February 19th, 2009

The message from GSMA Barcelona: fragmentation

Posted by John Carroll @ 3:35 pm

Categories: Mobile, Personal Technology, Telephony

Tags: Phone, Mobile, Palm Inc., Smart Phone, Conference, Telecom & Utilities, Smart Phones, Advertising & Promotion, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology

Toshiba TG01

The GSMA Mobile World Congress, which took place this week in Barcelona, is the world’s largest telecommunications trade conference. It is rumored that 50,000 attendees descended on this Catalonian city for the event, though that is matched by whispers at hotels and restaurants that attendance figures are considerably lower than past events. I filled out a GSMA survey today which asked, among other things, whether my company was placing limits on trade conference attendance budgets, which to my mind hints that market difficulties are affecting telecommunications companies as much as the rest of the economy.

Even so, it is, quite simply, the largest trade fair I have ever attended. Spread across eight separate exhibition halls, it featured booths promoting companies that covered every possible niche in the telecom tapestry. Attractive models in revealing clothing swam among a sea of mostly men in dark colored suits, which is the oddest thing about the GSMA conference. I have been to a number of trade conferences during my career, and participants are usually attired in stereotypical T-shirts and backpacks. According to a public relations person to whom I spoke, formality is typical of telecommunications conferences, which made this jeans-wearing California guy feel somewhat out of place (next year, I’ll pack my suit collection as carry-on).

Apple was a no-show at this year’s conference, but the long shadow of their technical innovations and market success was well apparent. Every hardware vendor in the mobile device space is making a touch-sensitive mobile phone these days, and the screen layouts of many bear a striking resemblence to the now-iconic iPhone entry screen. Large screens are becoming increasingly the norm, which is good news for those companies hoping to convince mobile users to consume more video media while on-the-go. MOFILM, a mobile short film festival that got massive coverage at the conference on account of attracting famous people to provide keynotes and hand out awards (well, “a” famous person, a.k.a. Kevin Spacey), would certainly benefit if large screens became more the norm. I can’t see mobile media becoming much more than a niche product if screen sizes stay small…unless vendors start including projectors into phones (not impossible, as Texas Instruments displayed some rather nice mini-projectors in their booth), or else provide wires that allow users to plug their phone directly into a TV set (some of the mobile video chips on display can now handle 1080p).

Granted, there are Read the rest of this entry »

June 29th, 2007

iPhone invades the cell phone market

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:32 am

Categories: Apple, Microsoft, Mobile, Personal Technology, Wired & Wireless

Tags: Apple iPhone, Phone, Cell Phone, Apple Inc., John Carroll

I’m going nowhere near my closest Apple store today, which is only a few blocks away from where I live in Hollywood. All evidence would suggest that the store will be an absolute madhouse. This is a shame, as I’ve been dying to take one of the devices for a spin (though not buy…I would have trouble justifying the expense given the other technology toys I’d like to buy).

I’ve been waiting for a full-screen phone ever since I worked at Orange Communications in Switzerland. Back then, SMS was the pinnacle of cell phone technology, though WAP was supposed to change all that and bring “the web” to cell phones.

What a joke. WAP is to the web what the children’s story “See Spot Run” is to Tolstoy’s “War and Peace.” It’s not “the web” by any stretch of the imagination. It was, however, a reflection of the extreme limits of most phones…a limit that still largely persists today.

Small screens Read the rest of this entry »

June 8th, 2007

Thoughts on HTC's iPhone competitor

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:06 am

Categories: Apple, Microsoft, Personal Technology, Wired & Wireless

Tags: Apple iPhone, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Microsoft Windows, Microsoft Corp., Hardware, Mobile Marketing, John Carroll

Clearly, I favor Microsoft products, which shouldn’t surprise anyone. I was a fan of the company’s technology long before I was employed by them in May of 2005.

This means that I want Windows Mobile to respond properly to some of the innovations popularized in the iPhone. Fortunately, that appears to be happening. HTC, a Chinese company with a long history of building phones that run Windows Mobile (as I recall, they were the manufacturer of one of the first Windows Smartphone sold in Europe through a major mobile service provider…which happened to be Orange Communications, a company for which I worked at the time), is rolling out the HTC Touch, a phone built like the iPhone around a larger than normal touch-sensitive screen. HTC designed the touch-sensitive software which drives the user interface, and though it doesn’t have the 4-8gb of Flash RAM built in that is present in the iPhone, it does come with a miniSD slot.

It’s an interesting concept, though whether or not customers will gravitate to a keyboardless smartphone is still an open question. Krakow found the on-screen keyboard unusable without a stylus, a problem the iPhone may or may not face, depending on their approach to text entry.

