It seems the best way to bury bad news is not to release it on a Friday evening; it’s to release it through an official company blog. Just ask Telefonica – a couple of weeks ago they used their BlueVia developer blog to announce that they’re closing their app stores in Germany, Spain, and Argentina. And the tactic seems to have worked: only a few outlets picked up on the news. One of those outlets was Mobile Entertainment, whose editor, Tim Green, sub-headed his piece with the question, ‘Is this the final death throe of the operator portal?’ and summarised the announcement in the following wise: “we’re handing you [i.e. consumers] over to Google and Apple. And maybe Amazon.”

Telefonica in choppy waters

Telefonica’s retreat is the latest action in the ongoing battle for the ownership of mobile content and a share of the profits that come with selling that content to consumers. It is also part of a gradual retrenchment by the mobile network operators, who spent most of the last decade repeating the mantra, “We will be more than just a bit-pipe”, and vowing to recoup their investment in 3G licenses acquired at the turn of the Millennium (in extortionate and counter-productive government auctions) or die trying. Unfortunately, there are more examples of the latter than the former.

Faced with declining voice revenues and chronic failure in the mobile content space, operators have been forced to accept and embrace their bit-pipe status and rally around increasing data revenues. Doing so has even allowed them to continue making a decent living, thanks to two factors: firstly, they’ve reduced their costs by consolidating their operations, and secondly, they’ve secured high data revenues through ‘regulation by negotiation’ (i.e. they’ve set the price of data ridiculously high, then waited for the regulator to roll it back to a slightly less ridiculous position). It’s worth noting that this second strategy isn’t going to be effective for much longer: the regulators continue to roll back the boundaries of what the operators can ask for data, especially where their highest-margin-generating international roaming victims are concerned.

Getting caught up in the operator red tape?

With operators so focused on selling expensive data packages to their subscribers, it’s no surprise that they’ve basically stopped caring about their mobile content initiatives. It’s even less of a surprise given how difficult those initiatives are to set-up, run, and make money from. Apple cracked it, of course, and as a result, some of the larger companies who feel threatened by Apple – e.g. Google, Amazon, Microsoft, and now Facebook – are having to learn to negotiate the space quickly. Early indications are that they’re already making a better go of it than the operators, but success is never guaranteed (a couple of years ago, a Mobile Enterprise editorial might have included Nokia’s Ovi in the list of new and exotic destinations for mobile consumers – and we all know how that turned out).

Why is this? Well, let’s start with their strategy. Or to be more specific, their lack of strategy. The core issue is that operators have not really known what to do with the content. Is it a customer acquisition strategy (3, having observed BSkyB’s success, garnered exclusive rights to distribute clips of Premiership football matches via the mobile channel but only opened their network a year before the exclusive option was due to expire)? Is it a revenue opportunity? Is it a basic service for all subscribers? Is it a marketing launch with not a great deal behind it – consider the “silver surfer” campaign run by BT Cellnet (the forerunner of Telefonica O2 in the UK) in 2000, or the Vodafone Live! launch which had consumers going into Carphone Warehouse saying “I want the David Beckham phone”, but not using the services ostensibly launched in the campaign.

If, at some point in the last couple of years, you’d asked the operators why they’d decided to close their mobile content portals, most would’ve simply shrugged and said, “They aren’t generating enough money”. Clearly, plenty of people out there were measuring the success of their mobile content portals based on the amount of cash they made – as opposed to looking at their contribution to the business of acquiring and retaining subscribers. Given that most of the mobile markets in the developed world are now saturated (in terms of mobile penetration), it’s probably the latter benefit that the operator’s CEO was expecting, and which he or she thought they were funding. So there’s a disconnect somewhere in the large bureaucracies which inevitably typify these organisations.

On this theme, it’s clear that operators’ mobile content ambitions have been hampered by the bureaucratic nature of their organisational structures and processes. These structures often mean marketing and technology departments work against one another while counter-productive political agendas triumph. I’ve seen this first-hand, and it’s probably as frustrating as trying to get at a pair of scissors encased in heat-sealed plastic. In one procurement exercise, early in the last decade, an operator tried to decide between four objectively scored approaches to building the latest version of their corporate consumer portal. Two of the approaches were being advocated by large, internal, IT groups; the other two were being pushed by ‘operating companies’. Operating companies are the local/regional organisations operators use to deliver their services from country to country; weirdly enough, they are treated as part of the operator parent company and as customers in their own right. Anyway, the approach finally selected was not the one that received the highest objective score, nor was it the cheapest. In fact, the two cheapest and highest scoring approaches weren’t even shortlisted. When the solutions were whittled down from four to two, the remaining choices were the ones being pushed by internal IT (which had scored, respectively, third and fourth), and obviously one of those was subsequently selected. Why? Well, one factor was that the “winning” internal organisation wanted to keep its expensive downtown office open (and avoid having to move to the parent company’s out-of-town HQ), and needed to win the brief to do so. The technology selection, at best, avoided having to take a wider set of difficult decisions.

