Category: Blog

Nokia Plan B: if I see a fire, I put it out

 

For the last few days I ‘ve been telling anyone that will listen (and some who won’t) that Stephen Elop made the wrong pick from his list of burning platform choices: Build, Catalyse or Join. He should have built, and catalyised by putting all possible resources behind Meego and Qt. The results would have been amazing and could have been delivered much sooner than the first Nokia WP7 mobiles will be. Major roadblocks in Meego were not technical, only political. Intel have stated that they are ‘not blinking‘ on Meego, that’s a great decision and they will benefit from taking a longer view.

Last night, some clever young shareholders floated a Plan B for Nokia listing a set of proposals that could, if implemented, turn the company around. It makes a whole heap of sense to me. The Plan B people say that they are Nokia employees though they haven’t yet revealed their identity [edit: Plan B was revealed to be written by bored iPhone developer]. I wish them the very best of luck with this endeavour. However quixotic it might turn out to be, at this stage in the game an intelligent opposing view needs to be stated.

As I see it, Nokia made its decision to go with Microsoft at the behest of the Board, Institutional Shareholders, Vendor Stakeholders and Carriers. There is no 2/11 conspiracy. Whatever you make of Elop’s questionable work history he is not a shill, a patsy or a trojan horse, he’s just doing his job to the best of his ability. Shame about the lack of vision.

Nokia’s corporate culture sucked, it was bloated, arrogant and blind to reality. The company never really understood user experience or web services and it always put the Carriers before the Consumers. It should have taken a leaf out of Apple’s book in that regard but it didn’t have the balls to upset its Channel. Ovi made far too many compromises to the Mobile Network Operators and very few for developers. There’s a huge swathe of Nokia middle-managers who will never realise that they are the people responsible for this pivot. They are complicit in their own downfall yet they will always want to blame someone else for their personal tragedy – Stephen Elop is that man.

Goodness knows many of us are sick of reading crowing comments from idiots who don’t know the difference between a UI and an OS. Symbian was a fantastic Operating System, but it didn’t evolve fast enough and it was a bitch to work with. The genius of Android is the fact that just about anyone with a computer can make an app with it, and they are: the Android market is full of rubbish. Apple got it dead right from day one, no suprises there. WP7 isn’t bad in the same way that Win7 is so much better than Vista, perhaps Microsoft and Nokia can capture some developer mindshare again.

Meego is an amazing OS and Qt is an incredible UI framework.

‘Moving forward’ as corporate folk are wont to say, this is the perfect partnership for Microsoft and if executed well it might yet change Nokia’s fortune. Clearly the deal has the support of the Carriers and they remain, for better or worse, the biggest customers of any mobile manufacturer. In short time, we’re going to see just how good a leader Stephen Elop really is.

Nokia, you should have Thought Differently.

Why Chinese Internet companies should switch to English as their ‘official language’.

Baidu CEO Robin Li has stated that Chinese companies have a responsibility to compete internationally and go global. He’s right, they do. Nothing has impressed me more than the achievements (and potential of) Chinese technical talent. That’s why I started a company in China to compete on the global stage.

Beijing and Shanghai in particular can and will compete with Silicon Valley. In this case, an insular rather than expansionist view is a cut to the nose to spite the face. Chinese companies can innovate. This is not a clone factory. There is a lot of money to be made and that should be enough incentive for anyone to get cracking.

We are constantly reminded that Foreign companies do not understand the Chinese market. This is true. Legions of fresh-off-the-boat ex-pats arrive every year oblivious to those who have failed before them and doomed to repeat the same mistakes. Group-On are, in my opinion, the next disaster waiting to happen. I’d be happy to be proven wrong on that one but I don’t think I will be. So, do Chinese companies need to make special concessions or behavioural changes in order to attack their overseas markets?

In order to improve their ability to compete internationally several Japanese companies, such as Rakuten, Nissan and Uniqlo have recently taken the bold decision to switch to English as an ‘official’ business language. I firmly believe that Chinese companies should to take the same steps, even if only baby ones, toward this goal. Why?

Quite simply, English ability in an engineering team or design team improves output. Now, that sounds an incredibly arrogant, nigh on racist statement to make and on one level – yes it is. I apologise if I cause offence, my intention is quite the opposite. I’m not saying this because English is in any way better, or worse, than Chinese as a language to communicate technical or esoteric subjects, in fact, Chinese is probably the winner in that particular argument. No, I make this claim based on my experience running local development and design teams that create products and services for the international market.

