Mobile musings and wireless wanderings

I led a roundtable this past week at GDC Mobile on search and discovery of mobile games. This post will be dedicated to addressing some aspects of the search and discovery of mobile content. I will go through the presentation in detail and include the salient points brought forth during the roundtable.

For a less in depth overview of the panel, Jeffrey Fleming from Gamasutra published this review of the round table.

Context

It is useful to think of search and discovery as specific vehicles of findability. In Ambient Findability, Moville defines findability as “the quality of being locatable or navigable.” This relates both to the degree to which something is easy to discover or locate as well as the degree to which the overall environment (in this case mobility) supports navigation and retrieval. According to Morville, the requirements of findability has to do the definition, distinction and difference of the particular object or thing to be found. For physical objects, this relates to size, shape, color and location. For digital content, this relates to labels, links and keywords.

Before getting into mobile search and discovery in particular, it is useful to look at the evolution of cable and the Internet. The best brief history I’ve heard of in the context of mobile was by respective heads of Nielsen Mobile Media (Sid Gorham) and Real Networks (Rob Glaser) on a panel on mobile content discovery at Wireless Influencers.

So, here goes, History 101 by Gorham and Glaser:

• First, TV dial placement was most important
  • From my vantage point, this is where we are now within mobile
  • Sid Gorham quoted a study they did in which a bowling game got a 270% lift when being sold off page one as opposed to page two or three. The importance of deck placement is well known to any game publisher. I’ll go into this in more detail later.
• Then, cross channel promotion
• Finally, an on-screen guide
• Cable was a content paradigm that people understood due to its relationship to television. As such, the context of discovery was based on a ‘channel’
• On the PC / Internet, access was unbundled from content
  • Navigation is rich
  • Advertising, transactions and consumer premiums are all viable models
  • The keyboard and mouse provide much richer discovery

When we then think about mobile in the context of search and discovery, we are faced with a number of challenges:

• Constraints
  • Network performance, limited device capabilities, fragmented formats, keypad & screen size
• Lack of navigational paradigm
  • ‘Channel’ model has had limited success
  • Multi-modal interfaces (voice + keypad) can be hard and difficult
• One size doesn’t fit all
• Non-integrated consumer touch points
  • Talking, texting, capturing, sending, listening & viewing
• Too much choice
  • As Garret Camp, the founder of StumbleUpon has noted, “given 8 choices, a user will not choose anything; give them 2-3 and they will choose something”
• Driving the right answer
  • The right reach vs. brute force
  • Will Relevancy and paid links work in mobile just as they have on the Internet

Before going through some specific market data related to search and discovery, it should briefly distinguish how they are used:

• Discovery (summarized from comments made by Vivek Badrinath, EVP Products & Technology at Orange)
  • Moments of boredom
    • Surf not search
    • Electronic programming guides work in this context
    • Better results, if you also add Amazon-style recommendations
  • Local
    • You are looking for something
    • You are looking for something in a specific context.
• Search (summarized from a recent McKinsey & Company presentation on search)
  • Objectives
    • If people are searching for a ringtone, they often will buy it
    • If people are searching for a video, they often will view it
  • An eye towards Japan
    • NTT DoCoMo: search limited to DoCoMo sites; after they present the authorized content on deck, you can access third party content and sites
    • KDDI: the Google search box is right at the top of the deck
  • Critical mass
    • The critical mass is typically 20% for any given service
    • For cable, it was 25-32M viewers
    • For online, it was 30-50M
    • For mobile, you need 25-40M search users (likely will happen in 2011)

Here is some data from a recent study done by Nielsen (Mobile Media Survey - Nielsen August 2007) that details the mix of search objectives for mobile search by method and the percentage of searches that related to content:

• 27% of the SMS searches were for content
• 8% of the WAP searches were for content
• 31% of the carrier search box searches were for content
• 27% of the carrier portal searches were for content

To clarify, WAP is likely to mean off-deck and both the carrier search box and the carrier portal searches were carried out via WAP.

