Many thanks to all the participants & speakers and to the TechOrange Global team for posting this article: Mobile Monday Panel Discusses NFC and Mobile Marketing

The MoMo event of 2nd May was a great success. It has been a while since we hosted our last event and here we are again, with new speakers and a very intriguing topic.

This time we had Polo Wu, director of interactive media from Starcom Media, who shared with us a preview of the upcoming mobile Coca Cola ad campaign in Taiwan and the NFC application of a Coca Cola campaign in Israel.

Polo Wu also emphasized on the importance of  ” Humanity oriented development”. From a media agency’s point of view, it is the service that counts behind whatever technology. Consumers will not mind if they are not using the highest or most complicated technology, the important thing is whether the technology fulfills a need of our daily life.

Roger Chen, V.P. of FarEasTone, also mentioned the mental issue of Taiwanese consumers towards NFC payment. Mobile phones are not given such a mission as payment tool, and and that the easier way to introduce NFC  is open(marketing or non secure) application.

Download slides here

Laurent, C.E.O. of Toro Development, has been working on NFC solutions for four years. He believes that NFC is a game changer technology for mobile marketing. It will establish a “Pull” communication between advertisers and consumers, rather than the most practices one-way Push.

There was also a demonstration zone of NFC and smart posters, using Toro’s software platform: akami

Demonstrating akami

More photos on Facebook, come and join us!

We would also like to hear your opinion on new topics, venue, information, sponsor…etc.

Contact us here, on Facebook or by email: admin@mobilemonday-taipei.com

Next event will be on 13th June, see you next time!

Steve Follmer consulted in Silicon Valley for many years, where he co-founded live365.com. He is currently between startups and analyzing opportunities in the mobile space. Steve holds a BSE degree from Princeton University.

“Get your head in the clouds : Are Netbooks quietly driving us toward Cloud Computing? ?”

Taipei MobileMonday 23, at Mary’s Bistro Cafe, featured a dynamic presentation from Sascha Pallenberg and Nicole Scott of Netbook News, on netbooks, the cloud, and their mutual synergy.

Sascha began with a fascinating review of the history and future of netbook hardware. Milestones included the first eeePC, which sold 3.5mm units. And more recently, ASUS has a netbook for kids, using Disney branding and distribution, with a 8.9″ display at $350. The Dell Latitude 2100 is also breaking ground at schools, its light, ruggedized, and straps right on to your little scholar. For teachers, Dell offers a 32 port docking station that recharges both the battery and the homework. Another exciting development is the eeePC T91, a “netvertible” that pirouettes into a tablet.

Netbooks are really hitting their stride, settling in on proper sized keyboards and screens, while retaining their svelte form factor. Users are waking up to the fact that they are fully capable for for our quotidian computing: email, surfing, IM, youtube, and office tasks. And they are breaking into vertical markets such as hospital and emergency workers, now that they are turning into tablets, complete with touch screens and multi-touch hardware and OS support.

Nicole does all her work for netbooknews using her netbook, with the exception of video editing. She argued that netbooks and smartphones are not exclusive, that there are valid reasons to carry both, and that the press is trumping up any “battle” between the two. Indeed carriers are now bundling free netbooks if you commit to their 3G data plan contract.

The 3G data network links smartphones and netbooks alike into the cloud. Sascha demonstrated for us a very advanced example: jolicloud, which lets you follow other users and the hot new apps, games, and services they are using (hosted on Jolicloud and sold through their app store). Jolicloud will soon operate purely in html, thus automatically syncing your service ecosystem across most every machine and platform. While also not fully released, Google’s Chrome OS will compete.

The cloud has technical advantages for many home, SMB, and even enterprise users. Less proven, but as Sascha discussed, equally vital, are business models leveraging this new paradigm. Carriers distributing free 3G netbooks with data plan subscriptions is one. Google’s targeted ad support is another; their Chrome OS speaks softly but carries a big stick. A more service oriented model such as e.g. $25/yr flickr pro acct. may also prove viable.

The cloud is the future, and the future is now. The client computer is too fat for most tasks; do most users really enjoy fretting about backups, disk crashes, viruses, and syncing? Tonight’s talk brought this vision into focus. The cloud enables a thinner desktop, which can take the form of a netbook, or a smart phone. Netbooks and the cloud are synergistic. Netbook unit volume in Taiwan now rivals conventional notebooks. Even meagre CPUs are adequate to launch linux and run a browser. CPU’s and operating systems are becoming commodities, and the Wintel model is under assault.