The selected approach was generally deemed unsuccessful in the market. Ironically, if you spoke to the company officers they were quite sanguine about the whole process – ‘central IT’ made a massive ‘profit’ on ‘selling’ the mandatory offering to the group’s operating companies for an inter-company charge. So if measured in terms of meaningless intra-company funds transfers, it was a massive success. Job done, boys (and I’m not aware of any women involved in that particular decision) – high fives all round!

But why did operators continue acting in such a dysfunctional manner throughout the Noughties, a decade in which their anxieties about being reduced to mere ‘bit-pipes’ seemed to be at their height? The answer is that, until Apple, Google, and Amazon came through the middle, all of the operators acted in the same way; there was no externally disruptive player whose success would throw a light on their own mutual failure.

Without this light/these players, a situation which will be familiar to anyone who’s ever watched an episode of The Apprentice evolved. In case you haven’t seen it, allow me to explain: a job is given to a bunch of people with no experience or knowledge of how to do it, and with at least a 50% chance of failure. Success or failure is measured on who is least bad, rather than against any objective criteria, and the whole point of the exercise is to see how blame is assigned afterwards. A principle of social Darwinism comes into play; over a series of generations, you end up with a population where membership is defined through a process of survival through blame management, rather than by success in the market. You end up with a winner, but you sure as hell don’t want him or her running your mobile content shop.

Can operators do well out of business mobility services provision? My colleague Jeff Yee thinks so; you can read his post here.

I think everyone knows the potential impact of access provided by mobile technologies. As mobile computing continues to expand the implications are mind boggling, and the potential impacts on your business are critical. In thinking about mobile technologies; most people focus on the app on the device, and if you’ve read my blogs before you know I strong believe that the user experience will be a critical component in its success or failure.

As mobile accelerates, the speed and agility of the deployment are also critical – so consider how you’re going to manage this. Poor back-end deployment strategies can have as negative an impact on the user as any poorly designed UI, and an arduous infrastructure deployment can add significant precious time to a deployment project.

John Stratton, the President of Verizon Enterprise Solutions recently provided his views on the topic in a discussion with a group of industry analysts. He stated that we have already entered the next major era of computing that is based on cloud and mobility. He went on to comment on the dire consequences for those companies which do not embrace this era. He said that companies must reinvent themselves with this technology shift or risk destruction. A bit of hyperbole maybe, but business executives should not underestimate the rapid pace at which an enterprise mobile platform deployed through a cloud based service architecture can quickly provide positive business impacts.

I believe that the business impact of this technology shift will far exceed prior technology shifts. Stratton said he believes that with each wave of new computing technology there is a growth of 10x of users over the prior generation. In my opinion that may have been true prior to the internet era, but it far underestimates this wave.

It’s also important to not just to measure the impact of mobile in terms of users – but also in terms of engagement. In the world of PC-based internet access, users were tethered to their desktops. So while the number of users was a dramatic increase from prior generations, the impact of user engagement started and stopped with the time that user was logged into the workstation.

With mobile the access is ubiquitous, the user expectations are high, and many users are tethered to their mobile devices for all of their waking hours. Getting quick directions,checking email, checking the price on a purchase, researching a company, answering virtually any question… just pull your device out of your pocket.

In the child game ‘Where’s Waldo?’ the objective is to search out the single character in a huge crowd. When it comes to having high expectations for accessing mobile apps which are connecting cloud based services – we’re all Waldo – and it’s changing the ways that businesses interact with customer, partners, and prospects forever.

Don’t you hate it when you’re used to something and all of a sudden it changes on you? Probably the most extreme and infamous example of this was in 1985 when Coke was changed to “New Coke“–not only in name but also in the formulation (due to getting beat by Pepsi in their taste test challenges). People boycotted New Coke and within months, the “old” Coke was re-introduced as Coke Classic. Plus Coke Classic outsold both New Coke and Pepsi!

New coke didn't last long, and Coke Classic quickly took its place

Another less extreme example was when the Mars candy company rebranded the Marathon bar to “Snickers” in Britain in 1990. It made commercial sense since Snickers was the bar’s brand name elsewhere in the world. Nevertheless, UK customers grumbled about the change, but it stuck–and clearly they did not boycott the candy bar. Snickers is the world’s best-selling chocolate bar of all time!

Well, in the mobile world you may have seen or heard that Gartner released their latest Magic Quadrant report on mobility (if you haven’t you can request it for free here). Mobility solutions for enterprises have been around for a long time, and just a few years ago there were many names for such solutions, such as mobile middleware, mobile platforms and mobile frameworks. In fact, Gartner started out referring to this space with without any reference to mobile at all–they called it the Multi-Channel Access Gateway (MAG) market.

Then as mobility became a way of business–and life–Gartner eliminated MAG and created the Mobile Enterprise Application Platform (MEAP) and Mobile Consumer Application Platform (MCAP) reports. (Why not? Double the exposure!) MEAP was a funny, but catchy name and soon almost everybody dealing with mobility latched on to it (MCAP not so much–maybe because it’s two syllables). If you Google “MEAP” you’ll find loads of references and almost universally people in technology will understand what you mean when you say MEAP.

