Hugh Spear's Blog

Is the pendulum of popular support now going to start swinging away from Apple?

Back in 1994 when we started Dialogue with an SMS application called PageMail we gave ourselves three years before we were either acquired or out of business. Why? Well in those days the personal computer software world was controlled by Microsoft and the general view was that if you did something well and it was popular then Microsoft would either do it better and make it cheaper, or acquire you and your product. The result would be the same but you would be wealthier if you were acquired. 

We've lasted longer than 3 years partly because SMS didn't get as popular as soon in the US as elsewhere. We've also seen that Microsoft has become less important in the world and this is partly due to anti-trust lawsuits which have prevented them from having a stranglehold on the market. The most prominent of these was the one which prevented Microsoft from automatically installing Internet Explorer with the Windows operating system. 

Now we seem to be seeing the same approach coming along from Apple and threatening small groups of developers who just like Dialogue are just trying to create and sell innovative solutions to an embryonic market.

The advent of IOS 5 marks for me the stage at which the  world's support for Apple will start to weaken and it will be seen less as a force for good and more and more in the same light as we saw Microsoft at the height of its powers. 

I was one of many who applauded Apple for its pioneering iPhone. In one fell swoop it disrupted the mobile industry forever. Nothing demonstrates this more than a look at the once unbeatable market leader Nokia. Nokia has lost market share, lost its Finnish locus of control and lost its' operating system. 

I also applauded Apple's way of dealing with mobile operators who have always been in control of what went on at the handset. This control has not given us great usability nor great innovation. It has pretty much continued with a status quo. Apple pretty much single-handedly democratised the production of a better user experience.

It has been fantastic to see m0re and more handset manufacturers making devices which are as close to the look and feel of an iPhone as they can get without infringing upon Apple's intellectual property.

So all of this work by Apple has been a breath of fresh air to an industry which was set in it's ways. Apple was the new kid on the block, doing something different, frightening the old dinosaurs and we all loved them for it. I still have no sympathy for other handset manufacturers nor carriers who have had the resources to innovate but failed to. But in the background something less healthy was going on.  Apple was getting to enjoy its growing market share and it moved from the 'little guy' fighting the giants, to the 'big guy' who liked to throw his weight about. 

The first hints of this were the controls it placed around what Apps you could install and run on your iPhone. But we forgave them for that because there were so many Apps out there that we ignored the ones we missed. Then there was the very public denial of support for Flash on the iPhone. Again we forgave them for that because Adobe is big enough to take care of itself, and we've all suspected that Flash wasn't as stable as it needs to be.  But all the same we don't put up with this 'Big Brother' style control over what we use on our PCs.

Now we find that with IOS 5 Apple has included all kinds of new components, applications and services and has been accused on several fronts of cherry picking the best third party Apps and recreating these to be part of the Apple product set.

I love the idea of not needing to synchronise with a PC. Even with my MacBook Pro it takes 3 hours to sync my iPhone. It takes twice as long with my iPad so it has ceased to be a suitable solution. So moving iTunes to the cloud and synchronising over wi-fi is fantastic. But wasn't there a wi-fi sync App which was refused approval by Apple and ended up being a very successful App for jailbroken iPhones?  Also, moving iTunes to the cloud makes sense, but iCloud also provides all kinds of other document storage and synchronisation. This poses challenges to products like Dropbox and services like Flickr to compete.

iMessage goes down the same route. There are lots of Apps which merge instant messaging with SMS. One of the more popular is WhatsApp Messenger.  These Apps have had to work around all kinds of difficulties to provide a good product with a good user experience. They are all significantly challenged by Apple bringing out iMessage which is a closed App and doesn't have any obvious API access.

In a recent article, Tim Hanlon explores this idea of Apple putting App developers out of business even further. Sadly, he concludes that it's Apple's ball and they will decide what you do with it and for how long.

I guess we do all have to play Apple's game just as we once did with Microsoft. But there are starting to be the stirrings of anti-trust lawsuits against Apple now and at some point, if they are not careful, they will become the target of a lot more. 

