BBM comes to iOS and Android as a standalone messaging app

True that.

Question is - is it too late in the day ? For Blackberry?

Messaging services have been slowly funneling traffic away from social media platforms for a while now and the mobile phone is truly starting to reflect what it always was - the most effective social network of them all.

Blackberry is late. 

But it does give credence to another rising trend out there. 

Doesn’t matter whose mobile OS you are on. Even if it is a competitors, if you have a good product/ service, make sure its available on all mobile OS platforms, so that you get all those users on all those platforms to at least have the option of using your product/ service.

Exclusivity (in an open age) on products of mass consumption especially on mobile platforms is a tricky bet and needs a huge ecosystem to succeed.

So code. Hack away. Understand your competitors mobileOS, UI and UX and deliver your product on that OS with a superlative user experience.

And you will benefit.

Ask Google.

Their Search app ( with Google Now), Map’s app and YouTube App on iOS are used more by Apple users than Apples own products in the same category. They even created an IOS app for Google Plus so that people could use Google’s Social Network on the iPhone.

All this just increases usage of your product/ service. And when people use your product more, you end up making more money.

From more avenues.

Because, users only care about services and products they use. Not about Operating Systems.

Ray Kurzweil on IBM’s Watson

Ray Kurzweil has held many hats. Accomplished scientist, entrepreneur, among the foremost thinkers in the realm of artificial intelligence and most recently as Director of Engineering at Google.

The naturally held belief is that Kurzweil will use his 50 years of expertise in AI and bring it together with the learnings from Knowledge Graph to revolutionize semantic search for Google.

Fascinating interview of how he intends to do it here, by Forbes journalist, Robert Hof.

However one part of this enthralling interview stood out for me. 

“I will say that IBM’s Watson [the famous Jeopardy!-playing computer] does an impressive job of actually understanding semantic language, and it shows the feasibility of doing this. All the knowledge that Watson had was not hand-coded in some computer language. The idea that you could write down all this common-sense knowledge … turns out to be very brittle, because it doesn’t reflect the ambiguities sufficiently in language and common-sense knowledge.

Watson didn’t work that way. It actually got its knowledge by reading Wikipedia and several other encyclopedias, and then played a game that is not a narrow task. It’s really equivalent to answering questions. The queries can be very diverse. For example, it got the query, “A long, tiresome speech delivered by a frothy pie topping,” and it answered, “What is a meringue harangue?” Watson got a higher score in Jeopardy! than the next best two human players put together.”

Google Glass- Not if…but when

Right now, I don’t really feel the need to buy a new tech toy even though I am a hopeless junkie.

But YES…I WILL buy this whenever it launches, whatever the price

image

I do not know what i will really use it for. Search? Maps? Recommendations? Voice activated command systems? GPS ? I can experience all of those with this.

But for sure every moment that I use it will be archived as a video or a picture for nostalgic musings in the digital scrapbook which overruns my drive.

“Ok Glass. Let’s record a video.”

Read Josh Topolshy’s detailed review here.

“Incremental improvement is guaranteed to be obsolete over time”

“Larry Page: I worry that something has gone seriously wrong with the way we run companies. If you read the media coverage of our company, or of the technology industry in general, it’s always about the competition. The stories are written as if they are covering a sporting event. But it’s hard to find actual examples of really amazing things that happened solely due to competition. How exciting is it to come to work if the best you can do is trounce some other company that does roughly the same thing? That’s why most companies decay slowly over time. They tend to do approximately what they did before, with a few minor changes. It’s natural for people to want to work on things that they know aren’t going to fail. But incremental improvement is guaranteed to be obsolete over time. Especially in technology, where you know there’s going to be non-incremental change.”


Quite a good and rare interview of Larry Page by Wired’s Steven Levy. You can read the entire interview here.

Source: Wired

What is the intent of your “Like” ?

With Graph Search Facebook has entered the Search game, and it intends to make search relevant with discovery and recommendation.

That’s neat.

However, one of the prime indexes by which they can sift through data and match queries to responses will be the “Like” button.