Market Data

Eric Puterbaugh - Director of Client Services, Mobile Media - for Nielsen Mobile presented some interesting data at the round table. I should also note that Eric is my brother and a Nellymoser co-founder. According to Eric, on-deck games sales in the U.S. were at about $175M in Q3 2007 which is roughly ~$700M annually. Of particular interest is that games are growing at about 24% YoY whereas applications in general are growing at 225%. We spent some time discussing this information. Fortunately, Rob Tercek (a mobile pioneer as well as the Founder and Chairman of GDC Mobile) participated in the discussion and noted that the game growth is slightly misleading mainly due to the fact that Sprint’s game business has taken a hit over the past year. It is also worth noting that application growth relates to both the success of location-based services (e.g., Verizon’s EZ Navigator) and the price point of these applications which is typically around $9 / month.

To provide some additional contextual market data, according to mMetrics (Q4 2007), just over 20% of the mobile subscribers (~220M) play games at least once during a given month. Taken a closer look at the 20%, half of these subscribers play games that they have downloaded, 1.5% play browser-based games, and about 15% play native / pre-loaded games. Keep in mind that these numbers may not “add up” but this relates to the fact that a given user may fit all of these contexts. Furthermore, of the games that are downloaded, just over 75% purchased the game by paying a fee whereas under 40% only use the trial versions. If we look closer that the purchase methods, close to 70% of those that purchased the games ordered via a mobile browser, 5% via short codes and around 10% ordered on the PC and retrieved the game via their mobile phone. Finally, in terms of discovery, about 75% of the subscribers found the game on the phone, 15% didn’t know where they found it, 10% via PC and about 8% (2% per media type) found the game via radio, television, magazines and newspapers.

Eric also presented some compelling data from a Nielsen Mobile study on deck placement. Their key conclusions were:

• Promotion enhances the popularity of games by approximately 75-100% more than the same titles when not promoted
• Increases in both revenue and downloads are driven by promotion
• Games placed on the first page of a promotional deck benefit from 25-50% more than those on the second or later page.

Based on our experience at Nellymoser and analysis of data from mMetrics and Nielsen Mobile, I would list the key discovery vehicles in descending order starting with the most effective:

• Pre-loaded on mobile phone
• On-Deck, promoted or featured
• On-deck, in-category
• Off-deck, D2C (e.g., club or storefront), PC
• Off-deck, D2C (e.g., club or storefront), WAP / Mobile Browser
• Off-deck, D2C (e.g., club or storefront), SMS
• Television, short-code
• Print, short-code
• Radio, short-code
• Retail, e.g., pre-paid card

Fragmentation

You cannot have a presentation related to mobile gaming and application development without articulating some of the issues surrounding fragmentation. This was clearly a sore point that was reiterated at this years GDC in which a number of game developers felt that they were being forced by carriers to support an unreasonable number of handsets such that the porting and testing costs were often equal to or higher than the initial development costs.

Nevertheless, just to reiterate the key aspects of fragmentation, I highlighted the following aspects of fragmentation. First, standing between consumers and content providers is a highly fragmented system of content formats, mobile phone types and wireless networks. Second, combining both on-deck and off-deck introduced additional friction in mobile discovery and delivery. There is further fragmentation within each operator related to middleware access methods. For example, I presented the following diagram I created to represent the middleware fragmentation for the top three U.S. operators:

I then spent some time going through the steps that a consumer has to go through to find a game on each of the operators’ decks. Here is a screen shot from the Sprint deck hierarchy:

Case Studies and User experience

After discussing fragmentation, I discussed some case studies and the importance of user experience based on work Nellymoser has done related to tackling the problem of discoverability as it relates to games.

This included differentiating the pros and cons and when to use SMS, MMS, WAP, Java and BREW. I focused on discussing the following case studies:

• Off-deck storefronts
• In-application commerce
• On-portal game discovery (WAP vs. App)
• Mobile widgets
• Multi-platform and use of social networks for discovery and distribution

I raised some issues and observations based on these various case studies, such as:

• Reach versus the right reach
• Browsing (text vs. multimedia, content-based vs. category-based, multi-modal)
• Downloads
• Heterogeneous systems (WAP billing, Java discovery)
• Previews
• Navigational paradigms
• Click rate & distance
• Pacifiers
• 2-second name test
• Trials (opt-in, opt-out)
• Relative price and price-discrimination
• Multi-platform, multi-player

Improving user experience … help is on its way

Despite the relatively pessimistic tone (with the exception of Nokia’s keynote), I concluded my presentation with some indicators that there are some positive initiatives going on within mobile that will improve user experience in general and discovery in particular. They are:

