Ned Notes


Ideas in Motion - Mobility

updated posting on

I recently gave an interview to a pair of researchers about what I thought was coming in future technology. Apparently, I said some useful things, so I got a transcript, and here it is!
Thanks to many for the re-linking!

1. INVISIBLE

A couple things I think are essential about technology. Really good technology should be mostly invisible to the user. Technology in general should be something that lets people get to their goal or their task focus. Without being in the way. It should be a layer that almost does not exist. So if you think about clothing for example, clothing can move smoothly and quickly rather than clothing that restrains and constricts you. The goal of good software is to enable you to move faster, not slow you down. For example, a touch screen gets me to something quicker than typing something in. So that’s basically the previous point that it’s almost invisible. For example, with a (good) touch screen, it feels as if I’m pushing right into the software.

2. AUGMENT HUMAN BRAIN - DATA STORES

Also, I can actually get to vast data storage, millions of data records of other information that I don’t have access to. So software or other technology should make it available, without the need for additional steps. So the idea that, a good example is that someone said recently that they felt with their computer off, half their brain was missing. That’s good technology, it’s supposed to augment the brain or make you feel smarter or faster or richer or deeper, it’s not supposed to be your frustration. So I see us in 10 to 20 years feeling that we have an augmented brain because we have access to these databases so I can find any one anywhere in an interface that feels almost invisible.

3. INFINITELY CUSTOMIZABLE

Building on that augmentation idea, it should be something that is infinitely customizable so it becomes not an augmented reality, that’s going a bit too far, but a version of who I am in the world, rather than a one size fits all. So much as we now customize our webpages or Gmail or Facebook, whatever we use, if I tend to prefer large icons and I constantly hit the small icon off the icon should change shape depending on how I act, so it should be intelligent not in terms of superseding my desires, but in terms of conforming itself to my desires. So if I tend to use a mouse instead of the keyboard options, then the mouse should become faster and better, or if I use keyboard shortcuts, then I should have a vast array of them, but if I never use them, why don’t you turn them off so if I accidentally hit one, I’m not like “what the hell?”

So the software should be intelligent enough to accommodate itself to my desires, and of course that takes learning and design. It’s just code. So speaking of customizable though, I would love it if there was a relatively easy interface for people to develop software, maybe this is beyond the purview of this conversation, but if people could put building blocks of software together, a good example of this is Popfly at Microsoft or Pipes at Yahoo, both are good example of services that allow people to mesh up storage or mesh of data information together. So if there was a consumer focused way for people to put things together. I may be interested in restaurants in the Caribbean, I may care about my family history down there, so I combine the two, and I suddenly find out my family tree places where the restaurants are. Who knows, that’s something bizarre, but the point is that each person has their own data stores that they care about, and we can’t assume that one size fits all.

WHAT WILL HAPPEN IN THE FUTURE?

random predictions from Ned

So I see people constantly putting other people together with each other. So putting people together with location, or someone they care about and weather. Someone their care about and swine flu. And like, it all comes back to being a node in that world. OR like, I was recently contacted on Facebook by somebody I knew in 4th grade, so I was curious about where they’d been, where they’d been over time, so I searched, I started searching, and I ended up with a map of San Diego because they’d been down there, but that came out of a focus on the person, so I think that regardless with how much technology surrounds us, it really comes back to, we’re connected to other people and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a physical connection, whether I’m walking home with somebody or I’m texting somebody on my phone, it’s about another person, it’s about the connection. So the data sources I think have to have, not just the person searching at the heart of it, but the ability to search for other people, which is why I think, customized URLs or webpages are becoming more and more pervasive. And why the kind of people search domain is going gang busters. So what other data sources?

