Archive of TheNextWeb.org
Written on December 21, 2008 – 7:25 pm
Peter Evers, Next Web Mobile editor
Call it the beginning of a new era, or just another iPhone app. In the infamous area of mobile tv, one of the big promises of the mobile phone that doesn’t really seems to take off, Livestation comes with the first mobile tv app for the iPhone. The UK based company runs in closed beta during the festive period and tries to gain as much learnings from a small userbase that is testing the service in the coming days. Livestation already runs a TV app for PC/MAC in beta, and now they have managed to bring the same technology to the iPhone.
Who needs DVB-H anyway?
Being one of the lucky ones to test the Livestation app first I must say I had a real ‘wow’ experience when I opened the app first. Even on a 3G connection the app offers a seamless TV watching experience. Livestation really shows that watching mobile TV through an internet stream doesn’t have to be lagged and pixely and that, with mobile connections becoming faster and faster, there’s no real sense in building expensive DVB-H chips in phones anymore. And even from people owning Nokia’s DVB-H equipped N96, all I hear is complaints about the tv connection being too slow or not even working.
Russia Today and France 24!?
However, the available channels on Livestation are not the most appealing ones. Obscure titles like Euronews, Russia Today and France 24 aren’t my favourites to watch. But I have to say that watching BBC World News, ITN and Bloomberg Television can be a quite relaxing way to gain motivation for that decisive step out of the bed every morning. And who doesn’t want to watch astronauts working on their special space projects on NASA TV?
I hope you like that post!
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Written on November 13, 2008 – 2:24 am
Peter Evers, Next Web Mobile editor
For this story I’m taking you back to an age long long ago, before the release of the Samsung Omnia, Blackberry Bold, T-Mobile G1 and iPhone 3G, even before the release of the Nokia N95 or the iPod Touch. Let me take you back to August 2006…
Philosophizing about a school project
Around this time students Egbert Veenstra, Sytse-Jan Kooistra and Sam Baas were philosophizing about a new school project they had to work on. And as they were having a drink and a laugh in the summer sun they came up with the perfect idea for their project. They realized that the phone as we knew it back in 2006 could be so much more and wanted to develop a new revolutionary phone. Well, develop…they obviously did not have the resources to actually build a new phone, but they were armed with a much bigger weapon: their creative minds. And as they put their minds to work they developed a concept of the ultimate new phone.
The ultimate new phone
It had a touch screen that didn’t require a stylus, service-side processor power (whatever that is, but sounds really cool) and some ingenious ways for finger-touch text input. So they developed a concept phone by using some 3D designing software they used for their study and by making a picture of a table and a screenshot of their own phone’s screen they pulled together a nice mock-up. Now they only had to come up with a name and given the total switch their phone would make in people’s perception of a mobile phone they decided that it had to be named Switch. But while they were working on their project, they were also thinking of sending their concept phone to some leading tech blogs to see how hard it was to fool those guys. They only needed to associate their concept with a big company. Apple? Google? Microsoft?
Cupertino, California
Around the same time, but in a slightly different setting, Apple HQ in Cupertino, California, the research and development department of Apple was working on a new phone as well. A revolutionary phone. A phone that would totally change the way people thought about phones. Nearly six months later they finished it, not very surprising it was called the iPhone and CEO Steve Jobs was able to startle the world with a whole new concept. The world of mobile would never be the same again.
Get attention
Around this time, January 2007, the three Dutch students were watching Steve Jobs’ keynote as well. And as you can imagine they were stunned when they saw a real phone that was much like the idea they had been working on for the last six months. They were dedicated to get at least a bit of the attention and as soon as the rumors about Google creating a phone came around, they knew exactly what to do: leak their Google Switch to the biggest gadget blogs by sending some fake blurry pictures.
The hype they wanted
Now take a moment to Google “google switch”, do both an image search and a text search and have a glance at the results. The guys got what they wanted and created a hype in which all big gadget blogs were involved.
Ideas are open knowledge
But what’s the main takeaway of this story? It actually reminded me of a passage from my bible. My bible is written by marketing god Paul Arden, who was creative director at Saatchi&Saatchi and passed away earlier this year. His book is titled: It’s not how good you are, it’s how good you want to be. Allow me to cite a passage which is completely in line with this story:
“Ideas are open knowledge. Don’t claim ownership. They’re not your ideas anyway, they’re someone else’s. They are out there floating by on the ether. You just have to put yourself in a frame of mind to pick them up.”