Standard vehicles for measurement

• Standard methods for measurement across deployments
• Maximizing based on outcomes (e.g., loyalty, transactions, usage) as opposed to outputs (e.g., page views, downloads) the consumer value proposition needs to fit the experience

Android and Apple effect

• Have started addressing usability from the “ground up” (OS and apps).
• Establishing the conditions for themselves - and others - to deliver a more compelling user experience

Resurgence of applications: Browsers +- Apps

• The level of integration and user access will enable developers to set a new bar for rich, interactive discovery applications and services that will surpass the browser.
• A much richer and wider range of discovery vehicles are emerging - beyond ODPs and widgets
• Yahoo! Go is an early indicator of the importance of offering consumers rich, interactive experience

Improved retailing

• Explicit (user rating, ranking, comparing)
• Implicit (browsing, purchasing, viewing and preference history)
• Personalized (’anticipatory’) and directed navigation (e.g. Alltel’s Celltop)

Maximizing consumer touch-points

• Marriage of social web with mobility (personal, local, always-on, every-present)
• Talking, texting, capturing, sending, listening, viewing

Carnival 112 is now up at Taptology. A great collection of mobile writing as usual.

In short, there weren’t any “earth shattering” announcements at this year’s 2008 Mobile World Congress (formerly 3GSM). This is consistent with what I had suggested when talking with Jason Ankeny at Fierce Mobile Content prior to the event.

However, we are seeing steady progress and pieces falling into place that will continue to sustain a thriving ecosystem centered around the mobile device. Mobile advertising, music, and TV are all making steady progress and are clearly “real” (i.e., showing early signs of growth and not simply existing in the existential sense of the word).

Of course, there was plenty of “buzz”…

Consolidation: beginning of the end OR being of the beginning

Corporate consolidation
It goes without saying that the Microsoft-Yahoo mating / stalking process was widely discussed. A notable announcement that also related to Microsoft was their $500M acquisition of Danger - the company started by Andy Rubin, who together with Rich Miner, co-founded Android.

We saw the coming-out of Movius (IP Unity meets Glenayre) which was akin to when we saw the successful launch of Motricity some years back at CTIA. Another content industry related announcement was the Mandalay acquisition of Twistbox.

Consolidation of operating systems
It appears that this is the beginning of the end of the highly-fragmented mobile operating system (OS) ecosystem. With Linux taking center stage at this year’s show, it is clear that Linux has a seat at the table going forward. The presence of both Google’s Android and the LiMo foundation was felt throughout the Congress. While Google wasn’t there front and center (e.g., big-booth or big signage), early demonstrations of Android could be found at a number of chip providers’ and handset providers’ booths. LiMo had more of an explicit presence and the demonstrations of LiMo systems were shown, arguably in a more mature form than the Android demos.

Although, it will take over 5 years for this OS consolidation to start to simplify, we will see rapid movement from over 30 operating systems down to a small group. Linux, Symbian and Windows will be around for the foreseeable future. I’d also add that Apple has clearly made a seat for themselves at the Smartphone table, but it is uncertain whether they can make an entry into the feature-phone world of operating systems.

Convergence and context

We are seeing a return of convergence. According to Steve Andrews, BT Group Chief of Mobility and Convergence, “2008 will officially be the year that convergence comes of age”. Whether or not it is co-incidental, this return of convergence (e.g., converged messaging) is happening at the same time the original convergence hype-sters are getting rebooted. Last year, I would have written off companies like Comverse and Openwave, but there is some interesting activity afoot. For example, the original team (Andre Dahan and John Bunyan) behind AT&T’s mMode and the original American Idol voting success is now at the helm of Comverse.

For Nokia, it is all about context. The president and CEO of Nokia, Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo, said that Nokia will “reshape the Internet” by enabling a context-aware Internet. In the same EE Times article, they suggest that Nokia believes they, and not Google, will deliver “operator-independent, cross-platform phones through new software and services.” My recent blog entry entitled “Of Trolls and Droids: on cross-species development and the evolution of mobile tools and platforms” dealt with this topic in more detail.

Content, content, content…

Although we didn’t explicitly hear people asserting that content is king, the positioning statements (e.g., Nokia’s emphasis on context being central) and the sponsored articles in the Mobile World Congress Dailies had a number of related declarations: context is king (Colibria), customer is king (Telecordia), conversation is king (Southwing), etc.

