Sprint to Create Own Mobile App Store

Sprint is going to create its own mobile app store, working with Openwave to develop applications running on devices using the Sprint network. The apps will be operating system agnostic, meaning apps at one store will run on the various operating systems Sprint supports, including Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Android, for example.

Sprint Says They Will Give App World “a Run for Their Money” | BlackBerry Cool:

What's "King" These Days?

People always can reasons to debate whether "content," "distribution" or "context" is king. Perhaps nobody yet is seriously arguing that "location" or "presence" or "social connections" or "mobility" is king, but one can predict that somebody will make those arguments.

One of the debates which slowly is growing, though, is over "openness" and "curated" approaches to end user experience. It would be too easy to say Apple is the foremost proponent of curation ("closed") while Android, Chrome and Firefox are examples of openness.

It might be more accurate to say the trend to curation is growing, across all platforms. You might think of curation as a culling, optimizing or editing process, where apps and software are optimized and filtered. Apple always has done this to optimize end user experience. But app stores, both mobile and soon Web app stores, also are curated environments, to a greater or lesser extent.

In Mozilla's view, for example, the open Web is the way to create rich applications, while Apple takes the opposite approach. In Apple's case, the company plans to create a new Mac Apps Store containing software expressly optimized for Apple devices and the Mac OS X operating system.

Apple plans to curate significantly, rejecting buggy apps, betas, apps built with Java, apps with Easter eggs, apps that aggregate content, apps that duplicate Apple's own apps, apps that contain pornography, violence, promote drinking and drugs, for example.

Mozilla Foundation is taking an entirely different approach for its new "OPen Web Apps" store. Designed around a "use any browser" approach, the idea is create a store that allows creation of Web apps that work in any modern desktop or mobile browser (Firefox 3.6 and later, Firefox for mobile, Internet Explorer 8, Chrome 6, Safari 5, Opera 10 and WebKit mobile).

Consider the Mozilla initiative an example of the "write once, run many" approach to software. In Mozilla's vision, apps are designed to run independently of operating system or hardware. See http://blog.mozilla.com/blog/2010/10/19/prototype-of-an-open-web-app-ecosystem/ for more detail.

Open Web Apps will use HTML, CSS and JavaScript and will supoprt installation to a mobile or desktop Web browser, or to a native OS desktop or mobile home screen.

Open Web Apps will use existing identity systems like OpenID and support portable purchases, meaning that an app purchased for one browser works in other browsers, and across multiple desktop and mobile platforms without repurchase. Think iTunes and you have an example of the difference between the Mozilla and Apple approaches.

Open Web Apps will support access to one or more advanced or privacy-sensitive capabilities such as geolocation on a user opt-in basis.

In Mozilla's view, apps must be distributed by developers directly to users without any gatekeeper, and available through multiple stores, allowing stores to compete on customer service, price, policies, app discoverability, ratings, reviews and other attributes.

Open Web Apps will be able to receive notifications from the cloud, and support deep search across apps. In other words, apps can implement an interface that enables the app container (generally the Web browser) to provide the user with a cross-app search experience that links deeply into any app that can satisfy the search.

In essence, the debate over curated and open approaches is a preference for, or against, gatekeepers. But the emergence of new app stores, already announced by Google, Apple and Mozilla, should change the software development business in some key ways. Web apps should grow in popularity, and make more rapid development of lower-cost apps and lower-volume apps available in substantial quantity, as app store publishing will cost a lot less than traditional shrink-wrapped apps store in physical and online retail stores. See http://www.readwriteweb.com/cloud/2010/10/web-app-stores-how-they-compar.php for more detail.

About the only safe statement is that all the traditional arguments about openness and curated approaches, including the issue of gatekeepers, are going to heat up again as the web app store trend gets established.

Watch a Mozilla video about the new Web Apps Store here: http://videos-cdn.mozilla.net/labs/openwebapps/openwebapps.webm

A Look at Google TV

A look at Google TV. using the Logitech set-top.

Startups: When Desperation Leads to Success

Angel investor Mike Maples talks in this video about "pivots," those gut-wrenching, desperate changes in business model that entrepreneurs sometimes make when things really aren't going well. Sometimes a beloved idea has to be abandoned or modified in serious ways to get to a larger business.

Pivots are really hard and painful to do, without a doubt. They aren't planned, they weren't intended or foreseen. But sometimes it is the difference between huge success and middling along. Pivots also are risky. They are emotionally hard to do, since it often means abandoning a dream.

Mike Maples: “You Have to Be Willing to Throw it all away”

New Android "Gingerbread" Coming Relatively Soon?

The video apparently means a new version of Android is coming in perhaps several weeks.

How Big a Market for 3D TV?

There's always a chicken-and-egg problem when new video devices, supporting new video formats, are introduced.

Devices are useful when there is lots of content available, but lots of content isn't made available until there is a large installed base of terminals.

That isn't going to be any different with 3D television. DisplaySearch thinks those problems will be overcome over time, and they have been in the past for new content formats.