One thing Read the rest of this entry »

April 12th, 2007

Spiking the digital media punch

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:19 am

Categories: Apple, DRM, Digital Media, General, Personal Technology, Wired & Wireless, Zune

Tags:

Digital music has clearly crossed a threshold. Apple just sold its 100 millionth iPod. EMI is taking a chance on DRM-free music in hopes that consumers will embrace legal music downloads (and thus offset a 20% slump in CD sales).

I have a Zune, and I find it has revolutionized the way I listen to music (and I'm sure iPod users have experienced the same thing). The world of digital music, however, still carries with it habits that originated in the need to accomodate disc-based media in an all-digital player. Individual music files give me musical content, but an album offers something more. I get the printed material that is inserted into the CD cover, which contains things like additional art (more than just the cover), lyrics, and other information not normally found in online CD databases.

There's no reason for CDs to have that advantage. Given that most digital music playback devices come with screens, why not incentivize people to buy complete albums by packaging them with art and lyrics in a fashion that is easily accessible from music players?

Heck, since this is

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April 2nd, 2007

EMI ditches DRM

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:02 am

Categories: Apple, DRM, General, Personal Technology, Zune

Tags:

…sort of. Last night, posts started littering the web announcing that EMI might make such a move, instigated by an article in the Wall Street Journal. Some respondents in talkbacks on other sites wondered if this was an April Fools' joke, though I doubted it, given that EMI has been rumored to be considering this and the source was the WSJ, not "Ronaldo's cool stuff" blog.

The motivations are obvious. Unprotected music is a nearly ubiquitous reality right now, with anyone who owns a computer and a CD reader capable of ripping DRM-free copies of music. Of course, getting a physical CD is a bit more complicated than downloading from a web site, and given that the process is the same for both legal and illegal music downloads, it remains to be seen whether consumers will show an honorable streak and opt for the legal music download sites (which carry a fee) now that the DRM lock-in risk has been removed.

As I expected in the stub

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March 28th, 2007

A precipitous drop in CD sales

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:36 am

Categories: DRM, Economic Policy, General, Personal Technology, Television, Zune

Tags:

According to an article in the March 21st edition of the Wall Street Journal, sales of compact discs for the first three months of 2007 have experienced a precipitous drop of 20% versus the same period only a year ago. Need I state the obvious, but that drop has NOT been offset by online sales of digital music. Quoting from the article:

The music industry has been banking on the rise of digital music to compensate for inevitable drops in sales of CDs. Apple's 2003 launch of its iTunes Store was greeted as a new day in music retailing, one that would allow fans to conveniently and quickly snap up large amounts of music from limitless virtual shelves.

It hasn't worked out that way — at least so far. Digital sales of individual songs this year have risen 54% from a year earlier to 173.4 million, according to Nielsen SoundScan. But that's nowhere near enough to offset the 20% decline from a year ago in CD sales to 81.5 million units. Overall, sales of all music — digital and physical — are down 10% this year. And even including sales of ringtones, subscription services and other "ancillary" goods, sales are still down 9%, according to one estimate; 

On a radio show Sunday night where they discussed the issue, people had various theories. One was that music companies were simply producing bad music, and hence, customers weren't buying it.

That's an annoyingly pretentious argument.

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March 16th, 2007

The EU's ongoing joust with iTunes

Posted by John Carroll @ 10:23 am

Categories: Antitrust, Apple, DRM, Economic Policy, General, Hardware Infrastructure, Personal Technology

Tags:

In what some articles have characterized as an EU that has backed down over iTunes, Meglena Kuneva, EU Commissioner for Consumer Protection, re-characterized her previous words that chastised Apple over its closed DRM model as merely a means by which to start the debate over ways "to develop this market and to have more consumers enjoying the really very important, very modern way of downloading and enjoying the music." She also dismissed comparisons of Apple to Microsoft, noting that Apple's share of the market is not very large. I presume she means Apple's computer market share is not very large. I wish Microsoft could point to their portable music player share (an area where Apple's share IS very large) as reason for the EC to call off their antitrust attack dogs.

Slight diversion aside, the cause of all this ruckus was Ms. Kuneva making a sharp point of the fact that we wouldn't accept CDs that didn't play on every device. That point was always a bit odd, however, as its like pointing out that doors in the middle ages rarely had locks as reason to oppose the proliferation of locks on doors. CDs weren't ever designed with the Internet in mind, where ripped music files can be sent around the world as easily as email.

Yes, CDs lack DRM protections, but that does not mean it is the way god intended music to be distributed. Call it an accident of history, though its worth noting that if one DRM scheme became the norm (just as one digital CD format became the norm), the compatibility issue wouldn't exist. CD technology is proprietary technology licensed for a fee, and DVD technology is equally proprietary AND uses DRM (albeit a very bad one which has long since been cracked).