Perhaps it is the natural order of things that empires whether they are technological or political eventually become too strong and people turn against them. It woud be a shame if this is now starting to happen with Apple. It probably won't stop me from using their products, but it will reduce my admiration for their business.

Mobile World Congress 2011 - take-aways

MWC 2011 Starters

This must be something like fourteen years of visiting this show in either Cannes or Barcelona and each time I try to justify the event to myself as something worth doing.  Some years the justification came from seeing the progress of the technology and trying to identify what we would need to do to keep up. Other years it was just to see which themes looked like dominating the industry.  Now it seems to be more the practical value of being able to meet with so many important contacts in one place during one week. I just hope that someone kept hold of the list of 'Next Steps'!

The items below are the things which I took away from the show this year. For me it was worth the time, cost and effort to attend, and I'm already looking forward to next year's show.

Maturation of Wholesale SMS supply

One of the two themes which for me seemed to re-emerge regularly during the week was the movement towards open cooperation between some of the larger and better established SMS Aggregators in the world.   There appeared to be agreement that worldwide SMS connectivity was becoming a regular requirement for many global businesses; and that the job of providing this was difficult to do successfully. There is now a core collection of companies that are already working together, have enough integrity to only promise what they can deliver and are poised to provide a global network of SMS connections.   Unfortunately, there are also a number of companies which damage the reputation of SMS aggregators by being less than honest about how they carry out their SMS routing and focussing on price without regard to service quality. My hope is that over the next year or so, we will see more transparency come to this market and that this will lead to some more sustainable and loyal revenue streams.

The need for an eco-system

This is the second theme which has become apparent in many areas of IT, but almost more so in mobile. One could argue that one of the primary reasons for the success of the iPhone is the quality of it's eco-system. iTunes for music, the App store for games and widgets to do almost any task. The simplicity of the purchasing experience which rewards developers, the huge industry of additional hardware which enhances the iPhone; from protective screen covers to high quality speaker systems.  The success which the iPhone brings to creative artists, application developers and hardware manufacturers means that anyone who wants to unseat the iPhone as the dominant smartphone has to do a lot more than just provide a cute handset.  

In the past the mobile networks thought that their role was to provide the eco-system of value added services and all they wanted out of a handset was something cute which had good signal strength and battery life.  The reality is that the mobile networks were not good enough or focussed enough to provide an eco-system which worked for all the participants, and this has enabled Apple and to a lesser extent Google to step in. 

The great news is that Apple provides a fantastic case study for other's to follow if they want to achieve dominance in their own field.  Many at the show now recognise this, but they don't have Steve Jobs at hand so we will have to see how well they can learn from the iPhone and apply the lessons.

Top 5 Personal MWC 2011 Awards

My own personal awards for MWC 2011 are as follows.

1. Biggest distraction - CBOSS Girls.

Whatever CBOSS do seems less important than how their stand looks. Their stand is a white stage and on the stage stands attractive women wearing less than the February weather really required. Everyone seemed to have visited the stand and many seemed to linger, but no-one seemed to know anything about the company or its products, or if it has products. 

2. Biggest attraction LG Optimus.

The LG Optimus is billed as the worlds first 3D mobile phone. It is fair to say that there were some beta software glitches, but overall this was a fantastic device and one has to congratulate LG for innovation within the hardware and showing that there is more to the world than just an eco-system.  The games were better and the movies more engaging when shown in 3D. It even has a twin lense camera to enable users to make their own 3D movies. 

3. Best Story to overshadow the show - Nokia and Microsoft.

Coming just days ahead of the show this was always going to be the big story. I bet that the other handset manufacturers running Windows Mobile 7 were a bit miffed and it probably damaged their commercial prospects at the show.

But really this could be the most important story of the decade. It remains to be seen whether Microsoft can recreate the success it had with the Xbox rather than labour on through more and more iterations of Windows; and whether Nokia can concentrate on hardware and communications engineering and be a little less Finnish. But if these companies can pull it off then the world will be a better place. 