To give an example, If I use Graph Search  with the query “Which DSLR camera do my friends recommend” - Facebook will search through my network ( maybe later extended network), gather all the instances where my network “Liked” an activity or instance related to a DSLR camera and aggregate them to give me a list of recommendations.

That’s cool.

Now here’s the caveat. Given that many brands have spent tons of money in audience acquisition campaigns- (remember ” Like this page” and you can win a free bar of soap? ) - it is very likely that many of these like’s are not genuine recommendations, but an act that was undertaken simply with the wish of winning a freebie. 

So let’s assume that camera manufacturer A ran a Facebook audience generation campaign using an app, where the sign in was to Like the fan page, then I will have a list of those from my network who “recommended” product A. 

Then let’s assume some months later camera manufacturer B ran a similar Facebook campaign for audience generation and several members of my network signed in ( by liking the page). I will also get their names recommending product B.

Now let’s say I find that a lot of similar names on these two lists.  

Which one would be the real recommendation? Which one would I really go by ? Will it even have relevance to my query ? 

Problem is marketers, agencies all colluded together to ensure that the number of ” Likes” was a metric to chase for.This was not Facebook’s doing. But it sure affects them. As the number of “Likes” grew so did the giddy excitement (amidst marketers/ agencies) of having a number to show as proof of efficacy for a campaign. More “Likes” became equivalent to more success. 

Sadly it was the wrong metric of efficacy to start with. Still is. Especially if you are paying to buy those “likes”. Through ads, apps or contests. Yes you do get people to engage with the brand, but it should not be taken as metric to define buying intent or relevance. One has to take into consideration the intent of a person who presses the “Like” button. Why did s/he hit like? For public good, or for selfish sweepstake? Or to make someone happy ? Or to buy?

When a system has to sift through this kind of data which is ambiguous, the search results can be pretty skewed in terms of relevance. 

It fits in other places as well. Just because I click on an ad word on Google and land on a  page does not give a clear indication of my intent. 

People will buy when they want/need to buy. At that moment they will search, they will read, they will read reviews, they will ask friends and then based on their need and budget, they will make an informed decision. The best we can do, is to ensure we are there in their mind and that our product has the relevance to match to their needs. 

Also, when people really need to search something, they will search. Even if the right answer is in the 20th page of the search results- they will find and use that information which matters to them. Not some paid promotion which supposedly recommends them on their next action. 

Graph Search will be important for power users and with time it will metamorphose, add functionalities and then only we can truly understand what  a game changer it is.

The consumer is not dumb.

Marketers, brands, organizations, digital ninja’s, social guru’s and agencies need to start by acknowledging that first. 

Google’s aim at enterprise mobility

Google continues with its strategy of creating iOS apps for iPhone. Close on the heels of Maps for iPhone and Google Now, it has launched a brand new app called Coordinate. 

Yes. The name is telling of what it it is aimed at. Helping you Coordinate. 

Features include:

Sharing real-time location: Employees are increasingly on the move in today’s business environment. Google Coordinate enables easy collaboration by enabling businesses to leverage real-time location sharing in just a few clicks.

Managing jobs: Your business has lots to do every day. Google Coordinate makes it easy to capture all the information needed for a job and to assign them to your team members with instant notifications.

Collecting data: Mobile teams often need to collect information while out in the field. Google Coordinate allows the admin to customize the fields that the mobile team needs to capture and collect – from measurements to client contact details – directly in the app.

Quoting from the Maps Coordinate Document on Google:

“Google Maps Coordinate is web and mobile application that helps organizations manage their mobile workforce. With Coordinate, your dispatchers can work more efficiently, because they’ll have real-time visibility into the location of your mobile workers and can send job assignments directly to their mobile devices. In the field, mobile workers can keep their dispatchers updated on the status of their job assignments, and can work more efficiently by knowing where everyone is.”

Pretty neat. Google has slowly but surely worked on its enterprise approach. From Google Docs to Google Drive. And it’s creeping on an upward trajectory.

