savvy).

The debate is on. Can carriers really limit the use of applications by their own users? Does it even make sense? Will it be supportable long-term?

The answer is no (sorry). If you are a carrier, you can limit the usage of your network (e.g. charge for data over a certain threshold, and voice is quite data intensive) but you can't limit single applications. It is not practical. It is not going to work in the long term.

The world is too open now, there is no way back. There are no walled gardens anymore. Maybe you can still put on a fence, but people will go around it. It is just a matter of time.

So, what if you are a carrier? Well, you are still making a ton of money, not a bad situation to be in. If VOIP takes off, your voice revenues are at risk, but they will be compensated by data revenues. Maybe just partially. But it is not like your revenues will disappear.

The world is going towards data. Voice is a data type. Period. Everything will go through the same pipe. You control the pipe, you make money. The risk? Become the pipe and nothing else.

How do you get out of becoming just a pipe? Not with fences. Build a playground, make people happy to stay with you, give them services, make sure they are so happy with you they won't go anywhere else (or, at least, lock their most important data like an evil Google).

Mobile cloud services. There is no other answer. That's the long term game. The rest is just happening, it is a snowball transforming in an avalanche. You can't stop it.

GPL is the new BSD

I know, I know, I promised I would not write about open source licenses anymore. The debate is over: AGPL is the license to use, let's move on. However, I still feel there is so much more education needed... So many people pick GPL without knowing what AGPL is, thus screwing the future of their projects in the cloud computing world ahead of us... It is sad to watch and sometimes I want to yell ;-)

Today I read a very nice (long) post by Jeremy Allison (of Samba fame).

The message is exactly my usual one: "GPL is the new BSD". GPL in a cloud computing world loses copyleft, and everything great that came with that (arguably, the entire free software and open source movements).

Jeremy wrotes:

For network services running in a cloud, [AGPL] brings back the fairness provision that the original GPL intended, and returns the freedom that Free Software promises to all users and developers.

Currently the AGPL is a minority license as compared to the GPL. Not much Free Software is currently written directly to serve cloud computing network services.

But cloud computing is going to change the industry in as profound a way as client server did in the late 1980s and 1990s. The ability to easily provision and scale up software services based on the Free Software LAMP stack (Linux / Apache / MySQL /PHP or Perl or Python) or more modern fare such as the open source Java software framework Hadoop is going to massively change the way software is developed. Of course at my day job, it already has for many of the engineers.

Even old fogies like me are going to have to learn some new tricks in this world. Free Software is going to have to adopt as well. I still have lots of Samba code to write first (no, Samba isn’t a finished product yet), but if I ever work on cloud computing code, I’d like to see it under the AGPL, in order to preserve the freedoms I’ve been able to enjoy in conventional software development these many years. Without the AGPL, our freedoms will depend on the kindness of strangers donating their modifications to our code back to us, as they did in the days before the GPL license and the FSF was born

Well said. GPL is going to be the new BSD. Google (his employer) will exploit it as long as possible. People should wake up and "give it an A". C'mon, AGPL is the way to go, just get over it and adopt it, so I can win my bet with Mark...

Impressions of CTIA 2009

I just came back from CTIA in Vegas, biggest US show for wireless. I was sick, but I dragged my body around for two days. I believe it was worth the effort.

Impressions:

1. The show was smaller, but not too small. That made look the floor quite crowded at times. However, looking at the lines at Starbucks, there were way less people than the last years (unless the downturn makes people less interested in coffee). There was a show beside CTIA, about car washing. Another market that might not suffer too much in this economy ;-)
   
2. The atmosphere was not upbeat but neither downbeat. Right in the middle, with a tilt towards upbeat (many people thinking the worst is behind us, see the numbers of RIM today if you need a proof)
3. There was absolutely no news to report. No new devices worth mentioning. No nada.
4. Networking was great as usual. The quality of the people that attended was very high (and with quality we mean rank in a large scale organization with cash to spend, of course)
5. Best thing in the show was a real Formula 1 car, with a simulator that actually moved the car left and right, back and forth (for acceleration and braking). Awesome. I scored a pretty good time, but I wished I could have played a lot longer. Nothing to do with wireless, but hard to beat

My conclusions:

1. I decided last year that it was going to be our last time exhibiting at CTIA. I have zero regrets. The show has no meaning left. It is after CES and MWC in Barcelona. Everything happens before it. Move it to September and we'll talk about coming back to exhibit
2. It is worth going, even sick, because everyone is there. The networking is great. With the prices in Vegas this time (I got a room at the five stars Wynn for $119, and a free upgrade to a Tower Suite. Circus Circus was going for $17 a night...) and the cheap flight from the Valley, it makes it even better. You meet 10 people from the East Coast and your cost analysis shows a 50 times ROI. $200 for two days of back-to-back meetings are hard to beat. I will definitely be back next year.
   