4. Best Buzzwords.

If you have an LTE Cloud Computing App that raises ARPU year on year and comes with its own eco-system then you have got it made.

5. Most conspicuous absence. Moble Content

Whatever did happen to mobile phone personalisation? My view is that this is now included in the handset eco-system. So it is purchased from iTunes or its equivalent, comes via an App or is just retrieved through a browser. The opportunities for independent vendors seem to be reducing.

 

 

Top 5 +1 reasons for using SMS in recruitment.

Dialogue recently launched its SMS service for Bullhorn the site is great and can be found at http://www.dialogue.net/sms-for-bullhorn/. It offers close integration with the software as a service (SaaS) application in that you send and receive the SMS messages from within Bullhorn itself, and that is the key to usability of add-ins like SMS. But it is also worth reflecting on why SMS is so beneficial to a recruitment and ATS (Applicant Tracking System) context. So here are my top 5 reasons in order of priority:

 Reason #1 Reach.

A mobile phone is always with you and always with your candidates. It is also nearly always switched on and mostly within network coverage. Also, every cellular phone supports SMS and unlike voice calls, the messages can't be diverted. Add to this the research findings that nearly everyone knows how to use SMS and 98% of SMS messages are read. And you have the single most compelling reason for the success of SMS.  You message will reach the person you send it to.

Reason #2 Speed.

SMS is fast, really fast a message can cross the world in a few seconds to land on a phone wherever it is.  If you want to tell someone about a vacancy fast you can.  If you want to tell someone an interview time has been changed you need look no further.  Why is it fast? Well four reasons:

1. There isn't much data to shift around. Being a bit more technical; a text message is 140 bytes of information. SMS uses a 7 bit character-set and uses something called 'bit-stuffing' to get 160 7 bit characters into 140 bytes.  So SMS is compressed into something very small which is then switch through various networks at a very high speed.
2. It uses the cellular network signalling channel (SS7). This is bandwidth which is always there. Ever notice on New Year's Eve when you can't make a call because the whole world is doing the same thing, but you can send an SMS. There is so much less congestion.
3. Mobile networks have invested heavily in SMS infrastructure. Why wouldn't they, it is the success story of the the past decade. In January 1998 I remember when Vodafone in the UK told me that it had carried 1m SMS messages in the whole month. According to the UK Mobile Data Association by January 2010 there were 11m messages sent in the UK every hour. 
4. With companies like Dialogue who are a tier 1 SMS aggregator and the sort of company that will carry all of these 'Application-to-Person' messages; you have no third party between the application and the mobile network, so no delays. Indeed Dialogue even runs its own SS7 (signalling layer) interface for SMS.  So is viewed as a mobile network as far as SMS is concerned.

So overall, SMS is built for speed, the networks have worked hard to handle the volume and if you aggregator is also your application provider then you have very little friction.

Reason #3 Cost.

Several commentators have noted that SMS is the most expensive data in the universe. At an average cost of US $0.1 per SMS, it is over US $700 per megabyte. Compare that with the data plan on a mobile phone or the charges from an ISP and you see what I mean. But that is missing the point that the competitive alternative to SMS is not email or the mobile internet, it is voice, and SMS is much cheaper than voice.  Try making a voice call to 50 people to tell them about a job vacancy that would interest them and you have two costs, the cost of the call and the cost of your time. The cost of the call will not be cheap because the chances are you are calling a cellphone, and the cost of you time must be worth more than $5!

Reason #4 Response.

The response rates for SMS marketing are regularly quoted in the high teens and up to 25%. That is almost unheard of with more traditional marketing mechanics. But what is better than the statistic is the idea that SMS replies coming straight back to your application will enable the recruitment professional to focus attention on the enthusiastic candidates immediately.  Nothing pleases a potential employer more than a recruitment company finding interested candidates quickly. 

Reason #5 Precision.

Who wouldn't want an SMS reminder of an interview date and time together with the address and the name and job title of the interviewer?  You can fit it all in a single message, and probably include some travel advice too.  Again, contrast this with a voice call and you can see information being lost.  

Plus 1.