As I muse on the utility of a service like Coordinate, several thoughts come to mind - all around enterprise mobility and BYOD.

  • Sales teams on ground can benefit from this
  • Teams which work on location based tactical jobs will benefit
  • Teams which work on remote location data centers can benefit from this
  • On ground tech teams which work in labs/engineering centers far away from corporate HQ’s can benefit from this
  • Add this with an enterprise version of Google + , which can be a social layer for an organizations social intranet and you have amazing integration in a social way across silos for different business units connected right down to an employees mobile in a simple unobtrusive way

Only thing to be noted. It requires a Google Coordinate license for this mobile app to work

Check the video below. Neat creative.

Why Tizen ?

Last week was important. Not only was Ubuntu Linux launched for phones, Samsung, of all announced that it would launch its own set of phones based on Tizen. Samsung’s handsets will be based on Tizen Linux, a mobile OS that was launched by the Linux Foundation and the LiMo Foundation in late 2011.

Now that’s interesting. Considering, that when you think of Android, the one brand that comes synonymously to mind is Samsung. Its incredibly popular Galaxy series have almost single-handedly catapulted Android to market dominance as the Mobile OS of choice. (40-50 % of the total Andorid Market) 

The mobile game, however,  is about the eco-system. Whoever controls the eco-system controls profits and the future. Apple has shown the walled garden’s profitability. User’s can take the hassle of converting all their content on to one OS but they need the relevant eco-system to stay there and if they are happy, they don’t really want to shift, because honestly it is a hassle.

So why would Samsung, gun for a new Mobile OS, when Android has worked so well for them ? The answer is simple. As long as they are on Android, Google calls the eco-system shots. They control how the OS works, not Samsung. So tomorrow if they start dropping developer support or any other competitive actions for their own benefit, Samsung has very little negotiating leverage.

And what could be these competitive  actions? 

According to this Bloomberg Report, Byun Han Joon, an analyst at KB Investment & Securities in Seoul says, “Tizen was born as Samsung hoped to lighten its growing dependence on Google on concerns that its top position in the smartphone market may weaken following the Google- Motorola tie-up.” 

As per the Wall Street Journal and MacDaily  Google and Motorola Mobility (which it bought for $12.5 Billion)  engineers are already hard at work to launch a New Google Phone/ Tablet in 2013 - which will truly compete with the iPhone (and you can bet Google will support the development of this Phone to the hilt).

This Phone will be build on Android.

That can only mean one thing- Competition for Samsung from Google on the hardware front.

There is no question Samsung’s mobile phones are their primary revenue engine. And the only threat there is Google and Androids dominance, along with Google’s partnership with Motorola Mobility.

In today’s business world, every one loves a position of leverage. 

A good example of this is the way Amazon runs the Kindle HD on a forked version of Android, which really is nothing like Android but customized to Amazon’s requirements. 

A little research on Tizen tells you that;

“The Tizen mobile operating system is part of the Linux Foundation, with strong support from Samsung and Intel. There has been a long period of development, but version 2.0 of Tizen should be released during January, with an appearance on a mobile device in the first quarter of 2013” 

Now Samsung and Intel coming together on a mobile OS is kind of important.  <Tangent- Apple with the A5 core chip is looking at moving mobile chip building in-house.>

Some additional facts worth pondering:

TIzen has amazing HTML5 cross functionality, and what is even more important is that HTML5 applications run on Tizen without a browser and even offline. 

There are serious questions on whether any brand can catch up with an Apple’s profitability and ecosystem in replicating another app store, and if you don’t decide to go native, then the only other option is HTML5. With advances done on HTML 5 by partners like Sencha e.g.: The Fastbook , it will become more and more mainstream as a viable platform to build mobile apps.

Tizen fits in beautifully with the HTML5 angle.

Also note all Android applications will run on Tizen devices with OpenMobile’s ACL,  (Application Compatibility Layer) which means for people wanting to make a switch from Android to Tizen ( once the phone’s are launched), they would be able to easily run all Android apps, with minimal work. 

