Robin Jewsbury's Forum Nokia Blog

I was fascinated by Steve Balmers interview in the Washington Post this week.  The core quotation for me was

"Here are the premises I have. Number one, there will be no media consumption left in 10 years that is not delivered over an IP network. There will be no newspapers, no magazines that are delivered in paper form. Everything gets delivered in an electronic form". 

So this sort of prediction has been around for years.  But this time is goes a lot further - this time he is implying that the publishers who remain in "paper only" will become dinosaurs and further all other publishers will have most to Internet only delivery.  A further knife in the back for the big branded publishers was

"Also in the world of 10 years from now, there are going to be far more producers of content than exist today. We've already started to see that certainly in the online world"

So is this really going to come true?  Yes, I think it is.  This prediction did not come from "hot air". Microsoft will have paid a lot of money for this prediction and it will be substantiated via a lot of unpublished analysis.  Steve Balmer will be retiring in 10 years and he's paid for a prediction which could be used as he epitaph for the industry.

Then today I read in the UK's Sunday Times about the success of Amazon's Kindle and it's the same story about the death of publishing books on paper.  The Kindle is selling extremely well in the US and is amazingly already taking 6% of book sales that are available for both the Kindle and paper - here the prediction is that Authors could sell direct to Amazon (dissintermediating the publisher all together).

So are these predictions signalling the death of the big branded publishers?  No, they do not go that far - for sure the big successful brands will adapt and survive - there is still a need for quality and consitency.  However, it does signal a need for them to adapt and that they will get smaller audiences from their existing countries. The number of content producers will continue to increase and take their own share of the audiences.  The good news for everyone is the world audience for internet media is going to signficantly increase.  The growth of the mobile internet in countries such as India, South Africa, Indonesia, China and countries in the middle east is already massive.  So long as the publishers produce relevant localised content they will be able to benefit from the globalisation of publishing.

Others will benefit too.  I do think a more prevasive Kindle and publishing platform is a Mobile phone.  So phone manufacturers and those providing the software services for them (such as ourselves) will benefit - and that's was really interests me.

I've been looking at the Morgan Standley Internet Trends report.  Its an excellent report which charters the growth of the fixed and mobile Internets.  One thing that has interested me for some time is that I've noticed that there are two worlds for the Mobile Internet and I wondered if this report could shed light on my thoughts.  I'll call the two worlds, the Old World and the New World.  I plotted the above graph (explained below) and was disappointed as it was not as clear cut as I expected but all is explained below.

Old World

The Old World consists of the established fixed Internet countries where the consumer discovered the Internet via a PC.  These people have subsequently also bought Mobile phones are increasingly discovering the mobile Internet through on the phone.

New World

The New World, mainly consisting of the emerging economies, has a population who are discovering the Internet firstly by Mobile phone. With perhaps only the technical elite in these countries using the fixed Internet.

Discussion 

Now my observation has been that those in the New World are engaging with the Mobile Internet much faster than the those for the Old World.  The reason is perhaps that there is a greater expectation and disappointment from those moving from the fixed internet to the mobile internet.  Looking at the Morgan Stanley figures, I wondered if I could show the grouping of countries on a graph.  The reports shows the top 15 fixed and mobile Internet countries.  I worked out the ratio of of users on Mobile/Fixed Internet.  I also included the rate of change of the ratio for each country and this is shown by an up or down arrow before the country name in the graph above.  The groupings are there but its not as clear cut as I had hoped.  The problem is that the Mobile phone penetration rate for a country does not represent the Mobile Internet engagement by users.  For example in Italy the penetration is 133% because of the intense interest in having the status symbol of a phone, but the interest in Mobile Internet has not matched this interest - another way to look at it is that because there is only one person and one internet viewer for very 1.33 phones so immediately the ratio becomes unrealistic.  So I then looked at our own data for our EyeMags service.  The reason for choosing EyeMags over Mippin (our main service) is that EyeMags has had 100% organic growth (absolutely no marketing had been done for it so there should be no real country weighting other than that the UI is in English). 