Commercial Open Source is very healthy

Last week was Commercial Open Source week for me. I met almost everyone in the industry, since I spoke at OSBC in San Francisco and I attended OSGR in Utah. The latter was a lot of fun, the former a bit surprising.

I wrote in the past that I believed LinuxWorld was done, and I was right... I also wrote that the next one up was OSBC. I now feel I was wrong. OSBC is morphing, naturally (I do not think Matt was anticipating this, it just happened). It started as a club of Commercial Open Source people discussing about business models and licenses. It became an outlet for large companies trying to behave opensourcy. It is now an education conference, for people that know a little about open source and nothing about how to make money with that.

I gave a talk about my way to build a successful open source business (similar to the keynote I gave at the World Computer Congress). I started with basic concepts, like "what is open source" or "what is dual licensing". At least half of the audience was listening with a level of attention that surprised me. I was talking about concepts everyone knew at the first OSBC. Not now, not at this one.

Open source has crossed the chasm. It is mainstream. The rest of the population (which happens to be the vast majority) is now looking at ways to create businesses around it. They do not know the basic concepts. They come to OSBC to learn them.

That is why OSBC was packed and the rooms were full, during an economic downturn where nobody is traveling.

The other angle came from OSGR and some of the chat in the hallways at OSBC. Every CEO I talked to said the same thing: "we are doing pretty well, business is growing, despite the economy". OSGR was the last days of the quarter, and everyone was relaxed.

Open Source companies are doing well. The downturn is helping them. I talk to a lot of CEOs in the Valley and, believe me, everyone is hurting badly. They are all scared to death. No cash from VCs, their customers delaying payments, some dying, contracts slipping quarter after quarter.

Not in the Open Source world. This market is very strong. It is now attracting the bulk of the market. It is perceived as the Walmart of software. And that is where people go to shop in a crisis.

Long life Open Source. Long life OSBC.

The bar is way too low at RIM

As you might know, RIM has two different models to push email (and sync).

One is called BES, or BlackBerry Enterprise Server. It is installed behind the firewall at medium/large corporations. It does push email and sync with Exchange.

The other one is called BIS, or BlackBerry Internet Service. No server software is installed. You open a wap page on your BB, tell RIM where your email is (Yahoo, Gmail or your POP/IMAP server) and your email gets pulled from your server and then pushed on your device (kinda push email ;-) However, there is no sync. None. You have to plug in your cable in your PC to sync with your Outlook. And you have to install the horrible BlackBerry Desktop software to do it.

The interesting thing that many people do not know is that BIS is half of the BlackBerry users today. And growing faster than BES. The Pearl first and the other prosumer devices that RIM is pushing in the market are mostly attracting BIS users. And some BES replacement. But few new BES users.

I use a BlackBerry with BIS these days. The sync is provided by Funambol, with the local BlackBerry sync client (the new one syncs contacts, calendar, notes, tasks and even pictures). I have the Funambol plug-in in Outlook, which pushes the PIM data to the cloud, keeping it in sync with my BlackBerry. No cables. On top of it, I have a website where I can see my data and change it if I am far from my computer, I am too lazy to type on my BlackBerry or I am out of battery (which happens ;-) Both system can be accessed by my wife and my assistant, if they want to screw up with my calendar and life.

BTW, all the above is available today for free at my.funambol.com if you are a BIS user. If you are a carrier and you want to give this service to your BIS users, give us a call. It is one of the hottest products at Funambol these days.

I also use the Funambol email client on my BlackBerry, although it does not make too much sense because I could use BIS. The email client, though, makes sense if you use BES and you want to have a separate Inbox for your personal live, so that your assistant does not find out you like soccer or something else...

I use the BIS just to test it. I have a Yahoo and Gmail account set up. For a while, I noticed that every time I was sending out an email with Gmail, it would appear again in the Inbox (sometimes, more than once). I thought I was doing something wrong. Somehow the RIM marketing image of a "perfect company" created a reality distortion field. I could not imagine for a second this was a RIM bug, because it was just too big...