All in all very interesting developments in the realm of mobile and mobile OS’s. More innovation. More capabilities. Ultimately leading to more user choice and benefits.

Sources:

Sources for the story include published articles on The Forbes, Techcrunch,Wikipedia, Sencha Blog, MacDaily, Wall Steet Journal, PC World, Bloomberg.

If it’s tech it’s got to be TV

Suddenly. Everyone wants to innovate the TV. Apple has been trying for some time now. Samsung, LG have gone with Google to create Smart TV’s and now its Intel.

There is only one problem. There seem to be no takers for these so called Smart TV’s. 

Television viewing is fundamentally different from surfing the web. EG - i do not want to read tech blogs on my television. Nor do I want app’s on my TV to watch YouTube videos. Not until YouTube videos get to the quality that say an HBO provides. Caveat- once a content creator on YouTube starts creating video content of that caliber, he would have already done content deals with HBO and whatnot.

Let me give you an example - Internet sensation music duo, The Piano Guys created amazing video’s to their cover instrumentals, gathered millions of viewers and fans on YouTube , only to ultimately sign a music deal with Sony. YouTube gave the musicians fans, but could not give them revenue. 

Television is a hugely visual medium. Add to it the fact that it is a piece of technology which is consumed by all members of a family, majority of whom could not care about things like which app is at number 1 on the iOS store. They want to simply switch on the remote and watch a movie, a serial, music videos, a game of sports or a simple sitcom.So a wired TV with a million apps makes little sense.

The core thing here is great quality audio visual content and that today is an organized industry controlled by broadcasters and cable operators. It is a walled garden.  Why cable operators? Because of their reach.

A 3 person start-up with no funding can create an amazing mobile app in one month, get millions of followers in six months and sell for a billion dollars in 1 year. But a 3 person team cannot create amazing quality audio visual content for long. Not without dollops of funding. SO the entire user generated content / web tv argument holds little sense as of today.

So then it becomes the battle for the set top box. That little rectangle which feeds you your weekly dose of Game of Thrones based on your subscription amount.

The set top box though is today controlled by cable or telecom operators. 

Or the alternative is to create a cheap enough streaming service which gives consumers more than what they get today at the same or lesser costs. Netflix and Amazon prime are already doing it in a way. But they are not an alternative to TV. They are at best an add-on. 

In a country like India for $250 a year I get to watch some 300 channels. Admittedly there is not much to watch on these channels and I do not need 300 channels, I maybe need 6, but cable operators don’t sell 6 channels. They package bundles. I end up paying for 294 additional channels , but then there is no other cheaper scalable alternative.

A Pandora/ Spotify/ iTunes like  disruption would be great for television content. The fundamental problem is who pays the bills? Example- traditional TV today scores big in beaming a live cricket match within the subscription rates- the hit is taken by advertisers who pay millions of dollars to broadcasters to telecast matches.  On a web streaming service, even if we end up getting advertisers( I have my grave doubts), who pays for the additional data download costs? A song is 3 MB. An HD movie is 800 MB. A 5 day cricket match ??????? And all these costs together - can they be lesser then $250 a year? 

Again grave doubts.

The only game that big tech players have in reinventing TV is by finding a cheaper way to distribute broadcaster content from the set top box to all screens ( TV to tablet to mobiles). Currently majority of attempts at doing this is costly and bloated. 

Or reverse the entire thing. Get broadcasters to lease their content in application formats which get hubbed off from mobiles onto television screens thereby killing the set top box as well as the remote. 

Once they can work that out, then they can add some additional bells and whistles like making televisions in an entire touch/ hologram experience. Who knows?

But beyond anything I guess it’s a clear sign of how big tech companies are desperately looking at new growth plays. With media consumption at epic highs, everyone is trying their best to muscle in into the media / marketing industry and sign in the next billion dollars in revenue.

It’s time for Smart TVs to get a bit more smarter. There is no point in being a 45 inch / LED/ 3D desktop surrogate in the living room. No point in disrupting the set top box either if the costs are not any lesser than $250 a year.