Within 20 years, publishing as we know it is going to be gone because texts produced by people are going to be pervasively available, so I picked up a paperback book the other day and I was, it was a book I’ve read before and I was like, “where the search?” I was automatically thinking about where the search was. And I don’t think the book is going to go away because books are beautiful piece of technology, but the ability to access any text that’s ever been written, I think the whole Google book program matters in a really deep way and i think in a way people don’t realize yet because I think people are going to be searching one text against another. I’m really into John Milton, Paradise Lost, and I recently searched a phrase in John Milton and I found that that phrase was used by 600 authors over time because he wrote back in the 1600s, and just being able to cross reference that, it wasn’t the academic scholarship, so much as the the, what’s the word, the resonance of an idea or term through time.

If we had everything we have now about online search and being able to reference data stores, Newton and Leibniz for example, invented Calculus in the same period in different locations, and if we had all sources we have now, that wouldn’t have happened because we would have been up on everyone’s developments. So it’s like going to you and saying, I guess people are going to use that technology to leap frog developments. Instead of just getting news quickly people are going to say, “oh, there’s a new development in nanotechnology, which enables me to go green technology, which enables me to go boom boom.” So instead of developing something over 20 years in a company, that will happen in 20 minutes flat. So I think that access to development will accelerate all sorts of innovation. Because the true innovation which emerges from nothing, all innovation is built on particles and pieces of previous thoughts, so now that we have all those previous thoughts there, it’s going to accelerate that.

Another thing, I think people are really going to mash up and combine are different technologies that seem at variance to each other. So I saw recently that somebody had connected different pieces of technology on an iPhone to do surgical, non-invasive surgery and they were doing it through the iPhone, and the iPhone was never designed for surgery, but they were doing it, they rigged this thing and they had an endoscope and they, so we’re going to see combinations, like that speaker phones there, if I was McGiver, I could rig it to blow up the building.

WILL YOU BE A MCGYVER? I think we’re all going to become McGyvers in the future, and we’re not going to become McGyvers because we’re using bubble gum, but we’re taking an intelligent pen and eraser, and saying talk to each other. Figure something out and come up with paper that can be written on and erased like, and so the way we put things together is going to be innovative, not necessarily the things themselves. Another example is that there were some kids recently and they got with their teacher with a balloon, a camera and a bunch of other stuff that’s readily available at Toys R Us, like a remote control car and they built, in a week, they built this thing with off the shelf stuff, and this teacher was just a 4th grade teacher, not a math genius, they built this balloon that could float up into the atmosphere and take pictures of the earth from space. And then the balloon popped and it floated back down on a parachute, and there were pictures of space and the same backyard. So it’s being able to put things together like that.

So I think the combinations of things, of assuming that there’s a low bandwidth cloud that everything can talk to each other. I think that’s going to be present. So in the future, you’re going to wonder why the heck there’s a recorder sitting on the table, why isn’t it uploaded to the cloud, like, “why was it, what was the problem?”

Intel is suddenly trying to make a case that they can lead the charge in what they've designated as "Mobile Internet Devices" (MIDs) -- but it's clear to any observer that they're just playing catch-up to Apple. Fortunately, they have this great Core Duo relationship with Apple -- so perhaps the rising iPhone tide can lift Intel's ship.

This morning's NY Times) notes a significant gap in the Intel positioning -- "the first generation of Intel’s MID technology will be aimed at data, not voice communications, leaving the company out of the market for smartphones. That has not damped the enthusiasm of Intel executives who foresee a proliferation of devices ranging from advanced ultracompact laptops to small, tablet-size devices that will be used for browsing the Web, navigation and Internet chat, rather than voice communications."

This is a really significant lack of forward-thinking on Intel's part -- because the future mobile Web is NOT just a browsing-on-smaller devices web. Instead, it will be a voice-activated, and voice-enabled multimedia messaging future. That's a lot of words to just say that voice is crucial as a control stream for any future computing device (large or small). Thus, as the Times article notes: "the weak link in the Intel strategy is that voice communication remains a significant factor for consumers choosing to buy hand-held devices."

