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Posts Tagged ‘Android’

Goodbye PC, hello smartphone

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, tagged , , , , , , , on February 22, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Here is a good commentary from San Jose Mercury News around Microsoft´s new mobile launch.

“The era of the PC’s dominance is officially over. We have crossed over into the age of mobile computing.

This transition has been building momentum for a while. Some might argue that the iPhone was the dawn of this era. Others might say it was really the rise of the BlackBerry. Or maybe even Android, Google’s mobile operating system. Good cases could be made that any one of these marked the start of the mobile era.

But Microsoft’s announcement of its new mobile-phone platform this week signals a clear end to the old PC era and an epic shift in computing.

But why Microsoft? The reason has little to do with the details of Windows Phone Series 7 that the company unveiled at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Spain, on Monday.

I haven’t touched it, and it won’t be available to consumers for months.

This isn’t about specific features or its design, or whether it will help Microsoft regain lost momentum in the mobile market. Rather, what struck me is how Microsoft did this.

For years, the company took its Windows operating system and created a miniature version for smartphones. While initially good enough for many users, this was the approach of a titan aimed at protecting its turf, rather than a nimble tech firm trying to innovate. It was safe, which is often the enemy of creativity.

Along the way, Windows Mobile was surpassed by the iPhone, Android and Palm’s webOS in terms of elegance and features.

Rapidly losing market share in this critical space to those competitors, Microsoft eventually decided it was time to reboot. For the new version, Microsoft scrapped the Windows-based version completely. The need to think mobile first was so critical, the company was willing to risk undermining its biggest franchise, Windows, which brings in billions of dollars a year.

Rather than let that fear of change paralyze it, Microsoft built the new operating system for smartphones from the ground up. And it did it for the right reason:

“The phone is not a PC,” said Joe Belfiore, Microsoft’s corporate vice president of Windows phone program management as he demonstrated the new platform.

“Well, duh,” you say. That sounds obvious. It’s not.

The success of the Windows operating system bred complacency. The temptation is to make sure everything you do reinforces the cash cow.

To cast that aside, to start over, is a fearless move.

I chatted Tuesday with Karen Wong-Duncan, a manager in Microsoft’s mobile communications systems, who said the rapid change and adoption in the smartphone market required more than just incremental changes. This time around, Microsoft was trying to think big.”

Read the full article here.

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Venture capitalists offer their best tech predictions for 2010

Posted in boic, tagged , , , , , , on January 8, 2010| Leave a Comment »

Here is a article from Seattle based TechFlash.

“Google’s stock will lose nearly 20 percent of its value. One of Seattle’s casual game companies — Big Fish, PopCap or WildTangent — will go public. And look for Android to be the hot mobile operating system of 2010, as Microsoft buys RIM in order to compete.

Those are among the predictions from a group of Seattle area soothsayers who offered their forecasts for 2010 in our annual venture capital predictions column. Take a gander at their responses below. How do you think they’ll do?”

Read the excellent article here.

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Java Appstore in the works

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Business models, Investments, Java, Market research, mobile 2.0, Sun Microsystems, Wireless, Wireless 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 22, 2009| Leave a Comment »

Building on the trend of Apple, Nokia and others – Sun makes the move into a independent Appstore deployment. As Apple has shown that it is a viable business model, it only makes sense – end-users like to shop around, and are willing to pay for smaller apps. As Google Android starting to make its way into mobile phones, and Nokia “opened” up Symbian – the end-user community developer trend will create a business eco-system worth spending some research on. The project is codenamed Vector but will likely be called “Java Store” after its official launch.

Here is some quotes from Jonathan Schwartz by way of Washington Post.

“Candidate applications will be submitted via a simple web site, evaluated by Sun for safety and content, then presented under free or fee terms to the broad Java audience via our update mechanism. Over time, developers will bid for position on our storefront, and the relationships won’t be exclusive (as they have been for search). As with other app stores, Sun will charge for distribution – but unlike other app stores, whose audiences are tiny, measured in the millions or tens of millions, ours will have what we estimate to be approximately a billion users. That’s clearly a lot of traffic, and will position the Java App Store as having just about the world’s largest audience.”

