Being Steve's boss & the history of Apple

What an interesting read on ex-CEO Sculley and Steve Job. This article covers the inside thinking of Steve Jobs, what it means to be a marketing company, how the core strength of a company means and bad decisions Sculley has made (with a self admission) before Steve turned it around.

article link.

Open cell access in burning

Link

Android Paid app

13 out of 46 countries where Android phones are being sold support paid app in Android Market. That means the rest only have free apps. In order for Android users in those countries to access the paid apps, they are forced to turn to piracy.

Google VP8 and WebM Project

Google announced the WebM Project at this year's Google I/O conference. The original license had the limitation that if legal actions brought against Google and the right would have terminated. Google has changed that by decoupling license and legal text.

http://webmproject.blogspot.com/

Wholesale Application Community

In an attempt to reduce the application fragmentation across platforms and operation, carriers are banding together in an attempt to provide more standard for developers.

The Wholesale Applications Community members include: AT&T, China Mobile, Deutsche Telekom, NTT DoCoMo, Orange, Telefónica, Telenor Group, Sprint, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone. Together the operators in the group have about 3 billion subscribers, the GSMA said.

The standard won't be really ready toward the end of this year - or in a more realistic term 2011. Other standard bodies like JIL and BONDI are also trying to address this age old problem of market fragmentation.

Microsft & HTC get intimated

The companies announced today that they have reached a licensing agreement. HTC will pay MS for leveraging their advanced patent licenses in the mobile space. The fact that Apple's pending lawsuit against HTC which is really directly against Android is a good move for HTC. It is certainly a 3 way corporation to fight against the mobile giant Apple's dominance.

ArcTechnica and AdMob released data traffic for the US and worldwide. The iPhone is certainly still the big dominance in the US. But Android is sneaking up from below. Sadly the other OS are trailing behind with a pretty big margin. The overall data traffic for smartphone still garners a mere 17 percent of the overall traffic. Yet, it is a astonishing 400% growth last quarter. More on this story.

iPhone & network load.

One of the main reasons, other than too many people are overloading networks, that iPhone is causing such headache for operators (esp AT&T)is that the paging channel is not implemented. In order to save battery life, smartphones completely drop off from the connection when data is done and reconnect when data is needed. This requires the re-establishment to the network again and eating up the channel bandwidth rather than using the paging channel and using keep alive message.

Android Fragmentation

According to IMS Research, Number of Android based handsets is expected to be 20 million shipped by the end of the year. Certainly a big achievement for a hot OS. However, this comes with like everything else, growing pain - fragmentation. There are two types of fragmentation for this platform. First it is the OS itself and the second one is physical design.

The Android OS is now at version 2.1 which has few major revisions since its launch. Each revision comes with different features and interfaces that developer and applications may chuck on one device but works great on the other.

Screen size and physical design is also an issue for developers. Android is supposed to be able to handle different screen size - only the ones it supports and uses Android's own resources type. Like the Archos 5 Internet tablet is certainly not part of this category.

Developers need to be aware of this. Prepare your apps to handle this type of different resources. Or take your battle and choose only the platforms you think make most sense for your app.

Can NFC play an important role in small biz growth

It seems the NFC industry is like the interactive TV industry... we are here, now. (repeat that for 5 years).

With the increasingly smartphone adoption rate, this may change as people are relying more on their phone which is no longer a voice device.

Businessweek has an article recently about the overall contactless mobile payment. Certainly enterprise can generate extra revenue with this technology as soon as they can figure out the revenue model. what about small business? it is an largely untapped market that I think can help reduce operating cost with this kind of technology.

http://www.businessweek.com/globalbiz/blog/europeinsight/archives/2010/03/alcatel-lucent_1.html

Sony Ericsson's Project Capuchin

The platform enables flash UI execution within the J2ME environment. Doc & Tools are available here.

VZW increases fee on SMS aggregators

Update: VZW says it has not decided if the fee will be increased... backing down?!

1 cent to 4 cents. So a $10,000 campaign will costs $40,000. Huge jump. This does not affect consumers. VZW is the first one to raise the fee which send shockwave to the advert. & marketing industry.

Smartphone Q2 2008 Market Share by Sales

Google to be VZN search partner

Google is already Sprint's search partner. Will this mean that VZN will eventually like to adapt Android.

Sprint launch NFL video app

This Java-based app is powered by Hands-On Mobile which has already launched multiple sport related apps (NBA, NASCAR, CBS Sports). This will only be available on Moto RAZR VE20 at this point. NFL is aggressively targeting the mobile segment. The announcment did validate the fact that Sprint is still only interested in Java platform at this point - probably the by product from the Sprint Nextel merger.

Mobile Ad market

source

Mobile ad. revenue already reached $1B this year, and expected to reach to $7.6B by 2013. Ad spending on mobile TV services is expected to grow from $335 million to more than $2.5 billion in 2013. Idle-screen advertising will grow from $7 million this year to more than $500 million by 2013, according to Juniper.

Mobile data growth

http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2007/08/partial-state-of-mobile-data-market.html

HTC handset sales

HTC reports their Touch sales figures exceeded over 1 million units since launched in Oct. The company also says the total handset sales has reached 15 million so far for 2007.

Sprint breaks-up with ClearWire

Sprint announced today that they have terminated the partnership with Clearwire, sending Clearwire's stock down 28%. Analysts also believed that Sprint's rollout plan will be reduced.

iPhone w/ Intel inside. JP operators to cut rate

It is reported today that Apple may come out of a iPhone based on the Intel Moorsetown Mobile Internet Device chipset in 2009. Intel has been pushing Taiwanese companies to adopt the MID platform but with little success. However, we should start seeing UMPC coming out in 2008 with MID platform.

On the other news, NTT DoCoMo announced 30% cut in monthly rate in exchange of higher handset price (average $540). KDDI has announced 20% cut in monthly rate with the same offer. How will that affect the Japanese handset manufacturers. I think the turnover rate for new handset will be longer and thus slower sale.