So here Indonesia and India do indeed come out significantly ahead of UK and US.  However, other new world countries such as China, Russia and Brazil, do not show up significantly so again the analysis is disappointing.  My conclusion now was there is a 3rd effect going on - that is maturity of the the Mobile Internet.  In China, Russia and Brazil the potential is huge but the maturity of the Mobile Internet is low.

Conclusion

This is a complicated area.  There are undoubtedly two mobile internet worlds and levels of maturity play significant role currently.

Perhaps someone can help.  I've setup a site at http://phonecount.com which has dynamic counters showing the world population and the number of connected phones at this moment in time.  Given the current rates of increase of both I work out when the total number of connected phones is equals to the total world population - I ended up with 11th June 2012.  I use poetic license to call this "everyone connected day".  Of course not everyone will have a phone, but many people will have more than one phone and this will make up for those without phones.  To me this will be an important day for our industry as conceptually it marks the point that everyone is connected via voice and the Internet.

The question is have I got the right figures?  I got the world population figures from the US Census Office so I think that's OK.  The phone growth figures was taken off the GSMA site and I found this more difficult.  I ended up getting a figure of 200M growth per quarter and then inferred 25.72 additional phones per second.  Does anyone have a better source for this as it seems a little bit of an estimate?  Also has anyone else done this before?  Am I the first?

Also please forgive the blatant advertising of my own product on this site.  I have to justify the effort taken somehow.

Mobile search is poor - it produces inconsistent results and can often fail to tell the difference between mobile and fixed sites.  This article details the failings...

Let's start with a few of definitions.  The Mobile Internet is the collection of sites which have been specially built/formatted for small screen devices/phones.  The Fixed Internet is the Internet as viewed on large PC screens.  Mobile Search is the attempt to search for content on the whole (fixed and mobile) Internet where the results can be displayed and formatted on small screens (examples are m.google.com and m.yahoo.com) .   The problems for the mobile search engines are that Mobile Internet is still very small so the search engines include (actually they prioritise) content from the Fixed Internet and then display on the phones using a transcoder.  A transcoder takes fixed Internet content and reformats it for the small screen.  Transcoders have what I believe is the impossible job of taking a web page and putting into a long thin column on a small screen and then paginating it if it's too long.  The reason why I believe this job is impossible is because the fixed internet consists of a vaste array of web site formats and there is no way anything can know how to cut up a page and put it neatly in a long thin band on a phone screen in a user friendly way.  Its true that good transcoders can make a reasonable job of 2/3rd of the Internet.  For example 3 column web-site can often display OK on a transcoder, although because the left hand column of web-site is often the navigation this does cause transcoders an issue - some display this navigation at the top of the page and the user has to scroll all the way through it before he can read the content he really wants to.  Others more successfully hide the navigation and take the user direct to the content and then allow the user to open up the navigation later.  The better transcoders also realise their impossible tasks and do not transcode if the device has the capability of displaying a web page (eg for a Series60 running the Safari browser devices or the iPhone).  The good search engines can tell the difference between a mobile site and a web page and not transcode

Now let's get into specifics how do Google and Yahoo mobile search engines compare on these things.  Please be aware this is the siutation in March 2008 and because of the fact that nothing really worksperfectly what is actually happens is changing daily.  So if you read this more than a month after March 2008 be aware it may not be the same.

First both Google and Yahoo present web and mobile web results separately, although Google does put mobile results marked with a little phone symbol in the web results when there is a significant result and real mobile web content is an extra click away on Google.

Finally, I think the main problems result in there not being enough Mobile Internet content.  For me transcoders are an temporary technology in place because there is not enough Mobile content.  Long term webmasters will either create mobile specific sites or use tools such as Mippin to quickly convert them.  Once there is significant Mobile Internet content in place search engines need to start prioritising mobile content over the poorly performing transcoded content.

As I write this the situation changes daily so I hope in a few months I will be blogging a slightly better story for Mobile search.

I've just spent most of the day watching all the iPhone videos at Apple developer site.  All very interesting and informative.  Some of the new Safari features such as CCS transformations, CSS animations and the local data SQL support from Javascript (sort of Google Gears like) look really good.  When are we going to get these features in S60 Safari browser?  Please tell me it's soon!!!