As a founder, I gave myself the grand title of CTO, but I am really just a very good Product Manager (even though I say so myself). Getting my hands dirty with the team is what I enjoy and that occupied a huge proportion of my days at Morodo. Time and time again when a developer or a designer hit a brick wall I was able to find a solution simply by searching for an answer where the designer or developer lacked the language ability or confidence to do the same. Whilst the sum of knowledge on the Chinese Internet is immense there is, at present, a greater sum of knowledge relevant to the subject matter on Western Internet, whether that be FOSS projects, vendor solutions, standards documentation, or design reference – or even just StackOverflow and Quora. This may well balance out in the future, and I hope it does, but that is the reality today and it is likely to remain so for some time to come.

To echo my earlier sentiment and continue with the seemingly offensive sweeping generalisations, Chinese developers and designers fresh out of uni have as great an understanding of the Western market as we do of theirs. Perhaps ‘they’ understand ‘us’ a little better as ‘they’ are more open to absorbing ‘our’ culture; only those people that make the effort to spend any time in China stand a chance of getting their head around the local market  (Silicon Valley – I’m looking at you here). Learning English helps close this gap, enormously. I have seen this happen over and over and it’s one thing that positively encourages innovation over blind-copying.

English language skills in China should not be the preserve of the Management team. In capturing a slice of the global market these skills are essential tools that are simple to come by and they need to trickle down to the developers and designers. Of course, I could go back and make the same argument again using Spanish, or French, but the reality is that the common denominator in the monied overseas markets where disposable income is available to be spent online is English.

Lastly, I don’t think that the policy I am proposing will ever be realised and perhaps I am writing this out of the need to say it rather than for it to be read and understood. In Internet services China can and will compete globally, it would be foolish not to, it would also be remiss of me not to share something I have learned with the people who taught me so many valuable lessons whilst I was a guest in their country.

The app feedback loop is failing

Loyalytics’ post on the stickiness of apps has got some wide coverage, way to go at promoting a churn reduction service. The headline: “First impressions matter! 26% of apps downloaded in 2010 were used just once” has popped up just about everywhere, with everyone and his dog chipping in tuppence worth of good advice for app developers.

I don’t think there’s that much to worry about in this metric in and of itself, a quarter of all apps are downloaded and opened once, so what? For content publishers the seemingly high rejection rate is not that unusual any more.

Now that our devices have gigabytes of storage space we’re suffering from a kind of collective syllogomania as we hoard apps, mp3s, TV shows, movies, books and magazines. I usually read two books every week – I start three or four, my unlistened playlist is always more than twenty-four hours long; over the last couple of years I’ve lost any hang-ups I ever had about deleting electronic files, whether I paid for them or not. I feel the same way about apps and I’m not alone.

However glib I might be about my own fickle consumption, there is a real issue here that developers need to address: why are their apps being discarded? Only the person doing the deleting knows the answer and nobody appears to be asking them the question. The app industry needs to improve the deletion process and get some feedback from happy scrappers like me.

One of the few features of Facebook that I rate at all highly is the way that the ads are presented. I can delete each ad and as I do so I am given an option to provide feedback, even a free-text box. I experimented with this text box not so long ago, explaining at some length that I’d marked my city of residence as Beijing, so there was no point in showing me ads based on a Florida locale just because I was tunneling through to a server in Miami to use the Internet. Lo and behold, about a week later I started to get ads for Beijing apartment rentals coming through. Well done Facebook, thanks for listening.

It should be obvious where I’m going with this. Right now, if I delete an app from my smartphone or tablet my only option is to provide a rating at that trashcan moment. Sure I could go into the app store and provide a review but generally, unless I’m overwhelmingly amazed or incredibly disappointed, that’s too much trouble. I’m far more likely to tell you what I think of your app if I’m allowed to casually speak my piece as I bin it. Don’t put me to extra trouble.

The feedback loop needs to be tighter and this can only come with support from the app store and/or OS owner. Whoever takes this leap of faith in closing the feedback loop will be on to a churn reducing winner.

Image: TiPb

Velcro laces

 

Ars Technica has written up a great piece on AVG’s preschooler technology report. According to the results of the survey, kids are better at navigating the iPhone than they are at doing up their shoelaces. This is probably not news to any parent who has ever asked their child to put down the PS3 for a few minutes and tidy their room. Like doing up your shoelaces, housework is boring.

After every major holiday festival (think Thanksgiving or Christmas) it’s common to see a flurry of tweets and posts bemoaning the perennial problem of being the only geek in the family: how I helped mum get Skype installed; how I rebooted Dad’s router; how I got Gran on Facebook. Given our exasperation over the older generation’s lack of skillz, why are we disappointed when we find that our children have a natural aptitude for the technology they’re growing up with?

This is the kind of natural evolution that would get Kurzweil’s approval. We should be pleased that generation Z will live a hyper-connected, and fully augmented life. I for one will be only too happy for my son to run from the command line before he can sew on a button or darn his socks, I know which of these three skills will be the most valuable for him.

The writers at Ars Technica (and The Daily Mail) can tut tut at the state of things today and settle into their slippers with some cocoa and a newspaper, I’ll nip out and buy some velcro-laced slip-ons for the kids.