I'd go even further. People aren't just making calls on mobile devices -- they view voice as just another messaging client, and another way (with NLP and voice recognition apps) of controlling computing actions. Fixed/Mobile Convergence is happening not only on the landline side, but also on the computing side. In the near term, it seems clear to me that I will take/make a message from a device and will often not even know (or care) whether the message was originally in voice or in text. The distinction will increasingly cease to matter. More on this at VON Magazine >>

I don't typically re-print complete entries from other folks on my own blog. However, there's a trenchant analysis of hte state of the iPhone market and market demand for the iPhone, posted by someone called "tantrum" over at the NY Times Bits Blog. This great piece of analysis on the grey market and global market for iPhones is buried in the comments though, so I'm re-publishing it here. (If you're "tantrum," and you're somehow offended that I re-printed your comment, let me know.)

Wall Street analysts like Gene Munster and Toni Sacconaghi continuously discount the role of international demand in iPhone sales. They do this primarily because they have a very America-centric view of the world in which this 5% tail wags the dog. Not in cell phones.

This is the issue. The customer-satisfaction numbers you see for iPhone in the US are no different internationally, in some cases they are much higher because the price ($399 and $499 is seen as perfectly reasonable, particularly in emerging markets used to paying higher premiums on US prices for BlackBerry and high-end Nokia phones).

Demand for iPhones outside the United States, particularly in emerging markets, is out of control and has reached the point where it has started to impact Apple’s normalized supply chain projections. It’s okay to have a delta of, say, 100,000 units or so per year between actual and forecast. International demand is driving that delta upwards of 1 million. That’s a whole different ball game for component sourcing, quality control and production ramp-up and some things are starting to come unstuck, even for a finely managed company like Apple.

What’s driving this?

  1. Free, out-of the box -ready, GUI-based network unlock solutions like Ziphone and iLiberty. Confidence in these unlock systems has grown significantly over time as technical expertise required to use them has fallen.
  2. A large, very organized procurement mechanism for iPhones, particularly into Russia, Eastern Europe, India and China. There are people who go from store to store buying iPhones and aggregating them for export to “resellers” overseas.
  3. Proliferation of Wi-Fi penetration and the recognition that in GSM countries, iPhone works simply and well enough. Wi-Fi hotspot usage is growing significantly around the world and the iPhone’s superior web browser is taking full advantage to maximize customer experience. It’s the right product at the right time for the macro-trend.
  4. The iPhone is relatively cheap to emerging market customers used to paying $500 for a BlackBerry and a cheap US Dollar makes it an even better deal. For example in Russia, at $499, a16GB iPhone translates to around 12,000 Rubles. An 8GB Nokia N95 costs $815 or 20,000 Rubles. The value-for-money perception with iPhone is absolutely huge.
  5. Zero or minimal compatibility issues on GSM Networks. I have used my iPhone with SIM cards from 32 different networks in Europe and developing countries. It works seamlessly. The iPhone is a quad-band GSM phone, meaning that it supports all four major GSM frequency bands, 850 and 1900 MHz bands which are used in the Americas, and 900 / 1800 MHz bands used in most other parts of the world, making it compatible with all major GSM networks worldwide. 2 billion people around the world use GSM phones.

To give you an idea of international demand; There are Nigerians shipping more than 500 phones a week from New York to Lagos and Nigeria is a third world country. The EDGE internet works perfectly, albeit just as slow, there and data is very, very cheap at $5 per 100 MB of usage.

“Data-driven” analysts like Munster and Sacconaghi get misled by the laziness of long-distance US-chauvinist analysis into making market projections based on perfunctory GDP per capita statistics and “population living on less than dollar per day” figures. They look at the wrong data because they think the world works in the same way everywhere. This weak analysis disregards latent middle and upper income demand in developing countries. Income distribution in many emerging markets is extremely lopsided.