“The store will be for all Java devices. Initially, the PC desktop will get the most attention from developers and customers, but there’s plenty of Java-enabled phones and developers will be pleased to have another distribution channel, especially one with the power of Sun behind it.”

Read the full article here. Read Jonathan Schwartz blog entry here.

Other bloggers covering this topic include: OStatic, Mobile Marketing Watch, Mobile Blogs, IndicThreads.

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Analyst forecasts 900% Android phone sales growth

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, boic, Investments, Market research, Venture Capital, Wireless, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on May 12, 2009| 1 Comment »

If you look for growth opportunities, look no further say Strategy Analytics. With a 900% growth forecast, and Google support in the background – the mobile ecosystem will see some intriguing innovations shortly. With iPhone and AppStore showing the way, Android from Google may provide a business opoortunity for global opportunities for mobile developers.

Please also see our previous articles: “Android vs. iPhone: Why Openness may Not Be Best” and “Android to do what no one else managed!”

Hardware Register has more on this story:

“Android-based smartphones will ship in massive numbers this year – at least compared to last year’s total, market watcher Strategy Analytics has forecast.

In its latest report, the firm predicted that Android smartphone shipments will increase a whopping 900 per cent during 2009 over last year. Shipments of Apple’s iPhone will grow 79 per cent this year, SA said.

The Google-developed OS hasn’t featured on phones for as long as Apple’s handset has been on the market. Nonetheless, healthy support from “operators, vendors and developers” will continue to help increase Android’s adoption, SA said.

“A relatively low-cost licensing model, its semi-open source structure and Google’s support for cloud services have encouraged companies… to support the Android operating system,” said Neil Mawston, Director at Strategy Analytics.

The number of Android-based devices is certainly set to expand this year. Vodafone recently launched the world’s second Android phone in Blighty – the Magic. It’s also widely rumoured that Samsung will launch an own-brand Android phones this year.”

Read the article here.

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Android vs. iPhone: Why Openness May Not Be Best

Posted in Board Of Intellectual Capital, Business models, Intellectual capital, Mobile, mobile 2.0, Technology, Wireless, Wireless 2.0, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on February 23, 2009| 1 Comment »

Conventional Valley wisdom have been that free is good. In terms of Android, this is the case – free is good! But, once you start to compare it to iPhone, some essential questions come up.

I recently finished a iPhone project with a company out of Sweden, Resolution Interactive. My task was to reshape the business model from traditional PC- online to something fruitful. Coming into to the company early last spring, the finances was well below bad, the team was in dissaray, and the revenues where nill. When iPhone developer program then came available in mid april, we saw the chance and made a jump for it. Although pretty messy to begin with, Apple continued to publish supporting materials, reached out with a network of visionaries and helped us go through the ups and downs of discovering a new market, new business model and new way of marketing.

When we in mid October release the first game – Clusterball Arcade – we received som good reviews and quickly went for title nr. two – AquaMoto Racing. Succesful in my mission, I was able to create a new businessmodel and find a new market for a struggling game company – this with the help of Apple and iPhone.

So, the release of Android from Google, the OVI initiatives from Nokia etc. are all good, but I wonder if they really will be able to provide the multitude of support that Apple was able to provide to me. Also, the unified developer environment (Xcode), the one device, clean business model and pre-existing audience to market too makes it very hard to understand how anyone will be able to compete with Apple on this market segment.

Mark Sigal just posted a excellent article at GigaOm. His analysis below summed this up very clear to me:

“The reality is that openness is just an attribute -– it’s not an outcome, and customers buy outcomes. They want the entire solution and they want it to work predictability. Only a tiny minority actually cares about how or why it works. It’s little wonder, then, that the two device families that have won the hearts, minds and pocketbooks of consumers, developers and service providers alike (i.e., BlackBerry and iPhone) are the most deeply integrated from a hardware, software and service layer perspective.”

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