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Tech Industry Catches It’s Breath -- NY Times
“It’s like with evolution, where you have a mutation and then a great explosion of diversity,” said Scott A. McGregor, the chief executive of Broadcom, which makes chips that go into a wide range of consumer electronics. “Then, you have a period where you see which creatures can survive the big change.”

Facebook announces mobile strategy and announces Facebook Zero mobile-web interface.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=1VVHWQQPUc0

The quick summary is that Facebook is providing a mobile-web interface to it’s web site that works across most phones and languages, will support SMS for messaging, and will continue to expand their presence in the mobile app space through new applications and also developer services (a la Connect). It sounds like mobile is a core element of their strategy, which makes sense if the goal is global user adoption.

Opera Demos Its iPhone Web Browser, It’s Damn Fast & Will Be Submitted To Apple
“Opera demonstrated yesterday in Barcelona an iPhone version of its mobile web browser, Opera Mini, and it’s damn fast. How fast? Well, about five times faster than your current safari mobile on a 3GS. The trick resides in the way it processes websites.”

That’s great, but as many have noted it is not likely that Apple will allow this to be released on the iTunes app store. Additionally, I’m not sure how I feel about how it works. All Opera browser internet requests would be routed through Opera, who would act as a proxy to retrieve the content and send it to the browser in an optimized format. Regardless, this is a pretty interesting technology.

Skype in a Struggle to Be Heard on Mobile Phones
“Most operators and network equipment makers still perceive Skype and other Internet phone call providers to be potential freeloaders, stealing their customers while they invest billions of dollars to build out and upgrade mobile networks.” (Skype announced a partnership with Verizon in the US at the conference)

Google CEO Eric Schmidt at MWC Puts Mobile First
“”Here, right now, we understand the new rule is ‘mobile first’ in everything. Perhaps the phrase should be ‘mobile first’ simply because it’s time to be proud of what we have built together. Our job is to make mobile be the answer to everything.”

What is the meta-story?

1. We’re seeing the largest internet businesses move aggressively into the mobile space
2. The mobile-web will be at least as important as mobile apps, and the large web properties are converting their sites to work accordingly
3. There is a shake-up in progress of the smartphone value chain. The role of the platform, OEM, carrier, and application developers is shifting, and this is resulting in questions about which apps will be allowed on each platform (skype, opera, etc). It also creates tension between the carriers, oems, and platforms all of which would like a bigger piece of the pie at the end of the day.

There is still one more day to go in the conference — we’ll see what else develops.

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We’re still waiting to get our hands on a device to try the new OS out. While the list of carrier and device partnerships is extensive, it will be some time before phones running the OS are available in the market:

“Carrier partnerships are far and wide, including AT&T, Deutsche Telekom AG, Orange, SFR, Sprint, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telstra, T-Mobile USA, Verizon Wireless and Vodafone, while hardware partners include Dell, Garmin-Asus, HTC, HP, LG, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Toshiba and Qualcomm. We’re told that we likely won’t get to see any third-party devices at MWC, though Microsoft is showing off dev units of unknown origin, and the first handsets are supposed to hit the market by the holidays of this year.” -- Engadget

In the mean time, here is the latest coverage:

Hands-on demo of Phone 7 from MobileCrunch

www.youtube.com/watch?v=VTD_CnTyeUk

Microsoft Phone 7 Series Official Product Page

http://www.windowsphone7series.com/

“A different kind of phone…coming holiday 2010.”

Engaged hands-on review of Phone 7

http://www.engadget.com/2010/02/15/windows-phone-7-series-hands-on-and-impressions/

“f you’ve used the Zune HD, you know what this is like. Lots of bold text on the device, lists with text cut off on the sides of the phone, and additional screens to the left and right driven by arrows pointing you in either direction. “

NY Times Coverage of the launch:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/16/technology/16phone.html

“The product marks a rare moment when Microsoft scrapped previous versions of its software in favor of building something new from scratch.”

It will be quite some time before this platform is able to make an impact on the marketshare of mobile platforms. But it will have an impact on the behavior of incumbent platforms. How will this affect Apple’s strategy in managing the iPhone platform, carrier relationships, and developer community? How will google seek to set obstacles in the path of Microsoft in the ecosystem?

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There are some interesting bits of data in there which are worth taking note of:

1. Android is gaining market share *fast.* It has gained marketshare more quickly than the iPhone lately, though it still represents a relatively small market. This is good news not just for Google, but also for developers and publishers.
2. There are vast differences between the most popular mobile phones, the most popular smartphones, and the mobile phones most used to access the web and mobile applications. I wish this report included a by-device breakdown of usage, because I suspect there are huge gaps between how RIM, Android, and iPhone devices are used today. eMarketer did publish some statistics about smartphone usage patterns showing that Palm, RIM, and Windows smartphone users don’t use apps as much as Android and iPhone users.
3. Microsoft continues to suffer mobile OS marketshare losses, declining from 19% to 18% in only one month. Expect a major market entry by them shortly. They will not simply ignore the mobile phone/application/web market, it’s too big an opportunity.
4. There were no surprise entries in the list from LG, Samsung, etc in the smartphone category. Expect these manufacturers to fight hard to gain smartphone marketshare in the US throughout 2010.