How are the big players affected by the netbook-cloud juggernaut? The obvious winner is Google, and the losers include Intel and Microsoft. Amazon has been selling cloud services for years. Taiwanese manufacturers invented netbooks, and they are profiting, though margins can be low. Apple both wins and loses; their notebook sales are being hurt by netbooks, they must release their own netbook tablet; their iPhones and iPods benefit from the cloud but their back end lags Google’s. And in the end, the biggest winner is the end user.

Resources

Netbook News http://www.netbooknews.com/ (Video, English)
Netbook News http://www.netbooknews.de/ (Text, German)
Mary’s Cafe http://www.maryscafe.com.tw/ Taipei’s Fine Dining Top Steak Pasta House

Steve Follmer consulted in Silicon Valley for many years, where he co-founded live365.com. He is currently between startups and analyzing opportunities in the mobile space. Steve holds a BSE degree from Princeton University.

iPhone Gold Rush – New Business Opportunity driven by iPhone.

Our 22nd event convened with a healthy crowd at Mary’s Bistro Cafe for some hearty Australian fare.

Other Steves (Jobs, Wozniak, Jurveston, McGarrett, Ballmer…) were unavailable, and I was pleased to accept an invitation from Scott Lo (Business Development Manager at Toro) to make the first presentation: How and why you can get a free iPhone, and other predictions about the future of the mobile industry. I’m creating a small startup involved in LBS, which will target the US market partly because of its size and also because I don’t want to compete with my colleagues here in Taipei. I’ve been analyzing the iPhone, and Scott asked me to share my findings with you.

Wikipedia has a decent table summarizing the three different generations of iPhones http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_models. The latest model, the 3GS can be pre-ordered from CHT and should be available in August, probably the 19th.

But I begin with two primary criticisms of the iPhone. First, it lacks support for background apps. How can you run a chat client without background apps? Well, they’ll fix it, but give them a year or two. I suspect this is related the second criticism: the battery barely lasts a day. Indeed in the 3GS, they had to underclock the CPU. Apple is rumored to have built a team of custom chip designers; I suspect this is to both cost reduce the iPhone and increase its battery life.

So, the iPhone is not perfect, but on balance its more than good enough. Its on time enough and its on budget enough. They’ve built a huge lead on Google’s Android phone. They’ve sold over 20 million and are well on their way to overtaking the 50 million Windows Mobile devices early next year.

Now, as important as the hardware and software, is the App Store. It really bulldozed the barriers facing small creative developers. I know some of these developers and they have been unhappy with the carriers. Well, lets just look at the record. The first cell phone call was made in April 1973. The iPhone was first sold in June of 2007. So the carriers have had decades, during which approved and released, I will guess, a few hundred applications. And in two years, Apple released 50,000 applications. Take a look at the App Store Wall from Apple’s developer conference last month.

So if the iPhone is so successful, why would they make it free? Apple is never eager to lower prices. Well, there are three reasons I’m predicting this. The first is funny math. What does the iPhone actually cost, to apple and to the consumer. Lets’ do some rough calculations using USA numbers. Everyone is going around talking about the $99, $199, $299 iPhone. But the reality is you also sign a 2 year contract at over $70 a month. What actually happens is Apple makes the iPhone for less than $200, and when you sign up with their carrier partner AT&T, you agree to pay AT&T nearly $2000 over those 2 years. And AT&T gives Apple $500 out of that revenue stream. So at the first level, Apple makes a device for $200 and sells it for $700. And these numbers are borne out, approximately, in Hong Kong, one of the countries where you can simply buy an iPhone for cash, with no contract, and there the new models cost HKD 5500 and 6500. Last year Apple made a big splash by reducing the price of the iPhone by $200… while at the same time increasing the cost of the 2 year contract by $10 a month. So they actually raised the cost, but many buyers don’t analyze the purchase and in packaging the cost in this way is clearly effective.

The second reason I think the iPhone will be free is that Apple is sometimes willing to sacrifice margins for long term gains, as we can tell from their Mac Mini. As we can estimate from a tear-down by iSuppli, the mac mini costs $376 to manufacture, but sells for a mere $599. http://www.isuppli.com/NewsDetail.aspx?ID=20432 By contrast, the iPhone 3GS costs $179 and bring in a revenue stream of $700 or up. http://www.isuppli.com/NewsDetail.aspx?ID=20398 I don’t have Apple’s exact spreadsheets but what is clear is that Apple is wiling to cut margins on a product if it serves their big-picture long-term strategy. The Mac Mini is strategic as a box that can slide in and convert a Windows user to a lifetime mac customer. The iPhone is strategic for capturing phone users and a long term revenue stream of carrier fees, and music, video, and software sales, and even Mac computer purchases.