If I was going to add one more reason, it would be that people are already voting with their feet. The most compelling argument to include SMS in a recruitment application is that the recruitment professionals are already using it, they are just using their own mobile phones, which is more awkward and the messages aren't tracked where you want them - in the log of correspondence with the candidate.

 Recruitment has regularly been highlighted as one of the top sectors for SMS usage. It isn't surprising because it is a people industry and people is what text messaging is all about.  It isn't about replacing email or voice calls. You need email to send documents and you need voice to really discuss a role. But for short alerts like job notifications or appointment reminders or directions and contact details, it is very hard to do better than SMS.

I hope this short article has helped highlight some of the benefits of SMS to anyone still teetering on the brink of embracing the technology.  

envelos the 1 SMS pitch

As a regular listener to the Jason Calacanis podcast - This Week In StartUps, I have found myself intrigued by 'Shark Tank', a section of the show where an entrepreneur has 1 minute to pitch his business to Jason and his guest. After the pitch the chat-room rates both the pitch and the business idea.

It got me wondering whether my products would stand up to this kind of scrutiny, and I wondered whether I could actually do a pitch in this amount of time which would tell the listener what the product was, why it was useful, how I would get customers and how I would get revenue.

 

This is the result of my efforts.

"Although an SMS can be up to about 25 words in length, most people use less than half of that space. 

The reason? We're no good at using a phone keypad to type more than a short sentence. 

So what if you want send someone a long URL in an SMS, or how about directions to your office or a list of people coming to the meeting?

If you, like me, are someone who'd rather not spend all day typing long messages into your mobile phone, then you're someone who could use envelos.com. 

envelos is a website where you use your computer keyboard to type text messages and send them out. People receiving your SMS messages will think they came from your phone and they will reply to your phone. 

Business users of envelos can also get their own 2-way SMS number which they can use to keep fully tracked SMS conversations with staff, and customers.

You can buy SMS credits to use on envelos or you can use the SMS credits from your regular mobile phone plan. Either way you're going to be sending better messages". envelos - making the most of SMS!"

That is my effort for the 1 minute pitch. But now I want to take it one further and make it the 1 message pitch. Thats right, 160 characters. Here goes:-

Rather than using a handful of words for an SMS, use envelos.com to spread your news. envelos, is a fully featured, cost effective desktop SMS, productivity app

Finally, here is the Twitter pitch, 140 characters:-

Don't use just a handful of words in an SMS, use envelos to spread your news. Be more effective with messaging and save money at envelos.com

Mobile World Congress vs CTIA Wireless 2010

I have been meaning to write this entry for a few weeks, but it seems to have been a busier year than I anticipated. So here goes.

I have attended The Mobile World Congress (MWC) in its various guises and locations for most of the past 15 years. It was the GSM Congress in Cannes back in 1996 when I first attended, it later became 3GSM and has moved from Cannes to Barcelona. I have always felt that this show, more than any other was the bellwether for the mobile industry. The biggest names always roll out their glitziest offerings at this show. The keynote speeches always try to capture the industry zeitgeist.  The attendance is genuinely multi-national and multi-cultural. You can't help but feel that you are at the centre of the mobile universe for those few short days in February, and for that reason you feel that you are getting a glimpse of what the future will hold. 

You also feel, almost absurdly, that for once Europe is the centre of the world. This is partly because GSM was a European standard firstly and the specifications are still maintained by ETSI in France. But it was also because people in Europe didn't quite get what was happening in Japan and Korea and we also thought that the people in the US didn't quite get what mobile was all about. We knew that everyone in the US carried pagers and we saw that the 'cellphones' used on the TV shows were outdated Motorola flip phones with telescopic aerials. So whatever was going on over the 'pond' it certainly wasn't leading edge.

This year was the third year I had attended the Mobile World Congress since the release of the iPhone, it was therefore the third year that the biggest current influence on mobile wasn't present at the biggest show. So something was starting to feel a little 'out-of-touch' about the Mobile World Congress!

