Versatile Amphibian

Away from the major vendors and their glitzy corporate stands, Mobile World Congress is a great place to meet young and up-coming businesses with a mobile flavour. This brief post showcases the ones that most caught my eye. blippAR (based in Holborn Circus, London) provide an augmented reality advertising platform that overlays rich content onto print content. The technology works really seamlessly from an iOS or Android application and has already been used by major brands like Cadbury, Tesco and Omega, but I reckon what will really make it take-off is native integration into the iOS and Android operating systems. That’s in the pipeline. Siine (also London based) were marketing an improved keyboard experience for Android. This sounds like a small thing, but Siine’s combination of quick templates for commonly used words and general ease of use marks it out as one to watch. I also loved the idea of icons for brands embedded in the keyboard so that “Meet me at Costa at 1600” can be typ...

Nokia announced three new Asha handsets yesterday to great fanfare, in addition to a new, lower priced Lumia. I played with all four devices at Mobile World Congress, a process that got me thinking about Nokia’s current range. My conclusion is that, despite being great products and well engineered, they’re not addressing a serious problem with Nokia’s range – the lack of credible smartphones in the crucial $150/ €100 price bracket. This part of the market is important as it is outside of the typical average selling price of contract smartphones and therefore not impacted by the distortion of operator subsidy that so damages the success of high end Lumias by making them effectively equivalent in price to the unassailable iPhone. For those who haven’t encountered it, Asha is a low-end device based on Nokia’s venerable Symbian 40 “smart-ish” platform that is aimed at feature phone users upgrading to a more feature rich device, either in emerging or developed markets. All three of the new ...

I must admit that I’m a bit of a Sony-phile and still reminisce about the glory days of mini-disc and Trinitron. They’ve fallen on hard times recently, which made my visit to their MWC stand all the more encouraging. I liked 3 products in particular, ranging in price from EUR15 to EUR300. NFC tags At the lower end of that spectrum were a set of four NFC tags. These are delightfully simple one inch diameter circles that you can hang off a rear view mirror or leave on a table. When you place your NFC enabled phone on them, it enables a user-defined programme of settings. For example, it could go silent and set an alarm when you put it on your bedside table, or enable Bluetooth, navigation and music when you get in the car. Simple in concept and an elegant piece of design. Smart watch At EUR129 was the LiveView Android watch, which links up to your smartphone via Bluetooth and displays four applications at a time. Flicking through menus was beautifully smooth and there was enough screen r...

Following the recent announcements that Huawei, ZTE, Fujitsu and Panasonic would (re)enter the European mobile handset markets, I spent Day 1 of the Mobile World Congress focussing on high end smartphones. My objective was to decide whether these newcomers could genuinely challenge today’s hegemony of Apple, Samsung and HTC. The answer was a clear “yes”, but the most obvious challenger was more of a surprise. I’ll give you a hint – they weren’t Japanese... Symbian is not dead, just stunned Before I could get started on this, however, there was the small matter of an 830am Nokia keynote to get out of the way. You may recall that this time last year, Stephen Elop announced his firm’s “exclusive” partnership with Microsoft. This year, despite being promised “significant industry news”, Nokia delivered more of the same. At the high end there were two new devices, the anticipated Lumia 900 and a new camera phone – the N808, featuring a 41 megapixel camera... no, that’s not a typo, it really...

I’m firmly of the belief that participants in the TMT industry need to read widely in order to understand the present and future dynamics of the market. To that end, this post is a collection of the articles that have caught my eye. This week – Google makes me want to shine lasers in my eyes, Nokia’s brim is full of Asha, differences in male and female social network use, planes and automobiles go robot and I get nostalgic about the number two. Mobile technology I’ve been predicting this for years – heads up display is the next step in mobile technology interfaces. Even without a non-manual way of interfacing with the device, there’s plenty of data that can be dragged off the Internet already and overlaid onto the real world automatically. I just hope they make a version for those of us who already wear spectacles... If not then I’ll have to get ‘em lasered... http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/21/google-to-sell-terminator-style-glasses-by-years-end/ But before we get to mass adopti...