Yesterday, RIM announced BIS 2.6, the new release of the service. As part of the release, now you can see your password when you type it (wow) and, mostly:

*BlackBerry Internet Service 2.6 uses Internet Message Access Protocol (IMAP) to integrate Gmail® webmail accounts. This integration protocol introduces the following benefits:
o Elimination of sent email messages appearing as received email messages in the message list on the BlackBerry smartphone
o One-way synchronization of read status, sent items, and deleted items.

What?? I wasn't stupid... It was a bug, fixed in the new release as a "benefit". Man, I wish I could go by with a bug like that in the open source world. The community would be yelling at us at the alpha stage (some would notice it even earlier in a nightly build...). Not a chance. And RIM is live worldwide. And Gmail is the fastest growing email system!

There is more:

* To use these improvements, BlackBerry smartphone users must remove and reintegrate their Gmail webmail accounts.

Whaaaat? I have to remove all my emails, open the awful WAP page, remove my account and create it again (but I could see my password now ;-)? To fix a bug??

I just can't believe it. The open source bar is just so high that quality is a must, not an optional. There is nothing marketing can do, when you are out there naked. They see you. You can't hide.

Open source is changing the way software is developed. It brings a different level of quality. It is destined to wipe out any closed source alternative. Yep, even if it is RIM, the perfect company with perfect software. Just wait (a few tens of years :-))

Silicon Valley is the center of mobile

Today I was reading the latest newsletter by Gerry Purdy, the Chief Analyst for mobile at Frost&Sullivan. It is titled "Silicon Valley 'Golden Triangle': Apple, Google, Microsoft and Palm Mobile Platforms".

He writes:

It seems amazing to me that five of the top six mobile platforms are being developed near each other within Silicon Valley (an area that is approximately South of Highway 92, North of Highway 17 and bounded on the East by the SF Bay and West the foothills, although there’s no real boundary). If you connect the locations of these companies, it looks like three points a triangle.

Apple is working on the iPhone platform (OS, App Store, iTunes) in Cupertino. Set that as point one. Go about 10 miles North West up Highway 85 to the Bayshore Freeway (Highway 101 at Rengstorff), and you’ll find Google working in Mountain View on the Android platform (Android OS, Market Place and general mobile apps such as search and maps). You’ll also find Microsoft working on much of Windows Mobile in their Mountain View campus at Shoreline & 101). Set that at point two. Go South East around 10 miles to Sunnyvale, and you’ll find Palm working on the new Pre platform (Web OS, Synergy and Apps Store). Set that as point three. And, if you go around 10 miles back South West from Palm you end up back in Cupertino at Apple.

He adds that there are just two other areas of mobile development, Helsinki (for Nokia) and Waterloo (for RIM), but the message is clear: Silicon Valley is the center of mobile.

Somehow, I struck me as a revelation. Although I have been living here for ten years, when I moved to the Valley in 1999 (ohhh, the good times ;-) Silicon Valley was so far away from the center of mobile. I mean, my grandma had a cellphone in Italy and in my Silicon Valley company, about to IPO, there were probably five people with a mobile device that was not a pager (what is a pager you ask, my fellow European? Well, you must have seen one in a movie about doctors... They were everywhere in the US).

I picked Silicon Valley for Funambol because I thought it was the best of the best to headquarter an high-tech startup. Even if mobile was nowhere to be found. Even if I was going to 3000 Sand Hill to meet VCs and my phone had no coverage, so I could not give them a live demo (last time I was there last year, the situation was not very different..). Even if driving from San Francisco to San Jose on 280 meant five dropped calls.

Back then, I thought I was fighting against the odds. Hard to find investors with knowledge of the wireless market worldwide (the differences are striking, from Japan to Europe to the US). Hard to convince people mobile was the next big thing. That Silicon Valley was best positioned to ride the next wave.

Boom! Look at it now. The Valley is the center of mobile.

I just did not realize that I picked Silicon Valley as a natural headquarter, and then the entire mobile world shifted here. It must be the weather.

Apple: openness can't be faked

Yesterday, I spent a few good hours trying to download the documentation of the iPhone 3.0 SDK from the Apple Developer Connection site. The site was down for almost the entire day. Talk about interest by developers for the new OS version... And inability for a company like Apple to keep up with it (hey, they are not famous for servers, right? ;-)

My goal was to find the new Calendar API (we need it to provide calendar sync with Funambol). They claimed 1,000 new APIs in the slides. They built the entire presentation on openness to counter Android, Symbian, Windows Mobile and Palm. It must be there, I thought.