A question:

If RIM has the highest penetration of the smartphone market, why isn’t there more buzz from developers about this platform? What does RIM need to do to be more successful in creating a developer community? Or is it a device which is popular mainly with the enterprise crowd, not consumers?

Something to think about in planning your own mobile initiatives.

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“The Kindle Store provides you wide exposure to make your active content discoverable and accessible to a very large community of enthusiasts. We’re looking forward to seeing some great innovation!”

Like iPhone apps, there will be a store where consumers can purchase Kindle applications. There are estimated to be 3 million Kindles in use, makes this a big enough market to lure developers to this new mobile app platform.

The Kindle device is quite different from the iPhone/iPad/Android smartphone platforms, which limits the kinds of applications possible. Games, which require rapid screen update rates, won’t work well on the slow but efficient eInk screen. Lack of a touchscreen (or capable pointing device) or application switching also limits the possibilities quite a lot.

If Amazon is to be successful in this initiative, it seems critical that future Kindles receive upgraded hardware (color touchscreen), and also an upgraded OS with task switching, improved UI, and a more robust API and SDK. That’s going to require very deep level of investment by Amazon. Do they have the drive to compete in this competition long term? Do they have a choice if the book market goes digital?

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This is significant for reasons beyond the usual “Apple is a control freak that hurts developers” discussion. Location based advertising increasingly appears to be the most effective and fastest growing form of advertising on the mobile web. BIA Kelsey, an analyst firm, studied mobile use in late 2009 and noted the following:

“…searches for local products or services now exceed out-of-market searches by a wide margin…

• 18.5 percent searched the Internet for local products or services
• 15.9 percent obtained information about movies or other entertainment
• 13.3 percent obtained information about restaurants or bars
• 11.1 percent searched the Internet for products or services outside their local area
• 4 percent purchased a physical item that needed to be shipped (e.g., a book)
• 3 percent used a coupon from their mobile phone”

Additionally, Apple acquired the mobile advertising company Quattro Wireless only a few weeks ago.

It is increasingly clear that Apple is not merely trying to control developers for the sake of controlling their platform. They have a specific interest in capturing the fast growing local advertising market before Google obtains the same dominance there they have on web advertising. This isn’t the only gem in the mobile web ecosystem, but it’s definitely one that is worth owning.

What next? It seems clear that we’ll see a local advertising solution from Apple in the near future. Ok, that’s a smart move through it’s frustrating to see the developer community get the short end of the stick here… again. This is almost definitely reduce the level of innovation by developers to create smart solutions to local advertising problems.

It’s also likely we will see a wave of buyouts of mobile advertising platforms by carriers and the other mobile handset OEMs this year in a last ditch attempt to preserve their position in the mobile market value chain. No carrier wants to be just a commodity data pipe. And no handset manufacturer wants to get left in the dust.

While carriers certainly don’t want to get too close to Google, they may have no choice in the matter given their alternatives could be reduced to cowing to Apple by the end of 2010. It’s going to be a dynamic year for the mobile market…

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But what’s the big picture here?

One thing to consider is that Apple has an amazing competency in the education market, and they may seek to capitalize on this market as a way to introduce the iPad to the mainstream.

Apple has already forged partnerships with several of the largest publishers including notable textbook publisher Macmillan. Kindle has so far failed to capture the education segment of the ebook market, and the current eInk based device is insufficient for many textbook uses (no color, small screen, etc). iPad, for all it’s shortcomings, *may* be a better device to satisfy the textbook market need.

This is a large market, and it is theoretically possible that Apple could incentivize iPad sales by offering not only educational discounts on iPad, but also discounted textbooks to students. A typical college student currently spends between $600 and $1,000/year on textbooks, which means there is enough “meat” here to offer large discounts. Imagine a $199 iPad including $99 in free textbooks. I can think of a few students who might jump at this chance.

What’s missing now is compelling ebook content. The large number of existing ebooks are not very interactive — they are little more than glorified text files. But the EPUB format, which iPad supports, is very sophisticated. Based on XML, full hypertext capabilities and rich media support is included (but not Flash . And iPad is actually a *great* platform for interactive books, given this content is created by the publishers. Something right out of Alan Kay’s “Dynabook” concept.

Now that would really be revolutionary.

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