I really have to give respect to Apple: first they kick the music industry in the ass, then they kick the mobile industry in the ass, and to top off these ass-kickings are strategically related. Breathtaking strategy at the highest level.

The third reason is competitive pressure. Google has said there will be 20 different Android handsets this year. You can bet there will be a lot of diversity of features and prices. And Google will harness the marketing budgets of those 6 or 8 manufacturers, and hundreds of carriers, all promoting their Android handsets. And I further suspect some carriers may be a bit unhappy with Apple’s new world order and would like to use Android handsets to try to hold Apple in check.

So for these three reasons: hidden charges, long term big picture flexibility, and competitive pressure, I predict Apple will make the iPhone free. Now they may charge an extra $10 a month. And it may be the old low end model at first. But its going to be free, for anyone who signs a contract for $80 a month. This is Apple’s “ace in the hole” against Google, possibly as early as September. Of course they’re not completely free, and its only a $99 price reduction, but as Apple teaches us day after day, the psychological impact is paramount.

What are the broader implications of this for the mobile industry? First, the handset is no longer a handset. At a deeper level, the phone is not just a phone, not just a handset. For Apple is a channel for selling software, music, videos and computers. For Google a handset is rather, a platform for delivering ads (which can be location based). Eric Schmidt has said its mobile is going to be bigger than internet. And for Toro, it is a platform for mobile marketing, a 24×7 channel to the customer.

Apple and Google want to carpet bomb the planet with hardware and software. They are not in the business of selling widgets. They are in the business of capturing users and their long term revenue streams. And I submit that Microsoft, Sony-Ericsson, RIM, Nokia, are tied to outmoded business models that can no longer compete with the new models, and they will be hemorrhaging market share.

A second, related implication is that smartphones are going to accelerate their push downmarket into feature phone territory. Set top boxes for cable TV in the USA are also expensive, but they find a way to give them away or rent them out cheaply, because they enable far larger revenue streams, with high NPVs. Throw in the competition between Google and Apple and I only see prices falling.

The big picture involves 2 billion handsets in the world, with 1 billion more being sold this year, primarily as replacements. Perhaps up to 20% of these phones can be defined as smartphones. Sales figures from Q408 showed OS distribution as Symbian with 47%, RIM with 19.5%, Windows Mobile with 12.4%, Apple with 10.7%, and Google hardly on the chart. However, it is clear that things are changing quickly. I expect smartphones to push down market to beyond 30% in the next several years. And I predict Apple and Google to shoot to the top of that league table, with Nokia getting hurt the worst. Nokia, RIM, and Microsoft are more or less simply selling widgets and despite having slapped up app stores their business models are not built for the 21st century. They’re not positioned to pump ads and music through the handset to the consumer like Apple and Google are, and they will soon find themselves replaced at the top of the league table. Google have up to 20 handsets running Android within about 6 months, and in response Apple will drop their prices $99 thus making their low end model nominally free. You can download the presentation here.

Resources:
http://mashable.com/2009/03/21/iphone-economy/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/06/just-how-much-money-can-free-iphone-apps-make-quite-a-bit/
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/06/11/why_apple_keeps_iphone_specifications_quiet.html
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2009/tc20090612_492771_page_2.htm
http://moconews.net/article/419-report-smartphones-to-be-29-percent-of-total-market-in-2014/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2IMHuZXfl0 AppStore
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE Ballmer

Having whet everyone’s appetite for the iPhone (and yes, I did just buy one), we greeted the presenters from Ayaris 9. This firm outsources iPhone development to their skilled team in India. Todd Enger learned to spec out products at Hewlett Packard; he and his team work with you to define your spec, and then they oversee its completion via their offshore team.

Included in their portfolio, they presented a GPS based coupon application, software to present medical videos, and even a karaoke application, among others. Further information is available via their website.

Steve Follmer consulted in Silicon Valley for many years, where he co-founded live365.com. He is currently between startups and analyzing opportunities in the mobile space. Steve holds a BSE degree from Princeton University.

21st MobileMonday Taipei Event Report
21st MobileMonday Taipei-Mobile Open Source

MoMo 21 proved enjoyably intimate, giving many of us a chance to catch up on friends from earlier meetings. As usual, the conversation was fueled by abundant Aussie fare and hospitality at Mary’s Bistro Cafe. The two presentations then centered on open platforms.