Work ethic
I truly believe that finding an idea is by far the easiest part of innovation. Because 99% of every idea is about stuff that is already out there. If your idea isn’t based on a lot of stuff that’s already around, nobody would understand you. So if you look at this story from that perspective, it is not very surprising that three young Dutch guys and Apple had the same ideas around the same time. It’s all about what comes after the idea, about having the will, the believe, the drive, the energy, to make your idea happen. And if you have those qualities, and if you’re lucky, you might just become very very rich.
You can read the full story from the students themselves here.
Written on October 17, 2008 – 11:38 am
Peter Evers, Next Web Mobile editor
Operator portals were doomed to disappear when the walled gardens opened up about two years ago, but after the rise of the smartphone and introduction of unlimited data packages they are doing better than ever. Still, most of the mobile internet use takes place within the borders of these portals. The predicted growth of off portal inventory goes much slower than predicted.
Smart mobile start-ups
However, it must be noted that a couple of smart mobile startups did a great job filling up this new space. Mobile-only communities like Itsmy.com, myGamma, and Flirtomatic are growing rapidly these days. Their big advantage is the painful absence of the bigger brands on mobile Internet, which results in most of the off portal advertising budget ending up in their pockets.
No mobile versions
On the other hand, this is exactly what’s withholding mobile media buyers to spend more budget off portal. Most established websites do simply not offer a mobile version of their successful online product. This is why media buyers who represent big consumer brands don’t want to spend budget off portal. Brands attract brands. Simple as that.
Be ahead of the pack
So why are these online brands still not available on the mobile Internet? I guess they’re simply waiting when the time is right, but they should be ahead of the pack because they are the main drivers behind the availability of premium off portal inventory. Their motivation might be that it’s still hard to drive traffic to a mobile site. While using their phone, people are often too lazy to enter a URL.
So all the traffic derives from really motivated people that are dedicated to find a certain mobile site and Google Mobile (which seldom directs you to a mobile site). Well, what about directing people to your mobile site from your online site? Offering an on-the-go version of your brand? Enhancing your site with an extra service because you like your users so much and want to offer them your content whenever they want to?
Best place to start? What about right here? That picture is how our mobile presence looks like at the moment, as the brand new mobile editor this is definitely the first challenge ahead of me. We’re going mobile! Keep you posted.
Written on October 15, 2008 – 12:05 am
Peter Evers, Next Web Mobile editor
Today is Blog Action Day. Today, many blogs all over the world will bring news, ideas and opinions to the world regarding one subject: poverty. Being a mobile marketeer, it seems like a weird idea to write about poverty since mobile phones must be the last thing on the minds of people struggling to stay alive, right?
You couldn’t have been more wrong. The most recent Mobile Metrics report by AdMob - AdWords for mobile - shows that AdMob serves about 35% of all their impressions in underdeveloped countries. Not impressed? Fishermen in India use their mobile to check the day rates of different sorts of fish to determine what fish they should aim for. In South Africa, people have completely skipped the era of broadband and use the internet for the first time on their handsets. Although food en fresh water aren’t, mobile is a true global phenomenon. So, how can we use mobile phones to decrease poverty? I have an idea.
Recently I became a Child Sponsor at World Vision, a charity organization that improves children’s lifes all over the world. Looking at the picture of my newly sponsored child, Scola Jalale (in Malawi that’s a real common name), a mobile idea popped up.
A couple of months ago I wrote an article about mobile charity payments. In this article I argue that since the mobile payment system is already in use in Africa, we could use it to send money directly to African people we care about. And now I’m Scola’s sponsor I had to think of it again. Scola is eight years old and currently at school, how fantastic would it be if we could text each other? This project would seemlessly fit in her school program and the money I would send her would benefit her and her community. The system should be pretty easy to set up, since the mobile payment system has already proven to be a success in Kenia. The costs of the text messages could be billed to the sponsor through a reversed billing system, which is also used in tv show votes. By selecting a certain number the sponsor can chose to send a message with either 0.50, 1, 1.50 or 2 dollars/euros/pounds. And given that World Vision probably wants to stay in control of the process, they could facilitate the cash points and take a share of the gift to invest in the whole community. If I were fifty and had a couple of millions in the bank, I’d start developing tomorrow.