Music
The key areas of content that were discussed last year, music and video, are still center stage. In fact, Billboard noted this leading up to their Backstage event. In Billboard Magazine’s Feb 16 article “Global Mobile: GSMA Mobile World Congress Will Explore International Growth of New Technologies”, Juliana Koranteng noted that music is making solid progress with handset manufacturers releasing more and more music-capable handsets. She also commented on the steady number of wireless music initiatives announced throughout the year that keep music as a key area to watch, e.g., Apple’s iPhone, Omnifone’s Musicstation, Nokia’s investment in the space, Motorola’s purchase of Soundbuzz, , Microsoft acquisition of Musiwave from Openwave.

I can confirm this music trend from my vantage point at Nellymoser as we are powering AT&T’s VIP Access mobile music service and Virgin Mobile’s Headliner mobile music service.

Mobile TV
The content hall (Hall 7) was dominated by Mobile TV providers. We saw the appearance of film celebrities “stumping” for mobile TV and mobile media. Robert Redford spoke at the Billboard Backstage event and Isabella Rossellini was taping a live interview on one of the booths during the event.

While technology fragmentation has stinted growth in a number of the mobile content areas, it is particularly noticeable in Mobile TV. There are very few handsets that have access to overlay networks (e.g., DVB-H, MediaFLO, T-DMB) and furthermore, the content providers have to deal with different deployments of these technologies across different operators and devices.

Advertising
It is clear that many are looking towards mobile advertising to be the saving grace of flattening on-deck operator sales. As with music and TV, advertising is making progress.

Of particular interest at the show was Nokia’s announcement of their own global ad network. Nokia launched their “carrier grade media” which aspires to provide a single marketplace to simplify the buying process within mobile advertising. Also see the Nokia article in the show daily. There was also news that the largest GSMA’s operator members (Vodafone Group, Telefonica, O2 Europe, T-Mobile International, FT-Orange and 3) have formed a mobile advertising measurement working group.

Consumer experience

Even though the iPhone has not seen the take-up internationally that we’ve seen in the U.S. (e.g., the higher-priced Nokia N95 far outsells the iPhone in the U.K.), Apple has left their indelible mark on user experience. To be fair, this lack of traction is likely tied to the iPhone being an EDGE device - all bets are off when the 3G versions hit the market internationally. Regardless, there was a lot of discussion related to how much Internet usage the iPhone was driving in both the states and Europe.

To date, the move from 2.5G to 3G has been underwhelming but it is clear from the show that we are making strong progress towards faster networks (e.g., HSDPA, LTE, WiMax). Certainly faster networks and more capable devices will make better consumer experiences possible.

The concept of personalization and customization as related to consumer experience received steady buzz. For example, Ad Infuse discussed how the user experience gets customized and Openwave argued for distinguishing between ‘participatory’ and ‘anticipatory’ types of personalization. From what I can tell, this is just another way of talking about preference and recommendation.

Widgets could been seen on a number of booths throughout the show. They seem to be used as a proxy for user experience, e.g., rather than directly tackling core user experience and design issues, widgets are offered-up as a short-term solution to the problem. They are clearly becoming a necessary feature for both devices and content offerings and as of the show, Yahoo!, AOL and Microsoft have announced their commitment to open platforms for mobile widget development.

Conclusion

On a personal note, I’d say that moving from Cannes to Barcelona has changed the nature of the show. While I do not miss the taxi lines, I do miss having the social events and congress proximate to one another. Compared with CTIA, both operators and device manufacturers have a fairly strong presence and people come to the Mobile World Congress to do business.

In Part 1, I endeavored to (i) define the various approaches towards the “write once, run everywhere” dilemma, (ii) defined a “stack” as a vehicle for understanding the evolving landscape, and (iii) provided some comments on the recent developments related to Google, Nokia, Microsoft, Adobe and Sun. It can be found here: Of Trolls and Droids: on cross-species development and the evolution of mobile tools and platforms.

In this post (part 2) I will address the evolution and who (i.e., which categories) will likely survive as this plays out.