Mirko Linder, lead developer for Paroli at Openmoko, illuminated for us the Paroli platform. This is an entirely open hardware and software GSM handset platform, built on the Neo Freerunner phone, in which all chips and architecture are fully documented and all firmware can be re-flashed. The Frerunner runs a Linux Kernel, and offers wifi, gsm, bluetooth, accelerometers, and touchscreen. OM2009 is Openmoko’s application platform running on top of this. The cherry on top, Paroli, is a python daemon which enables users to integrate and share data and control among most phone software with the ease of a scripted language. In a way, the entire project is a paragon of the open source philosophy, of generating new ideas and a common wealth, through sharing and through enabling users to program and rapidly prototype. An exciting project to which we wish the greatest success. For more information, check out Mirko’s slide show and Paroli.

Next up, Nicolas Sauvage, Asia General Manager for Open-Plug explained the use of open source on feature phones. Open-Plug is used by the majority of Taiwan’s OEMs and ODMs, who use their ELIPS development platform to dramatically reduce both the time and cost of creating handset software. Instead of creating a monolithic statically linked executable for the handset, the Open-Plug system enables the software subsystem to be built from components that are dynamically added. And indeed, these components can be open source. You can find his presentation here.

This raises the interesting subject of smart phones pushing downmarket into feature phone territory. Price will certainly remain the primary driver on any spreadsheet, but I believe sales are subject to additional dimensions. As a point of reference, iSuppli has estimated that the iPhone has about $200 in material cost, and as we know it retails for about $600. Indeed these numbers simply out of reach in many markets. But for the consumer, this hard cost is masked by bundling the phone into a 2-year contract. For the carriers, the handset is more than that, it is the vehicle through with voice, data, and SMS plans are delivered. For Apple it is a music delivery vehicle, and for Google is is an ad delivery vehicle. Given these powerful forces, it seems nobody will let the handset be “just a phone” and that consumers will have to search harder and harder for any pure phone handset. In sum, in addition to wagering on the win, place, and show among smart phone players, we can also watch the smart phone vs. feature phone boxing match. I don’t have any hard numbers at hand, but Infonetics predicts 1.1 billion handsets sold in 2009, and double-digit growth for smartphones for the next 5 years, with dollar (though not unit) volume exceeding feature phones by 2013.

The evening concluded with a drawing, with Makato Chiu from Pixostyle giving away 20 Golla brand cell phone bags.

Sponsored By Pixostyle

>Steve Follmer consulted in Silicon Valley for many years, where he co-founded live365.com. He is currently between startups and analyzing opportunities in the mobile space. Steve holds a BSE degree from Princeton University.

20th MobileMonday Taipei Event Report
20th MobileMonday Taipei – Windows Shopping: the Future of Windows Market Place for Mobile

MoMo 20 was held April 20, 2009, at Mary’s Bistro in downtown Taipei, where we gobbled down Australian pizza and three presentations.

FFirst off was Vincent Chiang of Microsoft Taiwan, presenting their .NET Micro Framework. In a word, it turns feature phones into smart phones. The framework is already in use on devices such as Garmin navigation devices and Comcast set top boxes; the version for cell handsets will launch later this year. Nicolas Sauvage and Open-Plug are assisting local manufacturers with integration. The platform is fully elaborated here.

Next, Kai Su of iMobile Mind discussed their experience developing for the Windows Mobile platform. They have extensive worldwide expertise generating custom turnkey solutions for industries including field service, healthcare, hospitality, real estate etc. Industry data shows double digit annual growth across numerous industries enjoying extensive deployments of handset and PDA “Enterprise Mobility Solutions”. Check out their powerpoint.

Finally, Johnson Huang, a Microsoft MVP at Delta Electronics, shared his positive experiences developing for Microsoft. Their “Windows Marketplace for Mobile” boasts 20,000 applications, with developers cut in for 70% of revenues, as seems standard. In particular, Johnson explained how VUI (Voice User Interfaces) are particularly suitable for handset apps. The presentation can be downloaded here.

Over the last 3 sessions, we’ve seen what Apple, Google, and Microsoft are bringing to the mobile world. Revolutionary not just on technical merits, they also level the playing field for consumer and developer alike, by bringing the carriers to heel, and through a veritable mall of app stores. With handsets being upgraded on an annual basis in many countries, what will the league table look like a year from now? Microsoft and RIM have strong established user bases, but Apple has the inside track, and nobody is counting Google out. We live in interesting times.