There was also something a little bit uneasy about many of the people I spoke to at the show.  It seemed that gradually the optimism and shine of the show was wearing thin. People seemed ever so slightly desperate. From handset manufacturers still trying to get their touchscreen phones and app stores launched, to infrastructure providers wondering where the next deal was going to come from, to the content providers, in the App Planet,  praying they were onto the next big thing. Everyone seemed a bit more anxious that ever before.

I came away with the feeling that the Mobile World Congress had slipped a little in relevance. It didn't seem to be defining the direction that mobile was taking or should take. More than that it has always been a beauty pageant for the Mobile Operators. A place where the undisputed kings of the mobile jungle would make their choices about what would happen next in our mobile lives. This seems to have changed and been changed by companies from the US who have redefined the mobile eco-system. Apple and Google have between them moved the mobile battleground away from Carrier Services and towards handset applications. People are still interested in the tariff of their mobile phone, but they are more interested in getting the applications they love. Software seems to be cool again and network services seem to be like drainage. You are glad its there but you don't want to spend much time discussing it.

So it was with some disappointment that I left the show and Barcelona.

Just over a month later I found myself in Las Vegas for CTIA Wireless and inevitably I found myself comparing the two shows.

It had been twenty years since my previous visit to Las Vegas. That time I had been in a VW Combi van with my girlfriend, travelling around the US over the course of a year. This time I was working and on a bigger budget and didn't expect to enjoy the trip as much. How wrong I was.

I had travelled to the US from Sydney, Australia. Flying into L.A. and then driving with a friend from L.A to Las Vegas was great fun. Las Vegas was in a way the opposite of Barcelona. Barcelona is all narrow streets, steeped in history and dripping with culture. Las Vegas was the contrary. That said, the people were so friendly and courteous that you just got swept along in the myths of ancient Egypt and Rome.

The show itself, CTIA Wireless, was actually pretty small. Probably about a quarter of the size of MWC. But it more than made up for it in two ways:

Firstly and most importantly there was huge optimism. You would think that the economy was flying along everyone was making money and was happy to share out their success. Whereas in Barcelona I had had conversations with anxious looking sales staff from large companies, who clearly were wondering where their end of quarter bonus would come from; here in Las Vegas everyone appeared to be safe, almost smug, with the reassurance that the venture backers did not expect a return for at least two more years. I quickly realised that whereas in Europe the mobile industry is a bit stagnant with carriers trying to shore up their revenues and handset manufacturers, especially Nokia looking like they would never again dominate an industry that they once rightfully claimed as their own. In the US on the other hand, mobile is one of the hot topics. And many of the companies exhibiting at CTIA were very ebullient about services they were running which were indicators of almost certain future success.

Secondly, there was good reason for the optimism. The US people always seems to me to be naturally optimistic, and it is infectious. But to have good reason for the optimism is something which made a big difference. From my perspective the good reason for optimism is that the US finally 'gets mobile' in its broadest sense. I used to talk to visitors to Europe from the US about running mobile marketing campaigns or connecting up corporate applications to SMS and I would get almost blank looks. Those were the days when the US view of using mobile was using a Compaq iPaq for stock-taking in the warehouse.  What was and is happening now is that you see advertising for SMS information services everywhere, you see SMS marketing keywords and shortcodes on billboards, on the seats of taxis and on TV. SMS is everywhere. And because the market is so big, there is room for just about everyone. You just have to pick you market and get on with it. So the reason for the optimism is because people are successful with their mobile strategies.

I think the breakthrough technology to change all of this must be the iPhone. It helps that Apple is a US company, but it also helps that Google, Microsoft and RIM are also US companies. And what helps more and more is that the US is the home of SaaS or Software as a Service style businesses. Put all of this together and you see that if you are in the business of hooking up businesses to cool apps on even cooler handsets (Mobility as a Service or MaaS), then the US seems to hold all the aces.

I would recommend anyone to go to CTIA Wireless and challenge you to come away without forming the strong opinion that mobile value added services are in their infancy, they have fantastic potential and for sure the place to exploit that potential is going to be the US for some time to come.