Setting the stage …

In the last post in this series, I referenced Darcy Wentworth Thompson’s On Growth and Form as a “framing” for the current approach towards the “write once, run everywhere” dilemma (i.e., structural evolution). For consistency, I thought I’d offer another framework for this post. George-Spencer Brown in his book Laws of Form developed a notation of two-element Boolean algebra. I have a proclivity for “sign engineering” (i.e., cognitive ergonomics) and notational systems and maintain a website - logic-alphabet.net - that is dedicated to such pursuits.

Nevertheless, the primary symbol from which Spencer-Brown built his system in “Laws of Form” is the “mark”. The mark denotes the act of making a distinction, i.e., between this and everything that is not this. Making distinctions (i.e., drawing boundaries) are a cornerstone of meaning and understanding.

So as not to further digress, the following post is a set of “distinctions” and taxonomies that I have made and found useful in understanding the evolution of mobile platforms. In full disclosure, since Nellymoser provides a mobile services platform, I have included us in the taxonomies.

A historical proxy - platform evolution

The following is a brief history of the Internet viewed through the evolution of application platforms. I have had the pleasure of spending time with Pete Brumme (co-founder of Silverstream amongst many other credentials). Together, we put together one way to look at the evolution of the Internet:

1993 to 1994 – Put a face out to the market … get a website launched

• Web Browsers / Servers – Mosaic, Netscape
• Authoring – Frontpage, HTML, CGI, Perl
• Production – Allaire (Cold Fusion), Macromedia (Flash), Microsoft (Windows Media), Real (RealMedia)

1995 to 1996 – The Dynamic Web; service different constituents differently; personalization

• Web Browsers / Servers – Netscape / NIS, Microsoft IE / IIS
• Authoring – Frontpage (Microsoft), HTML, CGI, Perl, Dreamwweaver
• Production – Allaire (Cold Fusion), Macromedia (Flash), Microsoft (Windows Media), Real (RealMedia)
• Content Management – Broadvision, Vignette
• Catalog / Portal Applications – ATG, Portal SW
• Personalization – Broadvision, Firefly
• Application Servers – netDynamics, Kiva, Bluestone, Silverstream, Web Logic

1997 to 1998 – Transaction Content; do business via the web

• Web Browsers / Servers – Netscape / NIS, Microsoft IE / IIS, Sun J2EE
• Authoring – Frontpage (Microsoft), HTML, CGI, Perl, Dreamwweaver
• Production – Allaire / Cold Fusion & Flash (Macromedia), Microsoft (Windows Media), Real (RealMedia)
• Content Management – Broadvision, Vignette, Filenet, Hummingbird / PC Docs
• Catalog / Portal Applications – ATG, Portal SW
• Personalization – Broadvision
• Application Servers – ATG, Sun / iPlanet, Kiva (Netscape), Bluestone (HP), Silverstream, Web Logic (BEA), IBM Websphere, Microsoft .NET

1998 to 2000: Not much happened

2000 to 2001 – Multi-device; any device, any time; N-Tier applications running on multiple devices

• Web Browsers / Servers – Netscape / NIS, Microsoft IE / IIS, Sun J2EE
• Authoring – Frontpage (Microsoft), Dreamwweaver
• Production – Allaire (Cold Fusion), Macromedia (Flash), Microsoft (Windows Media), Real (RealMedia)
• Content Management – Broadvision, Vignette, Filenet, Hummingbird / PC Docs
• Catalog / Portal Applications – ATG, Portal SW
• Personalization – Broadvision
• Application Servers – ATG, netDynamics (Sun), Kiva (Netscape), Bluestone, Silverstream, Web Logic (BEA), IBM Websphere

2001 to 2002 – Web services

• Web Browsers / Servers –Microsoft IE / IIS, Sun J2ME / SE / EE
• Authoring – Frontpage (Microsoft), Dreamwweaver
• Production – Macromedia (Flash), Microsoft (Windows Media), Real (RealMedia)
• Content Management – Broadvision, Vignette, Filenet, Hummingbird / PC Docs
• Catalog / Portal Applications – ATG, Portal SW
• Personalization – Broadvision
• Application Servers – ATG, Sun / iPlanet, Kiva (Netscape), Bluestone (HP), Silverstream (Novell), Web Logic (BEA), IBM Websphere, Microsoft .NET
• Web Services – Systinet, Cape Clear, Actional, Amberpoint

Reflecting upon this in hindsight, it is apparent that application platforms have become a necessary staple when deploying any type of rich, interactive web application. Early on, the companies providing the application servers created the applications themselves. Now, any company can create applications based on the application platforms using standard web tools and technologies.