The firm forecasts that 3.2 million 3D TVs will be shipped in 2010, with growth to over 90 million in 2014. Based on this forecast, 3D will grow from two percent of all flat panel TVs shipped in 2010, to 41 percent in 2014.

Some of us wouldn't be surprised if those forecasts fell short, though. The 3D experience imposes new conditions on television viewing, which is among the easiest of all consumer content experiences. There is value, at least for some viewers. The issue is how much new value, compared to the higher cost.

If I had to guess, right now, I'd say the adoption forecast is too steep. 

3D TV Not Growing as Fast as TV Makers Expected in 2010, but Will Become Mainstream by 2014, with 90 Million Shipments - DisplaySearch

What is Hulu Worth?

Finding the right price for a monthly video service is tough because it depends on three things: 1) the range of content available, 2) the availability of substitutes for that content, and 3) how convenient the experience is.

Pricing Hulu at $10 assumes that the value of number one can overcome the issues raised by number two and three. Does it?

Among the Hulu Plus substitutes is Hulu itself, since most of the Hulu Plus content is available on Hulu itself for free.

The additional content a user can get from Hulu Plus arguably does not provide enough additional value, and the ads tend to degrade the "convenience."

Hulu's big draw remains its first-run TV shows. But $10 will buy an awful lot of Netflix movie content, sometime soon.

Why Slashing The Price of Hulu Plus Is The Right Thing To Do

Brand Management in the Social Era

Forrester Research believes that online experiences of the future will be "customized by the end user, aggregated at the point of us, relevant to the device and to the moment, and social as a rule."

All of that has implications for brands, not the least of which is that brands increasingly are experienced on a screen, ranging from smartphone to tablet to PC to TV.

Customized, aggregated, relevant and social also means it will be increasingly easy for the brand experience to include third-party information such as comparative prices, user reviews and other information that can reinforce or weaken a brand promise.

And that sort of thing is difficult to shape and control over the full range of social mechanisms that already exist, not to mention what will increasingly exist in the future. All of that is just a way of noting that brands genuinely have lost control of their brands.

It used to be that a firm could shape and control its end user and prospect touch points. These days, those touch points include comments shared by customers all over the Web. Brand management therefore has to actively include all the major ways people talk to each other on the Web.

That is every bit as hard as it sounds.

iPhone Passes Blackberry in Global Market Share

Apple has passed Research In Motion in global phone sales. During this year's third quarter, 15.4 million iPhones were shipped globally compared to only 12.4 million Blackberries, the researchers at Strategy Analytics says.

With the shipments, Apple grabbed a 15.4 percent share of the market during the period, while RIM finished well behind with a 12.3 percent share. Nokia still leads with 26.5 percent of the worldwide market.

A major factor contributing to RIM's slipping numbers is its 'limited presence in the high-growth touchscreen segment,' according to Strategy Analytics.

iPhone Passes Blackberry in Global Shipments - PCWorld

It’s the Beginning of the End for the TV Biz, Says Analyst

"The TV and video business is about to face a nasty downturn, and it could happen faster than most people expect — like, over the next two years," says Lehman Brothers analyst Anthony DiClemente.

'We believe the feature film and TV content businesses are on the verge of structural changes that appear to impact the core revenue and profits of entertainment business models,' DiClemente said, Wired.com reports.

Few observers might agree that a change could happen that soon, though just about everyone thinks change is coming.

What might be more unusual is DiClemente's sense that the biggest losers are the major content companies, including Disney, CBS, News Corp., Time Warner and Viacom, for example, rather than the cable, satellite and telco distributors.

To be sure, a reasonable argument could be made that both dominant distributors and content companies have lots to lose. Content companies are right to worry that their gross revenues and profit margins will take a hit once alternate methods of digital distribution become more prevalent. The historic way of describing this dilemma is that content owners are exchanging analog dollars for digital pennies.

More recently, the phrase tends to be that content companies will exchange analog dollars for digital dimes. Either way, you get some idea of the magnitude of the potential changes.

Digital distribution, audience fragmentation and widespread file-sharing are eating into network and studios’ profits, and those profits may not come back, says DiClemente.

DiClemente thinks Apple’s iTunes and Google’s YouTube could emerge as winners in the distribution role. That would be only the latest turn in an on-going debate about whether "content" or "distribution" is king. At various times one or the other parts of the ecosystem has been seen as holding an advantage.

What might be different this time around is that both traditional "content" and "legacy distribution" parts of the ecosystem might face serious pressure, while new competitors in both content and distribution roles make headway.

It’s the Beginning of the End for the TV Biz, Says Analyst Wired.com:

Small Business "Software as a Service" Adoption Will Grow at 25% Through 2014

Small and medium business spending on software-as-a-service (SaaS) will increase exponentially over the next five years, eclipsing growth in investments in on-premise software by a significant margin, AMI-Partners predicts.

AMI forecasts a 25 percent compound annual growth rate for hosted business application services spending through 2014.