Of course, those formats are licensed

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February 23rd, 2007

Software patents and the dependency problem

Posted by John Carroll @ 12:34 pm

Categories: General, Intellectual Property, Microsoft, PC Forum, Personal Technology, Software Infrastructure, Web Technology, Wired & Wireless

Tags:

I've long taken a dim view of software patents. I wrote this piece as far back as 2003, arguing that Europe should avoid copying the American approach to software patents, both because they are unnecessary to spur innovation and because it would be useful for Europe to demonstrate why.

There are nuances to my view. I've noted - repeatedly - that one advantage of patents is that it provides useful cover for small companies and / or individuals so that they can compete with larger companies without fear their ideas will be copied wholesale. IBM might not exist today if not for a little patent on tabulation machines that Mr. Hollerith filed in 1889 during the early days of his company.

Unfortunately, the costs of software patents outweigh the benefits, by my reckoning, and it all comes down to the problem of the "stackable" nature of ideas. If I were to patent, say, a unique design for an electric sewing machine, that sewing machine idea wouldn't find its way into farm equipment, or military hardware, or be among one of the many patents used by manufacturers of a new process for making plastic dolls. Traditional patents tied to a particular implementation had a pretty narrow domain of infraction. If you had a sewing machine patent, industry segments outside that of sewing machines would be largely unaffected.

Not so software patents. The proposed

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February 9th, 2007

Samsung stealing iPhone thunder?

Posted by John Carroll @ 8:46 am

Categories: Apple, General, Mobile, Personal Technology, Wired & Wireless

Tags:

I was quite impressed with the iPhone, as were many others as evidenced by the run-up of Apple's stock in the hours after its announcement. After a few days, however, sobriety set in and I had a few iPhone-related concerns that I included in a blog post. One of those issues questioned how successful Apple would be in preventing similar phones from stealing some of the iPhone's thunder.

Well, perhaps "stealing its thunder" is the wrong term to use, because the iPhone could be part of a UI trend that has culminated this year and created phones of which Apple's offering is a notable example. That, at least, is what one could conclude from pictures of a new phone from Samsung (the development of which clearly had to parallel that of the iPhone).

Not only does the phone have a touchscreen, but as the photos show, it also has a keyboard hidden underneath. The entire UI is created in Flash, implying a level of UI customizability which doesn't currently exist for the iPhone. Plus, it enables viewing of HTML pages the way god intended them to be viewed. Last, it's 3G, vs. the iPhone's much slower EDGE (or in some cases, GPRS) data connection.

I don't know how it sizes up in other areas that matter to business people, such as Exchange integration, but it seems to fill a lot of the gaps in the iPhone, even if it doesn't have Apple's carefully cultivated invidious distinction (I know you don't agree with my use of that term, Anton).

As noted by others, Apple isn't walking into a market where there are no serious competitors. This is a market with lots of players, lots of competition, and lots of good design ideas from companies around the world. I have nothing but respect for Apple's hardware design skills. The phone market, however, is different than the market for iPods.

It will be a hard slog.  That doesn't mean, however, that I'm not happy Apple is going to try it. 

February 8th, 2007

The RIAA and Norway respond to Jobs

Posted by John Carroll @ 9:52 am

Categories: Apple, DRM, General, Hardware Infrastructure, Personal Technology, Software Infrastructure, Wired & Wireless

Tags:

A few days ago, Steve Jobs defended his company's decision to keep its FairPlay DRM exclusive to the iTunes store and iPod music players (among other things, such as declaring his preference for sale of DRM-free music). Central to that argument, however, was his insistence that the only way to grant content companies the protection guarantees insisted upon in the licensing agreement for the music sold by iTunes is to keep FairPlay private so as to protect DRM secrets (which as noted yesterday, I don't consider a strong argument, as we wouldn't agree with those who advocate keeping security algorithms secret) as well as create an easier upgrade path should the DRM be broken (which, IMO, is much easier if the algorithm isn't publicly vetted).

In other words, Jobs is basically saying that the music companies are making him do it, so blame them. Well, the music companies have responded to the charge with a "don't blame us, we aren't forcing you to keep your DRM private" answer. In fact, the RIAA is now on record as encouraging Apple to license its FairPlay DRM to third parties.

Doing so, argued Mitch Bainwol, chairman and chief executive of the Recording Industry Association of America, would eliminate technology hurdles that prevent music fans from buying songs at Apple's iTunes Music Store and playing them on devices other than the iPod.

"We have no doubt that a technology company as sophisticated and smart as Apple could work with the music community to make that happen," Bainwol said in a statement.

The RIAA, of course, has

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