Lens #1

For digital media services, it is useful to make a distinction between publishing and delivery infrastructure.

• Publishing Infrastructure – Maven, Atrium, Entriq, Narrowstep, eXtend Media, Brightcove, the Platform
• Delivery Infrastructure – Akamai, Internap, Limelight, Broadband TV, enSequence, Goldpocket, Cellcast

Companies such as Brightcove and thePlatform provide both publishing and delivery infrastructure.

• Service Infrastructure – Volantis, Netbiscuits, Motricity, Openwave, Qualcomm
• Applicaton Platforms – Mediabricks (Handmark), Qualcomm (uiONE), Nellymoser, Adobe
• Mobile Channel Enablers – SingleTouch, m365 (Sybase), mBlox, m-Qube (Verisign)
• Publishers and Aggregators – Limelife, Glu Mobile, JAMDAT (EA), Twistbox, Hands-On, Groove Mobile, Buongiorno, Real Networks

Companies such as Qualcomm, Nellymoser and Adobe provide both the service infrastructure and application platforms. Similarly, companies such as Orb Networks, MobiTV and Verisign provide both mobile service infrastructure and digital delivery infrastructure.

Thesis:

Operators and content providers (e.g., media companies and publishers) will and should run their business like they run their online businesses. They will continue to have a direct relationship (dialog) with their networked audience and utilize enabling platforms and services. We have seen this move start to take hold in mobile. There is a shift from relying upon indirect relationships with the customers (e.g., via publishers, aggregators and channel enablers) towards utilizing mobile service and application infrastructure and platforms.

Lens #2

Another way to look at this in terms of more specialized “platform” distinctions would be:

• WAP Content Management– Motricity, iLoop, Crisp Wireless, m-Qube (Verisign), Infospace (Motricity), Netbiscuits, Volantis, Verisign
• Rich Media (Audio / Video) Delivery – Real Networks, Quickplay, the Platform, MobiTV
• Billing, Delivery and Messaging Platforms – m-Qube (Verisign), Enpocket, Gold Pocket, m365, mBlox, Netsize, Qpass (Amdocs)
• Tools & Middleware – UI Evolution, Adobe, Qualcomm
• Mobile Services Platform - Nokia, Ericsson, Nellymoser

Thesis:

There will, and already has been, a general consolidation of platforms. For example, the Web / WAP content management, messaging / SMS platforms and even the rich media platforms will become part of a mobile services platform which itself is part of a larger service delivery platform. The network-aware applications and aspects of content delivery platforms will evolve and will likely become part of application platforms. There will continue to be tools and middleware but the paradigm will be driven by the common, standard web tools and technologies and not the current array of proprietary mobile tools used in ODPs, applications and WAP deployments.

Lens #3

A closer set of distinctions made within the mobile content enablement and delivery space looks something like the following (+/- a bunch of names):

• AJAX / Widgets – Bling, Widsets, Mojax, Opera, Mobidgets, Bluepulse
• Community – Intercasting, Gofresh, Upoc, Hands-on, Jumbuck, Perperoni, M7 (Motricity)
• D2C – Thumbplay, Blinko (Buongiorno), Blug Frog (just filed chapter 11), Flycell (Acotel), Zingy (just exited business, reverted back to Vindigo), Modtones (Faith), Playphone, Jamster (Jamba - Verisign, FOX), Ringster, Data, mVisible, Mixxer, QTones
• UGC – Yospace, Fun Mobility, Ontela, Mywaves, Oober, Shozu, AirG, Tribellis
• Video – Quickplay, MobiTV, Nexage, Packet Video, Real Networks, ROK, thePlatform, Transpera
• Music – Omniphone, Groove, Melodeo, Musiwave (Microsoft), mSpot, 3United (Verisign), Ericsson, WiderThan (Real Networks)
• On-Device Portals - Abaxia, MSX (Cellmania), UI Evolution (Square Enix), Action Engine, Refresh Mobile, Adobe, mPortal, Everypoint, u-Turn, inFusio, Streamezzo, Onskreen, Yahoo!
• Homescreens (sub-category of ODPs) – Surf Kitchen, Cibenix, Trigenix (uiONE / Qualcomm), MobiComp. Yahoo! Go, Nokia – CD, Handmark – PE
• Browsers / Mobile Internet Enablement – Opera, Novarra, InfoGin, Access Netfront, Openwave
• Advertising – Third Screen, Admob, Adinfuse, Rhythm, Enpocket, Millennial, Quattro, Aditon, Inside, Flytxt, 12snap, Adcell, TXT4, Miva, Aerodon, Greystripe, Sponge, Incentivated, MADS, Ringside, Google
• Content & Service Delivery Platforms – Goldpocket / Motricity, Comverse, Mobilitec (Lucent), Elatta (Qualcomm), UCP Morgan (Qpass / Amdocs), Cellmania, mQube (Verisign), wMode, Nellymoser, Ericsson