Written on September 6, 2008 – 9:04 am
Peter Evers, Next Web Mobile editor
This is a guest post by mobile marketeer Peter Evers based in London who frequently blogs about mobile on peterevers.net.
After working in mobile marketing for quite some time, recently a friend challenged me to think of a business plan for his mobile startup MaptheGap. His plan was either to sell his company or making money by selling pro accounts.
I think choosing the sell out strategy is one of the most common mistakes startups make. They hope to make their service so appealing that a big player has no choice but to acquire them. What if that’s not happening? Well, then you run out of money sooner or later, go bankrupt, and your startup has stayed a startup forever. In these times of economic slowdown it seems a pretty risky strategy.
Another failing strategy is to start with a pro account right away. So you’re launching a new service, but you prevent your very first users from using the full functionalities of your service? Since the first phase is mostly about convincing people to actually use your service, this will lead more to frustrated users than to money in the bank. Besides, a lot has been written and said about everything becoming free anyway.
So, what would be viable business plans to make your mobile service profitable? I have summed up three business strategies, which do not exclude each other, to earn money with a mobile service.
- Advertising - Very obvious, but still a lot of startups think of it as the a-word. They are too afraid to upset their userbase. But aren’t we all still watching tv and reading newspapers? Advertising doesn’t bother people as long as it doesn’t interfere with the usability of your service. Besides, the techniques to target ads on specific characteristics of your users and their location are pretty advanced, so your users might even think of the ads as helpful.
- White labeling - A white label product or service is a product or service produced by one company and rebranded by another company to make it appear as if it’s theirs. In terms of a mobile service, it means that you license the technique of your service to another company for a fixed fee, so they can rebrand your service as their own at an event (fair, release party etc.), offer it to their customers or on a bunch of other occasions.
- Licensing - By far the best way to grow a big audience, which obviously boosts your advertising sales, is to get your service preloaded on people’s phones. So your service is on their phone before they have even thought about buying it. This is hard, you’ll need to speak to phone manufacturers and they’ll need approval of the operators who sell their phones, but will certainly mean a big breakthrough for your service. Since the rise of the mobile Internet most manufacturers also have a ‘Downloads’ application preloaded, but the downloadable content within this application isn’t preloaded but can be changed at any moment. If you manage to get your service in there, every user of a phone of that particular manufacturer, looks at your service as soon as they want to download something. One of the most successful examples of this is the App Store on all the iPhones. The other side is that the operator or manufacturer will demand a share of your advertising revenue, but it’ll be worth every penny.
Although according to Michael Arrington revenue models aren’t really web2.0, I’d advise you to be ahead of the pack and think of a way to monetize your service instead of waiting for demanding investors (like Mike himself, what a coincidence) to come along buying shares you could have sold ten times higher.
Written on February 10, 2008 – 9:36 pm
Peter Evers, Next Web Mobile editor
Last week I decided to explore ZYB.com. The guys from this service say it brings mobile data to life. Sounds pretty exciting to me. So I started to bring my own mobile data to life. And before I knew it, my data was leading a life on its own. I’ll tell you what happened.
I’ve uploaded all my phone numbers to ZYB in order to store my phone numbers online and enrich them with all kinds of information about people I have in my phone book. But when I checked if there were any other ZYB users in my phone book, I discovered that I was the only one. At this point ZYB had lost all it’s relevance to me. But quitting ZYB without really knowing what it is didn’t seem right, so I decided to invite a few friends by sending them an automatically generated ZYB-invite text message. This is where it all went wrong. Somehow I hit the ‘invite all’-button which was positioned one millimeter from the ‘invite’-button. At that point many phones around me in the office started ringing. Yes, this meant that I had sent a text message to all the 500 people in my phone book. I’ve spent the rest of the day on answering calls and text messages from disheartened old friends, business partners and colleagues who asked what the hell ZYB was. I couldn’t tell them, I just apologized.