But that was not the point of this post.  I watched one particular video called "User Interface Design for iPhone Applications".  This is an excellent video and lists great advice for developers of any mobile application for any platform.  Basically it says when you take a desktop application and port it to the iPhone you should only take a subset of the functionality and create a simplied user interface AND the UI design should be consistent with the iPhone UI design.  All excellent advice which I would say works for any mobile application design on any platform.  However, the more I watched these things the more I thought of the iPhone advert for the Internet shown on US and UK TV.  See the AT&T version here.  This advert has always bothered me.  Basically it shows the iPhone looking at the PC web version of the New York Times (in the US version) and the Guardian in the UK version.  The claim is that the PC Internet is now works unaltered on the mobile phone.  Any yet this is totally inconsistent with the advice Apple are giving application developers who are telling them to change adapt the content and functionality for the iPhone.

Has Steve Jobs noticed the inconsistency between his marketing message to the consumers and the technical advice to developers?  Web applications are still applications after all and also should be adapted to the phone.  And indeed, this has happened.  Facebook wrote a very good web application for the iPhone.  So why Mr Jobs are you telling consumers and developers totally different stories?  Well, infortunately the consumer is being told an incomplete story yet again which will rebound on the the poor software industry yet again.  So please My Jobs (you love consistency in your user interface), please be consistent in your messages.

I was very interested to read Michael Mace's latest blog about the death of mobile apps, and Carlo Longino's similar blog also taking about the death of mobile native apps. 

Michael Mace shows this graph on his blog

We had this debate a year ago in our company and totally changed direction because of it - basically we stopped producing mobile apps a year ago and started producing a web only solution.  The concern was that we would not be able to create such a good user experience with the Web as we had achieved with our Mobile apps - afterall we had won several user experience awards for our applications.  This fear has not materialised; we put considerable effort into producing an excellent web experience.  Where we've really excelled is in our development cycles.  We've gone from a 3 month development cycle producing 14 different application variants (12 Java and 2 Symbian native variants) to a 3 week development cycle - we actually have more user experience variation than we used to coping with difference screen sizes and device capabilities but the development is so much easier and so much faster. 

Admittedly our application is ideal for rendering in a browser, but other application developers should also consider a move to web experience too.  Afterall the same happened with the fixed internet in the 90s.  In the beginnings of the Internet many applications were produced; my first experience with Internet shopping with Tesco was using an application which required a huge installation including a local database install.  It worked fine for the early adopter (me), but when they wanted to make it a consumer experience they came up with a brick wall - it was called installation (too many things could go wrong and did).  The same is true of mobile applications today - installation is too big a hurdle for the average consumer.... it needs to be just a click away.

The mobile browser is getting better day by day and can now do many of those things only applications could do in the past - its only going to continue getting easier in the browser.

I read with interest the Mashable article explaining how to share content on MySpace from your own site, so I tried it.

Unfortunately it is very limited.  It does allow HTML to be posted but that HTML is altered before it is displayed making it almost useless.  For example it removes Javascript - so I thought of using an Iframe.  Then, I found it removed the Iframe so I tried a picture and guess what is replace that with 2 dots.  Shame, seems they're concerned about security.  What's worse is they have no mobile option so the sharing screen displayed is a large form which would not work on a phone too well.

In the end the only thing you can do is give it some text and give it a URL.  If the Myspace user clicks the url they then get an "offsite" screen which they have to accept before getting the content.

All a great idea but the implementation is so limited its not worth thinking about until they fix the issues.

Just returned from Barcelona where thanks to a post on MoMo London we bought some Yoigo SIMs, where the charge is only 1.3 Euros per day for unlimited 3G data.  The network did completely crash for an hour on Monday but for the rest of the time it worked a treat and we were able to demo our software at a fraction of the price of our UK Operator which charges £7.5 per megabyte whilst roaming.  Yoigo only allow 2 SIMs per passport and because there were 3 of us I then installed JoikuSpot beta which turned my N95 into a WLAN hotspot for my colleague to use.  My N95 got quite hot but it all worked well.  The only issue with JoikuSpot was that it did not have any security so anyone could also use my Hotspot and it did not seem to allow https or smtp/pop.