Thesis:

The mobile phone shares some key attributes with both PCs and cable / set-top boxes. For a certain class of phones (i.e., that have suitable screen realestate), the browser will be a core feature set along with things like text messaging and voice. We have seen the power of this with the iPhone. This evolution will be disruptive to a number of mobile companies that are currently taking advantage of temporary disparities that exist (and are rapidly disappearing), e.g., mobile advertising companies and browsers / mobile Internet enablement companies. With set-top boxes the user interface (remote control) is much closer to the mobile phone than a mobile phone is to a mouse and keyboard. As such, the uniqueness of the interface and hence the user experience. This will make the mobile phone, along with other core aspects of mobility (localized, personalized, always-on, every-present) more than just a channel.

Carnival 109 is now up at WAP Review. Another great collection of writing.

This will be the first part of several posts. In this first part, I will attempt to: (i) define the various approaches towards the “write once, run everywhere” dilemma that has been exacerbated in mobile due to the fragmentation of devices, networks and formats, (ii) categorize the various approaches (e.g., operating systems, application user interface frameworks, runtime environments, extensible applications), and (iii) attempt to articulate some of the end-goals for each of the approaches being undertaken.

In future posts, I will address the evolution and who will likely survive as this plays out. Time permitting, I would like to put this in context of the larger multi-platform picture that includes iTV and PC.

Setting the stage …

Darcy Wentworth Thompson in On Growth and Form developed an explanatory theory of evolution based on geometrical, affine transformations. Using basic geometric operations (e.g., translation, scaling, rotation), Thompson endeavored to show that various forms of animals could be explained by applying transformations to an original “source” form. He was offering a structuralist view of evolution, in contrast to survival of the fittest.

As we’ve seen in mobile over the past five years, extensive efforts have been undertaken by game publishers and content providers to create and then transform a piece of content so that it can flourish on a diverse set of mobile devices. The company that delivers platforms, tools and / or technologies that eliminate the problems surrounding fragmentation and compatibility (hence lowering the cost and friction to create and deploy mobile content) will reap great rewards.

The veritable stack

Content providers and application developers have a wide range of choices when deploying applications and content. Furthermore, when creating and deploying content they must select a particular layer within this stack on which to focus their development. For the purposes of this discussion, I will distinguish five layers:

1. Operating Systems and Mobile Platforms - Symbian, RIM, Windows Mobile, Palm, Java FX Mobile, Android, LiMo
2. Application UI Frameworks - Series 60, Qtopia, uiONE, GNOME / GMAE, KDE, GTK
3. Runtime environments - Java, JavaScript, Flash, BREW, and various Mobile Internet Browsers
4. Media Players - Windows Media Player, Quicktime, Real, Ogg Vorbis
5. Applications - Celltop, Yahoo! Go, Nokia WidSets, and various Mobile AJAX “players”

It is still unclear within mobile, which layers in this stack will become dominant and who will control what aspects of it.

As it stands today, with respect to the PC and the broadband Internet:

• Windows is the dominant operating system (along with a relatively small footprint of Linux and Mac OS installs)
• Internet browsers (Explorer, Firefox, Safari) provide the dominant runtime environments. And, after broadband hit a critical penetration rate, Flash became the dominant Rich Media Application runtime environment, with AJAX rapidly gaining traction.

With regards to Application UI Frameworks and Applications, the dominant application UI framework is clearly Windows itself (e.g., .NET, Winforms) and after that it would arguably be KDE and Motif / X11. And, there have not been dominant “applications” that have functioned as portals from which content providers can deploy widgets and other types of plug-in content as we’ve seen in mobile with on-device portals such as Yahoo! Go. On the desktop, the extensible applications often relate to content authoring and design, e.g., Photoshop and Pro Tools.