So my first experience with ZYB was pretty bad. But a closer look on ZYB doesn’t quite change my opinion. ZYB has very few users, no one in my phone book uses it and after inviting all of them, still none of them are using it. Many users seem to be Danish, which gives me the impression that most users are friends of the Danish developers of ZYB. The ZYB community looks pretty boring too, probably because of the lack of users.
The biggest advantage of ZYB would be the possibility to store your phone numbers online, safely and secured (but don’t hit the wrong button). The funny thing is that a couple of days later I updated my Nokia N95 8GB and accidentally lost all my phone numbers. All my numbers were still in ZYB, so I could just download them back to my phone. But because of the automatic synchronization with both my office PC and my Mac at home I got all my numbers back before I could even think of ZYB. So what does ZYB really add?
Written on January 5, 2008 – 12:10 pm
Peter Evers, Next Web Mobile editor
Mobile barcoding isn’t very new anymore. You’ve probably seen the QR-codes and Shotcodes by now. 2D barcodes that aren’t really advanced, they redirect you to a website or show a short text when photographed by a mobile phone camera. Recently Tom Gibara added a new chapter to the mobile barcoding book. He developed the Moseycode. A Moseycode holds much more information than any other mobile barcode. When photographing a Moseycode, your mobile telephone will reveal information like 3D pictures, locations and even allows you to add your own media to the repository/portal you’ve found. The content of the code isn’t static. The Moseycode barcoding system is specifically developed for Android. So we have to wait for a little while to put the Moseycode to the test. But did you already actually use a QR-code? A Shotcode? When you did, you probably were in Japan. Because commercial use of mobile barcoding in Europe or the US is still very rare.
With this last thing in mind, it is remarkable how many mobile barcode systems were developed in the last years. Let me give you a short outline. (more…)
Written on December 24, 2007 – 9:45 am
Peter Evers, Next Web Mobile editor
As you might expect, almost every technological development starts in developed countries. Almost. Because one of the latest developments, mobile micropayments, is unheard of in the United States and Europe but is already up and running in developing countries like Kenia and India.
In Kenia, for instance, the mobile micropayment service M-Pesa launched in February. M-Pesa allows workers in the capital of Nairobi to transfer small amounts of money to their rural relatives, using their mobile phone. It’s a simple service based on text messaging, the only things needed are a PIN and a national ID number for identification. The receiver can collect the money at any small shop or petrol station nearby that acts as an M-Pesa agent (there are already hundreds around the country). A home address or a banking account is not necessary, which is probably the biggest advantage, because many Africans lack both.
Evidently, that is why mobile micropayments aren’t very popular in the US or Europe. Americans and Europeans both have home addresses and banking accounts, on top of that there is a large concentration of banks in the US and EU-countries, which makes micropayments somewhat redundant. Tim Jones, principal of innovation consultancy Innovaro in London says: “It’s unlikely that such a service would have taken off in Europe or the United States, where banking alternatives are already in place. But combine a rarity of banking services with the growing prevalence of cell phones and, much to the surprise of those focused only on developed markets, Africa is leap-frogging ahead of Europe in the area of micropayments”.
“Africa is leap-frogging ahead of Europe in the area of micropayments”
Meanwhile, the worldwide GSM Association and Mastercard partnered to develop an identical service in India. And Western Union, the dominant player in global remittances, is developing a micropayment service for Latin Americans to transfer money to their home country relatives. Mobile micropayment services skip banking services, which makes money transferring much more accessible for people in developing countries with few banking facilities. It makes banking easier, it stimulates low-income people to manage their funds in a more efficient way without having to open a banking account. Micropaying is helping them to put a safety net under their family, it gives them the ability to build a stable income. Eventually they might be able to start their own business and even grow their income. Mobile micropayment services overcome the problem of few banking facilities and gives underdeveloped countries the possibility to strengthen their economy.
An interesting question is: When will charity organizations jump in? Wouldn’t it be great if we could send money through our mobile phone directly to our fellow African entrepreneurs that just have the disadvantage of operating in a tough economy? We could personally stimulate them to succeed! Not just by sending money, we could call them, text them like we do with any other friend or colleague. What could be more satisfying than personally helping someone in need, without an organization or person in between? It’s the ultimate altruistic dream.
This is a guest post by mobile marketeer Peter Evers
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