On-premises software spending will grow at about five percent. But change will be slower for applications such as enterprise resource planning, supply chain management, procurement, finance, and core human resources applications which have higher switching costs.

AMI-Partners - News :: Breakout growth for SaaS in the U.S. small and medium business markets

Mobile Video Hiccups Once Second Out of Every Six

Despite the protestations of network neutrality advocates, there's a very good reason why real-time services ranging from voice to conferencing to entertainment video actually require some form of optimization and even packet prioritization.

Recent data collected in mid-year 2010 by Bytemobile from networks operated by the likes of AT&T, China Mobile, China Telecom, KDDI, KPN, O2, Orange, Orascom, Sprint Nextel, T-Mobile, Telecom Italia Mobile, Telefónica, TeliaSonera and Vodafone show that every minute of mobile video consumed by end users includes about 10 seconds of stalling.

That's 17 percent of every minute of video, or a stall every six seconds. That is hugely disruptive of viewing experience and will not be acceptable once users become accustomed to using video content. It will be completely unacceptable once users start paying for video content services.

The problems currently are worse about 10 p.m. local time, and best at 5:30 a.m,, says Bytemobile. Expecting such congestion and disruption, most mobile users opt to watch videos at lower-quality settings to improve their media experience. That probably isn't what content owners or their business partners prefer, to say nothing of mobile service providers who will inevitably be tarnished by that sort of performance.

Nor does "more bandwidth" solve such problems. Bytemobile data shows that stalling occurs on even the fastest of networks and a quality user experience requires optimization of video content. In other words, packet prioritization and, or, other measures to keep latency and jitter performance optimal.

That said, as network bandwidth decreases, video stalling dramatically increases.

Consumption of high-definition video is nearly non-existent on wireless networks, at 0.07 percent of video-specific traffic volume.

Moreover, video traffic directly impacts bandwidth availability on wireless networks all over the world.

read more here

Rival Tablets Not Dead, No Matter What Apple Says

Apple says seven-inch tablets will be "dead on arrival," but developers and retailers are not convinced, and consumers will have to make the call about demand for tablets in various form factors, says the Wall Street Journal.

Verizon Wireless soon will be selling the Samsung Electronics Co.'s Galaxy Tab—a seven-inch tablet that runs on Google's Android software. Next year, BlackBerry maker Research In Motion Ltd. plans to release its seven-inch PlayBook.

Apple CEO Steve Jobs says 7-inch devices were too small to create great tablet applications. 'Their manufacturers will learn the painful lesson that their tablets are too small and increase the size next year, thereby abandoning both customers and developers who jumped on the seven-inch bandwagon with an orphan product,' Jobs says.

The argument for a smaller form factor is pretty simple. For many, perhaps most users, the smallest devices are the essential devices carried everywhere in a purse, pocket, backpack or briefcase. For most users, the phone is basic, but iPods might be a close second.

Traveling workers mostly consider their phones and notebook PCs to be essential, with all other devices secondary. Some people traveling for work say they carry both an iPad and a PC, but over time, I suspect that will shake out in favor of one or the other devices. For those users, a 10-inch device is better.

Some day, when prices drop, that might also be a viable option for college students when going to class. For some, though, who carry a phone all the time and a PC when traveling, and for whom content creation is a big reason why the PC is carried, the iPad will remain a third or fourth device choice (iPods might be most commonly carried, after the phone and PC).

Many users, especially those whose work allows them to travel with just a smartphone, leaving the PC at home or the office, will find an iPad a reasonable option. But that's why there would seem to be a market opportunity for tablets in a couple formats. When a tablet can be the second or third device (assuming the iPod is the second device), the bigger screen is helpful.

When the tablet has to be the third or fourth device, there are weight and bulk issues that could be important.

But the market will decide.

Connected Device Market Potential Dwarfs Phones

Aside from notebook PCs, many Americans now own portable or mobile devices that already are capable of mobile communications, or increasingly will be capable of mobile communications.

According to Nielsen, the typical owner of any one of these devices actually also owns three to five additional devices within these categories.

That means a large potential base of mobile and portable devices that will be candidates for Wi-Fi and mobile broadband services in the future, in numbers that dwarf the installed base of "phones."

What remains to be developed are pricing plans that account for ownership and use of multiple devices, most of which are designed for content consumption or entertainment more than communications. Broadband plans that allow a user to connect multiple devices at various times, at prices deemed reasonable, will be a huge opportunity, going forward.

So far, most consumers have shown only modest interest in $60 a month plans that connect PCs, though mobile service providers now are experimenting with demand for $15 to $45 a month plans for tablet devices and smartphones.

Those are steps in the right direction, but what ultimately will be needed are the equivalent of family plans for data devices, where the "family" might be a single user or household wanting to use multiple devices on a single access account.

Social Will Grow 10 to 25x In The Next Five Years

Kleiner Perkins venture capitalists think social applications could grow 10 times to 25 times over the next five years.

Bing Gordon: Social Will Grow 10 to 25x In The Next Five Years