Facebook featurephone app

 

Facebook has released an app for featurephones to complement m.facebook.com, this makes perfect sense and might just be the biggest source of growth in The Social Network in 2011. Given the ease with which such a java app can be hacked together and configured for a vast array of mobile devices, I do wonder what took them so long to get around to this.

Featurephones remain the largest mobile market segment in terms of sales and use. Though the migration from dumbphone to smartphone is well underway, the harsh economic reality is that the majority of consumers cannot afford to upgrade and won’t be able to for some time to come.

Many of the tabloid tech blogs would have you believe that sub $100 smartphones will be pervasive in the market by the end of 2011. That may be true but thinking globally, which tabloid tech blogs rarely do, the average retail price of mobile phone floats between $45 and $50. That price is less than the baseline factory-gate cost of a theoretical Android smartphone that retails at $100. Factor in the legacy device life-cycle and the largely ignored refurbished phone market and, well, sorry folks, expect featurephones to be with us for a while yet.

So why a Facebook app when m.facebook.com is already doing a great job of servicing the needs of this market? I suspect a few reasons:

  1. User Experience. Ever tried to browse the web on a featurephone? It’s such easier to control and standardise the user experience with an app in these devices.
  2. Distribution. Featurephone customers are avid app consumers. This is evident in the incredible popularity of GetJar, Ovi and Tapjoy stores in this market segment. Carriers too might find it easier to sell phones with Facebook onboard. The few download and install stumbling blocks that frustrated app pioneers in the early years of this millennium are long gone.
  3. Reach. I’m at risk of repeating myself but featurephone customers make-up the largest segment of mobile users in the world. For the majority of them that ‘dumbphone’ is their only connection to the Internet. Staking claim to an icon or shortcut on their mobile desktop is a lot more valuable than grabbing a bookmark.

New Facebook registrations have reached a plateau in mature western markets, searching for growth a featurephone app is a superb idea, though perhaps not the right strategy for everyone.

The $35 tablet that never was

 

The $35 dollar tablet is dead. It was the kind of project that you can imagine starting life as a pub bet. As the clock winds round to 11:00 on a Saturday night and the barman begins clearing the glasses away the solutions to so many of the world’s problems seem straightforwardly simple don’t they?

Cheap tablet? Sure, I could do that, pass me that napkin I’ll sketch out the Bill of Materials, design and development, licensing, packaging and shipping costs. There you go, $35.

I am being somewhat disparaging. With the right volume of pre-orders (in the millions) perhaps it’s not quite an impossible dream and at some point in the future, as commodity costs fall, it might yet happen. But really, other than general ignorance, I wonder how this vapourware was ever entertained as a legitimate story.

Image: The Guardian

Flattr is the tipping point

Flattr is an egalitarian payment system ideally suited for small online transactions, such as one-off access to a paid news site. Uniquely, it makes no distinction between purchaser and merchant, everyone in the community is equal and anonymous.

For me, the hook is the ability to give money at the tap of a touchscreen, and not necessarily as a payment for a transaction but as a thank you. Read an excellent post?  Well give ten cents to the author. There’s no need to leave the site, log into Paypal, approve a transaction, return via a confirmation page and find your way back to the article.

Tipping with Flattr is pretty simple, as easy as Liking or Stumbling. Goodness knows that the web needs more cash incentives for original content creation that don’t rely on Google Adsense. Using Flattr bloggers can be buskers, rather than plagiarists or content farmers.

Moving out of Beta, Flattr has improved its donations feature and added QR Code generation to the Thing buttons that power payment clicks (so that real buskers can join in too). Word is that an API is on the way.

Only one sticking point: At the moment, Flattr’s mechanism for getting money into an account relies on merchant services provided by Moneybookers and Paypal. To get money out customers can only transfer funds to Paypal. I hope that the service continues to grow at a rapid rate allowing the company to operate its own merchant accounts. Flattr needs monumental scale to succeed and there’s risk in using competitors as vendors.

The One Laptop Per Child roadmap

Bashing the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) organisation’s utopian ideals seems to have become something of a sport, and an uncharitable one at that. Details of some supposed transgressions are documented at the OLPC wiki, on a very scrollable page labelled: Controversies. Many relate to the typically asinine politics one would expect to find in any overly academic NGO email inbox or FOSS forum; some are valid criticisms; most have a factual basis; and an overwhelming proportion seem to have issues with OLPC Chairman and Founder, Nicholas Negroponte.

In “The Rise Of The New Global Elite” Chrystia Freeland writes of Philanthrocapitalism:

“What is notable about today’s plutocrats is that they tend to bestow their fortunes in much the same way they made them: entrepreneurially. Rather than merely donate to worthy charities or endow existing institutions (though they of course do this as well), they are using their wealth to test new ways to solve big problems.”