Thinking about this whilst roaming data rates remain high its probably worth buying the best SIMs in each country with good data rates.  Perhaps some reader of this blog should set up a web site providing advice on best deals. 

I've been inspired to write this blog by an article by Tim O'Reilly in the New York Times recently.

Basically he was likening the introduction of the IBM PC in 1981 and the openness in software development it spawned to today's open movements in Mobile. 

Let's take his ideas a few steps further by comparing the past computer industry with today's Mobile Internet.  So IBM creating an open computer design could be likened to Google creating an open handset design - but remember that IBM never really profitted from this approach - it was Microsoft who profitted.  So in this analogy who is it that can profit from an open design - hopefully its the software developers that read this blog :-).

Strangely I think you can also see an analogy between Apple in the 80's with the Lisa and Mac, not being open but producing some exiciting designs with today's Apple and the iPhone.  However, Apple's concentration on keeping control was their eventual downfall and caused of the company being in the doldrums during the 90s.

Meanwhile I think you could also equate Nokia with the Unix manufacturer's of the 80s (Xenix and Sun).  Unix was always developer friendly just like the S60 platform and Sun branched out from hardware in a software platform of Java just like Nokia is branching out into a services platform today.

Now we just need someone to invent the Mobile analogy of what was the growth of the Internet to give us the kind of acceleration for mobile which occurred for computing in the 90s.   What could that be?  Let's hope it starts in 2008.

I was interested by Harri's blog on how to turn the N95 into an iPhone.  He was altering the N95's user agent in order to make the sites think the N95 is an iPhone.  He did not have total success, the reason why these sites do not support the N95 is because they mostly use an excellent open source library by Joe Hewitt which exposes two bugs in the browser implementation on the N95.  The bugs are in event.preventDefault();  and element.localName.  PreventDefault stops events which are processed in the library from going back to the browser (but does not work on the N95) and localName is used to recognise some elements (which also does not work but tagName does instead). 

Anyway you don't need to worry about either bug because we have worked round them both plus a few other issues with screen size.  You can see the result by putting the following url in your N95 browser (http://ipn95.mippin.com/).  So this version has the horizontal scrolling seen on the iPhone and also does something extra which even most iPhone sites do not do.  It pre-fetches the next page you want to ensure whatever you view next its already in memory and will just slide into place.  The only issue is that on N95's before version 20 it will eventually run out of memory and the browser will crash (returning to the home page often stops this happening), but I'd only really advise using this version if you are using a V20 N95.  It's for these reason that we are not making it available to the general public, but I'd be interested to know what you guys think of it and how its works on N82 for instance.  Once first loaded I'd recommend readers of this blog go to the Tech and/or Mobile section in the catalogue to see the best tech news you've read on your mobile phone from the world's top bloggers (including Darla, Alessandro Pace and Anina - you often read in these blogs).   To try the classic version of mippin just go to http://mippin.com. 

You may be wondering what Mippin is?  Its a new way of viewing Internet content on your mobile - any site with an RSS feed can be viewed. We format it perfectly for each mobile - optimising the content for each browser.  And you'll see from our latest press release its more popular on Nokia phones than any other manufacturers (I am sure that's because of the quality of the screen and browsers on Nokia phones).

I was looking at the Internet World Map and immediately wondered if the Mobile Internet is different.

We have the data- even better is that with Google Analytics running against our webserver we can make a video of how the growth of our service of Mobile Internet world has grown over the last 8 weeks from the UK outwards whilst we've grown from zero to 1/2 million downloads.  (This map is of our web-site - Google analytics only works with Javascript and cannot be used with most phones - but the web-site usage does reflect our much more popular wap site usage).

The Mobile Internet IS different - there seems to be a band of usage across Europe through the middle east, India and into Asia. Although usage is high in the US it is much more significant on the fixed Internet.

My previous article "Nokia comes out top" generated a lot of interest, because it implied Nokia handsets created the best user experience but did not explain why.   The UK's premiere online technology news site,  TheRegister analysed the article and said "perhaps the kind of people who buy Nokia phones are the type who enjoy mobile content, or the interface and interaction experience is so much better on a Nokia..".