Scenarios and open seats yet to be filled

Beyond having “winners” at each layer in the stack within mobile, the question will be whether history will repeat itself within mobile. For example, two areas are of particular interest:

Winner take all – OS and key application stack
Will there be a “winner take all” scenario akin to Microsoft’s dominance in the PC era. I alluded to this in a recent interview with Peggy Anne Salz for msearchgroove. On the PC, Microsoft became the de facto standard and essentially the sole provider of the operating system and core applications. Given that the PC paradigm was the “desktop”, Microsoft owned the key tools used in desk jobs: word processor and spreadsheets. The question is, will someone - Microsoft again or perhaps Google - assume this role within mobile? Google is headed in this direction but unlike Microsoft, rather than starting from the platform and working upwards, they have started with “killer” apps and moved downwards. For mobile, these applications relate to communications and location: Gmail, Google Maps, Search.

Rich Internet Applications
Will there be a dominant rich Internet Application (RIA) platform in mobile. On the PC, it can be argued that Flash surpassed the UI frameworks (e.g., Qt) and other runtime environments (e.g., Java applets) as a vehicle for deploying cross-platform RIAs. In mobile, while Flash has gained some traction in Japan, it has not had traction in the U.S. that content providers have come to expect on the PC. This is mainly due to the mobile operators but also due to technical limitations of the handsets and software in mobile. Java and BREW have dominated the runtime environments and have been the primary vehicles for delivering RIAs. I have discussed the state of RIAs in the context of mobile here. Interestingly, there has not been a dominant browser to emerge and / or a consistent environment for utilizing JavaScript / AJAX. It is also not clear whether our access to networked media and the social web will need to be dominated by the browser as we saw with the PC. As the phone itself provides interfaces that can connect and enable multi-platform services (e.g., IM, multimedia messaging, image / video capture, search, mapping), it is not clear that a browser is needed to mediate and provide a layer of translation.

Fault lines and foundational shifts

Nokia recently announced they are buying Trolltech. It has been noted by Adam Leach from Ovum that “this is bad news for Symbian and even worse news for Motorola.” This conclusion is based on a number of possible scenarios. With regards to Symbian, Nokia could use Trolltech’s technology to replace the UI layer provided by S60 which would result in them having a common application UI environment running across Symbian and Linux. This, amongst other things could result in lessening Nokia’s dependence on Symbian. Motorola, however relies upon Trolltech technology for their UI framework on their Linux phones, which means that Motorola would be relying upon Nokia for a key aspect of their mobile Linux platform. Trolltech is also part of the LiMo Foundation, which aims to collectively develop a Linux-based platform for mobile phones. Whether this is meaningful (i.e., Nokia’s answer to Google’s Android) or not will likely not be clear until next year.

The emergence of Google’s Android has “upped the ante” on openness, while significantly adding to the viability of Linux becoming a key operating system in mobile. At the same time, in the process of making their solution open source, it has led to the balkanization of Java since Java bytecode will not run on Android, which Richard Monson-Haefel has speculated may be advantageous to Microsoft. To be fair, developers will be able to use the Java language when developing for Android, and it is really not such a big deal that the compiled executable and runtime environment are slightly different. And, this balkanization discussion does not take into account the fact that Android will support standard JVMs (e.g., Applix) that will run J2ME games and applications. Or of course, that various JVMs and JSR implementations themselves are partially responsible for the fragmentation and incompatibility within mobile.

In recognizing the problems with J2ME, Sun has begun their process of standardizing on J2SE. The various Java FX initiatives result from this effort and are providing a vehicle to tie together a number of packages and technologies that are used to create RIAs. The question is whether Java FX is more of a threat to Adobe’s Flash and Microsoft’s Silverlight in mobile or whether JavaFX Mobile is more of a threat to Google’s Android.

My brain hurts trying to grok the various activities going on in the industry, yet alone trying to take into account the impact of Yahoo! / Microsoft in mobile. I will continue this post over the next couple of weeks, with possible interruptions from Mobile World Congress and GDC Mobile. I want to thank Jason DeGeorge for bouncing ideas back and forth during this post. You can check out his band, “The Modifiers” here.