Freeland goes on to quote Matthew Bishop, co-author of the book Philanthrocapitalism, as he describes the phenomenon of the less than ragged-trousered do-gooder to her:

“There is a connection between their ways of thinking as businesspeople and their ways of giving. They are used to operating on a grand scale, and so they operate on a grand scale in their philanthropy as well.”

Operating on a grand scale, to a massive vision, seems to have been what OLPC was all about and the organisation has not been found wanting where it comes to making sweeping statements of intent that have then been corrected by the realities of the project.

At launch in 2005, Negroponte stated the goal was to put laptops in the hands of 100 million children in three years, six years later, the organisation has shipped some 2 million units; At launch Negroponte stated that the first laptop would be powered by a hand-cranked dynamo, six years later issues with the dynamo have finally been fixed and two hours of cranking provides a full charge; In May 2006, Negroponte stated that the target price for the XO was be $100 but expected that by 2008 OLPC would be offering laptops at $140, five years later, the retail price of the new XO 1.75 is estimated to be $165.

For the naysayers knocking OLPC this appears to be fish-in-a-barrel territory.

Well, I’ll make no bones about it, despite the inauspicious retelling above, I come not to bury but to praise. Let me  start by saying: What successful entrepreneur doesn’t make outrageous statements of future intent and set tough targets? If it was easy to offer millions of children cheap laptops, everyone would be doing it (although in leading the way, OLPC has made it easier for followers).

So, what has OLPC achieved in the last half decade? In no particular order:

  1. Distributed almost 2 million low-cost laptops. And in doing so, forced other manufacturers to review their own pricing policies and roadmaps (netbooks anyone?).
  2. Created a laptop that runs on 2 watts of power (XO 1.75). Thereby solving the dynamo-power issue when running a computer where there is no electricity supply.
  3. Used Free Open Source Software. Despite being offered discounted Windows and free Mac OS X, OLPC has been true to its Constructivist principles and stuck with FOSS.
  4. Open Sourced the hardware reference design. OLPC machines are no longer built to a proprietary design, anyone can make their own.
  5. Raised the profile of IT education as a means to end poverty. Critics often state that the core OLPC management are all hype and no substance. Frankly, who cares how they grab the column inches as long as they do. Every day I meet people who have never heard of OLPC – a non-profit that accepts donations – and have never considered that giving away laptops to the world’s poor is an achievable goal.

Want to get excited about OLPC all over again? Watch this excellent interview with OLPC CTO Ed McNireney at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show.

To the naysayers, before you hang me, I agree: Nicholas Negroponte sometimes says things which make him sound like a dick, don’t we all. But what we don’t do is keep the money rolling in, he does. I agree that hardware is the trivial part, investment in teacher training, connectivity, specialised curriculum development and maintenance is the difficult bit, but unless the goal changes to One Library Per Child the hardware has to come first.

It seems to me that many of the most vocal critics, especially those involved in related projects, have more of an issue with Negroponte’s Philanthrocapitalism than they do with the aims of OLPC. Airing these issues  under the pretence of constructive criticism is a classic passive aggressive behaviour that OLPC, and the world’s vulnerable children, could well do without.

And here’s the real roadmap announced in 2009, it’s pretty much on track:

XO 1.75 – The XO 1.75, to be available in early 2011, will be essentially the same industrial design but rubber-bumpered on the outside and in the inside will be an 8.9”, touch-sensitive display. The XO 1.75 will be based on an ARM processor from Marvell that will enable 2x speed at 1/4 the power and is targeted at $150 or less. This ARM-based system will complement the x86-based XO 1.75, which will remain in production, giving deployments a choice of processor platform.”

XO 3.0 – The XO 3.0 is a totally different approach, to be available in 2012 and at a target price well below $100. It will feature a new design using a single sheet of flexible plastic and will be unbreakable and without holes in it.

Yep, it’s a Tablet.

Cheap Off-Grid connectivity

 

SPOT Connect is not the only GPS unit to provide off-the-grid messaging and barebones data but it is one of the first to pair the device with a smartphone app to enable SMS, Twitter and email in the wilderness.

For a satellite service it’s pretty cheap too, the unit is priced at US$170 (annual subscription minimum charge US$100 inclusive of SPOT’s tracking and emergency locator features).

The exciting thing about SPOT is that it’s driving down the cost of satellite devices and services at an alarming rate. By way of comparison DeLorme’s PN-60w, which offers a similar service from a dedicated device, priced out at US$450 upon launch in mid 2010.

Provision of low-cost connectivity in remote areas is a central obstacle in the humanitarian technology challenge. Where build-out of mobile networks becomes unfeasible it is often the case that satellite solutions don’t cost in either, if this declining price trend continues maybe one day soon they will. Here’s hoping.