Since a few more weeks have gone by and our product, Eyemags now has had over 420K downloads I have much more data to play with.  We've now have 25K votes on the magazines and 10K have come from Nokia handsets (in fact from 72 different models).  I took the 72 models and found the screen dimensions and then plotted the voting % deviation from the average by screen size.

The result is that people with larger screens seems to have the perception that the magazine is better - perhaps not a surprise that screen size does matter.

This is clear example that mobile content is a better user experience on the better handsets and that the manufacturers that sells better models will also benefit from this perception. 

Well done Nokia, your strategy of producing large screen Handsets is making users happier with our content.

When I did this analysis I was really surprised - I could not believe it was right!  The countries seem so random - is it statistically significant?  Read on and make up your own mind.

I took 120,000 mobile phone download log entries from our EyeMags mobile wap site (wap.eyemags.com).  I found the country from the ip address sent from the phone using InetAddressLocator.  EyeMags is a C2C content creation tool for users to create their own magazine applications for mobile phones and share these with their friends.  Its highly graphical with pictures and text and in the 6 weeks the service has been live the content has gravitated towards "girlie" type content.  Although there are examples of all types of content on the system the "girlie" type content is dominating the downloads.  The service is incredibly popular and we are about to pass through a third of a million downloads.  It could be argued that the high download content countries are those that are interested in "girlie" content but I would still argue that these are the countries that are leading countries for the Mobile Internet and in particular for Mobile application downloads.

Are the result statistically significant?  Certainly the top 10 countries seem to be and its still quite surprising that to see Indonesia and Romania there.  We knew about that India and South Africa were big but did not realise India was a significantly bigger downloader than the US.

However, whether or not the Maldives with 1000 downloads is the 20th country in the world for Mobile Internet application downloads could be seriously questioned.  Reality is that we do not have enough data for the lower countries yet.

I'll be providing further analysis of these results on the EyeMags blog.

It was wondering how I could unashamedly promote our new product on this blog and even if it were allowed.  Then I discovered we actually had some interesting data coming out of it and that Nokia came out looking very good.  So I think I can do it and also show some very interesting data too.

Our new product is called EyeMags.  Its a very simple way of users generating their own magazines (currently on our website only - but soon we'll add generation from the handset itself).  The magazines are highly graphical and have a very nice user experience - we generate different versions for different screen sizes and so use the total screen.  We've been up and running for 4 weeks and with no marketing whatsoever (in fact this blog entry is the closest thing to promotion we've done), we've had >200K downloads.  You download the content from our mobile site (wap.eyemags.com).

2 weeks ago we added voting, so users can feed back to us their rating for each magazine.  When we collect the vote we get the handset type and I quickly noticed some handsets were getting better votes than others (albeit for the same magazines).  So I did the analysis in the graph below to see which handset manufacturers got the best votes and here it is.  It's based on 10K votes over the last 2 weeks (generally ~20% of downloads result in the user looking for another eyemag in which case we ask them to vote on the one they came from).  It  may be unfair on LG (as it only had 70 votes in the result set), but I think it is generally accurate and in a few weeks I'll run it again and post the results on the Eyemags blog.  When I have more data I suspect I will be able to break down by handset models as well.

10/4/2007 - Further analysis now we have >15K votes Nokia are still clear winner over all other phones and the ranking remain the same.  We need to understand why the perception of Nokia users is that EyeMags appear better.  When I have even more data I will break this down further by model to try to understand the reasons for this better.

3GSM is where the virtual Nokia community meets the real world.  3 Forum Nokia Champions, (in the picture left to right) myself, Alessandro (biskero.org - he has one of the best blogs available) and the world's best Flash-Lite developer, David Mannl (flash-lite.de) met at Mobile Sunday in Barcelona.

recently...

• Steve Balmer's prediction on dinosaur paper publishers in the next 10 years
• One Internet - 2 mobile worlds
• World "everyone connected day" 11th June 2012?
• Mobile Web Search is not working very well
• The iPhone Inconsistency
• Web Apps vs Mobile Apps - the debates begins!
• Post to Myspace - a bit limited
• Affordable data whilst roaming
• Looking back to look forward
• S60 browser *really* does go IPhone

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