Unfortunately, it is not there. I could not find it. Either I am dumb (which is likely) or blind (nope, my vision is ok, I just changed glasses) or it is just not there.

I mean, 1,000 new APIs and none to give access to one of the two basic data elements in a smartphone (the other being the address book)...

Are they kidding me? Nope. They just play their cards. They do not want a MobileMe competitor on the iPhone. They will give you CalDAV, .ics support, even ActiveSync for the enterprise. But no access for developers. They might build something too good...

I know, I am bitter. But I am right to be bitter :-)

They are just playing the openness card and it is just a fake. Android is open, very open, almost too open... Windows Mobile has all the APIs you need. Same for Symbian, which is going to be even more open. BlackBerry has APIs for everything.

Apple does not.

You just can't fake openness, Apple . Even if you put names on a slide, it takes five seconds (or hours, if your site is down) to discover it is just words.

What I am sure about, is that they are going to pay for it. The lack of openness is going to bite them back one day. The world is going in a different direction and their tactics work when they are the only game in town. When they are not, it just relegates them to a small percentage of the market. I think it is just a waste, for such a fantastic company.

And I know, you are right, I am bitter...

Apple catching up

The tile of my previous post, with the predictions for the iPhone 3.0 OS presentation was "Apple raising the bar". After the presentation, I actually have to say Apple is trying to catch up... The features announced were unimpressive and there was no real news.

On my predictions, nothing from MEDIUM to LOW came true (hey, I got it right), while most of the HIGH made it (I am not sure about a couple yet, but I will double-check and report later).

My HIGH probability predictions:

1. Copy & Paste. MADE IT
2. MMS. MADE IT
   
3. Calendar API access from the SDK. NOT SURE YET, but they have said they have 1,000 APIs available. I would be shocked if calendar is not there...
   
4. A Task application. NOT SURE YET. Definitely they did not mention it, so this is the one that might not have made it (or is it too small to talk about it, we'll see)
   
5. Push support. Not the one that actually makes sense (for that you need multithreading support), but the one Steve Jobs announced almost a year ago for last September and never delivered. A crappy push, but at least some push. MADE IT (and the good push did not)

What else? Spotlight (for searching), landscape support for more apps (Mail, about time...), some improvements on the Stock app (news at the bottom), Caldav and .ics support for Calendar (good), Voice memos, API for hardware devices (very interesting, in particular the medical applications), Maps in you app (crucial for geolocation in social networking, it is going to be big), subscription paid models in the App Store (more ways to make money for developers, always a positive), Peer to Peer support via Bluetooth (very cool for sharing contacts or multiplayers games).

Not a bad list, but the rest of the pack is now ahead of Apple (wow). Palm in particular. Apple is behind the competition, they have to catch up. The question is whether Palm can actually deliver. If they do, we have a new ballgame.

Apple raising the bar

The guys at Apple are setting things up nicely: first, they had Palm go out with the Pre announcement and all the noise the WebOS generated. Then they had Google sort-of announce that the G1 is coming out with a new Android version in a month.

Now they are ready to raise the bar. When everyone has shown their cards, they will come out with something probably awesome, and have everyone else scramble to catch up. They are magicians at this. They could have released something new for the iPhone in a while: think about it, the iPhone 3G was just a minor upgrade, nothing really new came out from them on the iPhone front since that magic January 2007 (that's over two years ago...). There was no reason to do it. Now there is. Time to punch.

Next Tuesday, on March 17th, Apple will announce the iPhone 3.0.
What will be in it? Well, let me try to categorize my guesses.

HIGH PROBABILITY

1. Copy & Paste. No questions on this one. You do not want people to migrate to other platforms for a stupid missing feature. Even if they are just geeks and business people.
2. MMS. If you live in the US, you probably never heard of this one. Believe me, it is quite big in Europe and you can't sell a phone without it (unless you are Apple, but it is wise to add it anyway...)
3. Calendar API access from the SDK. Ok, this is a small feature, but it would allow us to finally support sync of calendars on an iPhone. That would be nice, since it is the #1 request I am hearing when I travel around and I always have to explain that it is not my fault, but Apple's.
4. A Task application. Yep, it is missing in the iPhone. Time to add it.
5. Push support. Not the one that actually makes sense (for that you need multithreading support, see below), but the one Steve Jobs announced almost a year ago for last September and never delivered. A crappy push, but at least some push. Unless they go for multi-thread, which has its complications, as you can see below.
   