I’m firmly of the belief that participants in the TMT industry need to read widely in order to understand the present and future dynamics of the market. To that end, this post is a collection of the articles that have caught my eye. This week – social video hype turns to dollars, cyber crimes’ billions revealed; Apple, Google set about Microsoft; and 1955’s view of space Digital media Online video services and technologies that underpin them were all the rage before the downturn. It’s almost as if the venture community has come into a bit of capital and remembered where they left off. How services like this get funded, I don’t know. Perhaps worth asking the YouView partners. http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2012/02/barry-dillers-ott-service-aereo-is-dead-on-arrival.html I’ve always said that QR codes are an intermediate step towards more advanced AR technologies. This interesting technology from Brazil suggests why their days are already numbered. http://thenext...

I’m firmly of the belief that participants in the TMT industry need to read widely in order to understand the present and future dynamics of the market. To that end, this post is a collection of the articles that have caught my eye. This week – $50k the price of ideology, Airforce, NOAA dispense with RIM, Amazon beats up HMV and forces Indian retail consolidation while Netflix “destroys” TV New business models Fascinating – ideological hacking has replaced criminal hacking as #1. Also worth noting the rise of attacks originating in Asia. No corporate can overlook this threat to their externally facing web properties. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/08/ddos_attack_trends/ Although extorting $50k doesn’t seem particularly ideological. Slightly amusing that the torrent got malware infected within hours of being uploaded. No honour amongst thieves! http://www.theregister.co.uk/2012/02/07/pcanywhere_shenanigans/ Bye bye RIM. Even government doesn’t think security is enough of a differe...

As Ory Okolloh recently put it: if mobile phones are the computers for Africa, why do all the journalists who write about them do so on laptops? I wholeheartedly agree. The smartphone is a great handheld entertainment and communication platform, but it isn’t a good device for the creation of much more than a drunken text message. No, the truth is that that laptop computer - or some variation of it - is almost certainly the utility computing platform for a connected Africa. It can do pretty much everything a smartphone, TV, desktop or tablet can do, yet costs less than any one of those devices. It isn't perfect, but it is the best utility computing device available today. In my view the device challenge is not to identify the computer for Africa, but to create a supply chain that reduces unit costs to a point that is affordable to the middle class (in the first instance). So if the computer for Africa probably isn't a phone, why should it'd connection be designed for a ph...

I’m firmly of the belief that participants in the TMT industry need to read widely in order to understand the present and future dynamics of the market. To that end, this post is a collection of the articles that have caught my eye. This week – UK broadband speeds jump 22%, Facebook more dependent on pigs than first thought and lacks the cash for mobile, Amazon embarks on an Indian adventure while Stripe guns for Paypal and the FBI hacks Skype New business models Sigh – more patent news and what is clearly the opening salvo from Google’s new Motorola patent portfolio weapon. Apple, it seems, are a harder target than Samsung! (see second link) http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16871075 http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-16877438 For all the gnashing of teeth over the years about the poor quality of UK broadband, a good bit of market-based competition between BT, Virgin and Sky has led to speeds being on the rise. Of course, consumers tend to be able to find something to do with tha...

$1,418Mn of investment in African telecoms infrastructure was announced in January, down very marginally on the same month last year, but up 15% on 2010. As ever, cellular network upgrades dominated proceedings, with large capex commitments being made in Nigeria, Tanzania and Liberia. Staying with mobile for a moment, the launch of 3G networks continue to make headlines, with HSPA being switched on by operators in Zambia and Kenya. There also seems to be light at the end of the tunnel for Vodacom in DRC, where resolution to their dispute with their local partner appears close, potentially unlocking nearly $500Mn of much needed investment into Africa's 3rd most populous country. Also worth mentioning is the continued success of alternative wireless broadband access network solutions, such as wifi (Burkino Faso), WiMAX (Namibia), satellite broadband (South Africa) and TD-LTE (Nigeria). These are generally quite small investments, but are meaningful in that they extend data provision ...