If you define a potential user as someone who can afford (or is used to) paying twice as much for an iPhone and double what an AT&T subscriber pays per month, there are at least 7 million potential iPhone users in Nigeria, 9 Million in South Africa, 80 Million in India, 25 Million in Russia, 25 Million in Brazil, 8 Million in Indonesia and 100 Million in China. Not all of them will be users but just 5% of this number is way more than 10 million. Considering mobile phones are some of the most universally adopted products on the planet, a good GSM phone reaches Iran and Iraq much faster than people on Wall Street can ever imagine. I predict iPhones will be available to elites in Cuba (which has both GSM and TDMA) within the next 30 days.

From research I’m conducting. we have conservative numbers of grey market as follows:

Russia 2000-4000 phones/week

China 4000 -6000 phones/ week

Demand from Western Europe is substantially slower but still significant, averaging anything from 2000 -3000 units/week from New York and other big cities with international airports. Now, not all the phones shipped from New York are bought in NYC but the export pattern is clear and very strong.

I have completely ignored the cash-flush Middle East where Dubai has always been a world-leading port in grey market clearing and forwarding for consumer electronics.

Conservatively speaking, something is sucking 15,000-20,000 iPhones/week out of the United States. If this phenomenon is coinciding with steadily growing adoption among US customers, suddenly the slack Apple had is drying up.

Many of the millions of visitors coming to the United States every month are going back with a packed iPhone in their luggage. It’s one of the things people are expected to buy when they come.

Foreign nationals are not very likely to buy iPhones at an AT&T store because the requirements are inconsistent (some stores requiring SSNs, existing phone numbers and/ or activation), queues are long (non-starter for people with a limited window to get back to the airport), lack of other Apple products (iPods etc) and accessories and simply, AT&T stores are not landmarks.

Finally, the reason why used iPhones will begin to show up on eBay and other consumer-to-consumer sites in Western Europe is because individuals who speculatively buy an iPhone to resell are up against “organized unofficial” suppliers and 3G is a big deal there. In emerging markets, you’re much more likely to buy a phone from an “expert hacker supplier” if you worry about fixes and other things. And yes, the parallel market is showing budding signs of getting sophisticated at providing some of the support Apple wont provide.

Oh well, maybe it’s just version 2.0 coming out soon.

I think not.

Bottom line: Apple has produced a product that is promising but short of the mark in 3G Western Europe, reasonably good for the US but a smash hit in emerging markets.

— Posted by Tantrum

Interesting post on mobile devices from the Crimson Consulting Group. The article points out that new companies who create mobile apps and and market them to enterprise customers often miss the point that end users can make their own decisions -- regardless of the enterprise defined "corporate" decision. Therefore, it's absolutely necessary -- as RIM is discovering -- to market to the end users themselves, and deliver features for those end users. Pleasing the IT department is just the first step -- end users need to be satisfied enough to use (and evangelize) your product to their peers.

A recent survey in the UK, reported on ZDNet, shows that among enterprise smartphone users, 59% are very satisfied with their iPhone, versus 47% feeling the same about their RIM Blackberry. What is interesting is that RIM practically created the enterprise smartphone category with their innovative way to make enterprise email, contact, calendar, and other information available to mobile users while making the CIO comfortable that the firewalls were still secure. Apple, on the other hand, has focused more on Phone + iPod features, and is frustrating business users with the lack of support for Microsoft Outlook Exchange, RIM, task lists, remote deletion tools, etc.

Frustrated end users can degrade or defeat an enterprise sale by opting out or making counter choices. When the PC and the Internet first emerged, this happened too -- end users made choices counter to their IT departments "big brother" corporate-policy decisions. As the Crimson Group notes, in the early days of the mobile telephone, the largest group of buyers were business users making phone and service choices as individuals, but using them for business.

Today, history is repeating itself. Apple has captured the imagination of the enterprise end user, who are people too. Thus, Apple may in the end win this game, because they've made it far easier to add enterprise applications to their offering and win the enterprise market than RIM will find the challenge of making the Blackberry more appealing to hip users who want an entertaining lifestyle device.


Reaching Me: Ned Hayes · Seattle WA · 206.321.7981 · ned AT nednotes.com