MEDIUM PROBABILITY

1. Tethering to your PC. I just do not think this is going to make it, unless AT&T is allowed to come up with a specific additional plan attached to it. If not, they will prevent Apple to do it. No carrier will like it overseas as well (tethering to a PC means a lot of traffic, and they all have caps on data usage in Europe. You would think the carriers would be happy that you go over your data quota, but the cost to answer the phone when pissed customers are calling is too high. It does not make good business sense). Apple has learned they have to work with carriers to succeed in this market, so this happens only with them in agreement.
2. Flash support. Apple wants to control the development environment, so they have not allowed Flash so far. But with the App Store so big, I feel Flash would be a second citizen anyway. The time to get Flash in has arrived, I believe.
3. Multi-thread support and real push. The Pre has it. Apple can't allow them to steal the show. The new iPhone OS must allow more than one app to run in the background. The issue? Battery life. How do you solve this? With a new HW, which leads to the next item.
   
4. A new iPhone. Gasp. What? Well, why not? They pre-announced the first iPhone to steal the thunder. They could do the same now. Palm is coming out with something cool, they announce a new iPhone coming out in June, show the OS now and have everyone wait for it (hurting Palm badly). It makes sense to me...
5. A very cool wireless charger. The Pre has it, do you want them to be the only ones? Clearly, this requires a new device as well.
   

LOW PROBABILITY

1. An iPhone-based netbook. I actually bet on this months ago and most people said I was an idiot (I am used to that ;-) However, I am a persistent idiot, so I think it will actually happen one day. That day might be next Tuesday: netbooks are the only category of laptops that are growing at a fast rate. Apple is the king of high-end laptops. They can be the king of high-end netbooks as well (at $499).
2. An iPhone keyboard. Hey, the Pre has it... Not a chance in my opinion, unless it is via Bluetooth as a separate item.
   
3. Steve Jobs showing up to say hi, live or on video. He did not even attend the Disney board meeting, so I believe there is no chance. But it would be great, and hope is cheap (or was it talk?)

That's it. Buzz is building up. We'll know very soon.

Google is scary

I have been negative on Google in the past, due to their relaxed use of open source (i.e. returning code to the community only when convenient). However, I feel that is nothing compared to what is happening (and will happen).

Today Google announced a slight change in plans. They are launching "interest-based" advertising. Camouflaged under a "making ads more interesting" tag line, in reality they are starting to use the information they collect about you browsing the web. Any site that you visit that has Google ads (pretty much all) will be used to create a profile of you, so that they can target ads to your interest (and sell it to the advertisers, of course). Their top line must be hurting...

Ok, we knew they could do it, so where is the problem?

Well, let's look at mobile for a second. They just launched Latitude. They will not use the data they will collect about you for now. Until the business starts degrading a bit more and they will change the course.

Think about it:

1. they know what you like and the site you visit, including when you do it and from where (ever noticed that Google changes language depending on where you connect from?). Not to be evil, just to create a profile of you to better target ads.
   
2. they know where you go, with Latitude, with a precision of 3 meters if you have GPS in your phone (something all phones will have in a few years). With that information, is easy to understand if you have a job or not (are you going back and forth from home every day to the same place? Then you have a job). Are you a traveler, do you go to the airport often? Do you work long hours, are you back at home late or early? Do you go out at night and have fun or stay at home in front of your TV? Out in the same bar, different bar every weekend? Which area in the city, Castro? Knowing where you are every single moment they can build a profile of the kind of person you are, quite accurately. Do not give me the BS of "it is too much data to compute!". They are scanning every book on the planet, mapping every street in the world. Nothing is too big for them. Of course, they are going to create a very accurate profile of you, but not to be evil, just to better target ads (interesting ones).
3. they read your email, if you use Gmail, which happens to be the only hosted email system growing. If you write often about soccer, you must like it. Hey, we do not care about what you write, we just read it just to create a profile of you to better target ads...
4. they know what you watch, since you must be using YouTube quite often. Watching strange things? Well, now we know what you like... Not to be evil, blah blah.
   
5. they have your cell phone, home phone, home address. I know, you say: I did not give it to them! Unfortunately, I am ready to bet that some of your friends have your email address in their address book on Gmail, including your cell phone and home phone. The fact you did not give it to Google does not mean they do not have it. They do. It just adds to your profile. In case they need to call you for delivering an ad you would really like.
   

One thing they do not have (yet) is your full social network. I am sure they are hurting. They know some of your friends, due to the address books, but they are nowhere close to what Facebook is doing. I am ready to bet it is not going to last long. They need that kind of information to better target ads... They might just buy Facebook and get over it.

Bottom line, Google is scary. There is nothing we can do about it. We can talk but at the end of the day, we use Google services (actually, I use Adblock Plus, so at least they can't target me through ads). You can opt out, but how many will? Few paranoids. In public, we are all scared about privacy. In private, we are a bunch of lazy people. Google knows it. And it collects data about us.

Very valuable data. Something they might not use. As they were not using the info they were collecting about the sites you were visiting. Wait for their stock to drop a bit, they will use the next weapon. I guarantee it.

Google is scary.

The next sync: app sync

These are very exciting times for cloud syncing technologies and products. MobileMe has started an explosion of look-alike and better-than. Everyone is jumping into cloud services these days, in particular in mobile. Mobile devices need a cloud service, because they represent just one chunk of our life. The rest is scattered among other devices, such as our desktop or laptop or netbook. And in our landline phone. And in our TV and music set. Bottom line, if you have a mobile phone that does just a bit more than just voice calls, you need a mobile cloud service.

That is why sync is big and is going to be even bigger. There are going to be more and more devices IP-enabled, getting in the space. All with the need to be synced to the rest of our (mobile) life. All pointing to the cloud.

What else to be done, once you have all your data synced in the cloud, and among all your devices?

App sync.

What's that? Well, let me try with an example. You are watching a movie on your mobile device on the train. The train stops and you have to get out, so you have to pause the movie (unless you want to miss your stop, and piss off your family because you are not home for dinner, then go for a lame excuse and a likely separation...). You get off the train saving your life from devastation, you go home, have dinner, put the kids to bed then you finally land on your couch in front of your TV. There, you find your movie waiting for a PLAY button, exactly where you left it on the train.

That's app status sync (or whatever it is going to be called, context switching or something like this... We'll get some marketing guru involved one day). One example of it is already visible with the launch of the new iPhone Kindle application. If you have a Kindle and you are reading a book, once you open your iPhone Kindle app, the book opens at the page you were reading on the Kindle. And vice versa. The status of the two apps is synced. Nice.

This applies to many apps, pretty much anything. I would like the idea of opening my mobile device and start from the Word document I was editing on my PC. Or on that email I was about to send. Or that music I was listening to in my car.

It is the next sync. First, you sync the data. Then, you sync the apps. I would really like to see the former one done (we are still far from it), but I am already looking forward to the latter.

Cloud syncing is going to be an interesting market for years to come. Stay tuned.

Mobile is still strong, despite the rest

It is hard to be optimistic on anything these days. When you look at your portfolio, read newspapers, watch TV, you are bombarded with negative over negative.

However, in a downturn there are always areas of optimism, sectors that fare much better than the rest. It is just a matter of picking them and ride the wave, while everything around is collapsing.

One of these markets - in the current downturn - is mobile. Just look at the figures below, coming from a recent IDC study.



Granted, it is not 500% year-over-year growth. But it is growth nonetheless. Personally, I would sign up my entire portfolio for those numbers. I am getting used to the -30% to -50% losses...

Why will mobile operator still do well in 2009:

1. Voice. In a crisis, people won't give up their cell phone. They will give up their landline, moving everything to their mobile device. And they will talk more, because that is what you do when you have time and you are depressed (the other thing is playing games, which is the other market that won't suffer that much). Voice revenues are going to go up, not down, with zero capex for the mobile operators.
   
2. Data. The trend towards smartphones and data plans is not going to change. People will wait a bit more to switch mobile phone, but the next one is for sure a smartphone. Some might even drop their DSL at home and go for an iPhone or the like, to save money and have everything in one place. Data plans are a great revenue generating tool for mobile operators and they will get more.

With all the clouds outside, it is hard to see clear and pick potential winners. But if you stop and analyze the market for a second, it is easy to see why mobile operators are going to fare much better than the rest. And with them, those who sell them solutions to improve data revenues and customer retention.

Life is good, I just have to stop looking at my portfolio, read news and watch TV ;-)