Which leads us to the present, where Gartner has decided to combine MEAP and MCAP into (drum roll please)… Mobile Application Development Platform or MADP! “Mad-P.” It doesn’t really roll off the tongue like MEAP, or heck even like “M-Cap.” Will MADP catch on? Will this be a case of a New Coke failure, or will the market gradually accept MADP as the new Snickers. What do you think?

Commercial Plug: I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that Antenna is excited and honored to have grabbed a spot in the Leaders Quadrant of the MADP Magic Quadrant this year, so whether it catches on or not – MADP is cool by me.

Web as a development platform for enterprise mobile applications is gaining momentum. It make sense to develop a single HTML5 application and run it on multiple mobile devices. And today’s web browsers are doing great job keeping up with HTML5 standards. Then why do you need a hybrid client? The question is simple and so is the answer. Things are built keeping some objectives in mind.

A Web Browser is a general purpose web-client to show and capture information online through web-pages. No doubt a great tool, but enterprise mobile applications need more. Let’s take a quick look at some of those important requirements:

A Hybrid Approach

1. Offline Support: They should work offline. Yes, HTML5 is there but it better suits to applications that require temporary storage or where life-span of information is small. Life-span of enterprise data on a mobile app is generally more than a day

2. Data Security: Security is one of the major concern in enterprise mobility. You can’t leave your data with web browsers because there is no proper data security. A hybrid client can provide a secure and robust way of storing and retrieving the information.

3. Auto-Provisioning: A hybrid client can auto-provision your enterprise applications based upon the authentication. End-user does not to worry about which web-app is for me and which not.

4. Version Updates: What if you need to upgrade application on the device of your end-user but he has some pending updates for the server? You can provide a robust way of optional, delayed or compulsory upgrade through a hybrid client.

5. Transaction Handling: An app running on mobile means no guarantee whether you are in network or not. Handling transactions when you are in offline mode is a big headache with web apps. But a hybrid client can handle them nicely and automatically.

6. Data Size Limit: HTML5 has data size limitations. A hybrid client can overcome these limits and allows you to store data based upon your device storage capacity.

7. Device Integration: Enterprise applications are very demanding these days. You need integration with GPS, NFC, camera, phone book, calendar etc. You can’t do most of these things through web apps. But a hybrid client can make it happen by exposing the native device capabilities to web-apps.

8. Native Push Notifications: Native push is really cool feature when you are not using an app and you need to be alerted with its notifications. With web apps, when you are online, you do not actually need native push but what if you have exited your web app. You can’t get any push notifications specific for that app. A hybrid client can allows you to receive these notifications and to handle them automatically without any user-intervention if needed.

9. Mobile Advancements: Mobile devices are getting smarter and powerful day by day. You can’t keep up with these advancements and leverage them in your mobile web applications until your device web-browser starts supporting them. Further, we all know that HTML5 is quite slow in keeping up with these advancements. A hybrid client can fill this gap. It can provide you the opportunities to keep up with these innovations and make your app more powerful, productive and future-proof.

Using web-technologies for developing your mobile application provide tremendous benefits like JavaScript as single programming language for multiple OSs, ease of development and debugging, skills-availability, open standards etc. But, in most cases, a web-browser is not enough to run an enterprise mobile application. And so a hybrid client like AMP Hybrid Client can provide, your web apps, the power of device native technologies and simplicity of web-technologies.

What is your take on it?

Have you ever driven a car that feels like it was made just for you? Everything is right where you think it should be. The controls seem to be exactly where you would have put them. Executing a task is effortless and easy. Nothing seems to be out of place and everything has a purpose. Now, have you ever used software that felt that way? Odds are you haven’t.

Evidence that mobile budgets are on the up and up is usually seen as cause for celebration, especially amongst vendors looking forward to eating a larger and tastier piece of the technology investment pie. Now, while I like pie as much as the next man, it would be remiss of me—irresponsible even—to ignore the implications of market research released by Antenna Software, the equally-pie-happy vendor I work for, which suggests that the growth in mobile budgets is unsustainable and that we are, as an industry, not doing enough to ensure that we’re earning our keep (read: pie).

Are you getting enough of the mobile pie?

I promise not to say anything more about pie if you keep reading. Assuming that you’ve agreed to that ‘bargain,’ you’ll want to hear what Antenna has revealed and why it threatens the rise in mobile business budgets. Here’s the story: Antenna tasked business research specialists Vanson Bourne with surveying 1,000 IT and business ‘decision makers’ on, amongst other things, the adoption they’ve seen when they’ve developed a mobile asset (be it app, web-app, mobile website, storefront, or content portal) for their own workers. In the business, and especially in the US, we call this ‘enterprise’ development. The specific question was: “If you’ve commissioned enterprise mobile projects in the past, to what degree have they been adopted by your employees?” The results of asking this question were quite sobering: only 1 in 4 respondents were able to state that their completed enterprise mobile projects have been taken up by the majority of the employees they were intended for. And 41 percent (i.e. a lot) of the respondents revealed that their enterprise projects have been taken up by only a quarter or less of the employees they were built for.

It is evident from these responses that both time and money being spent on giving employees tools to make their working lives easier and better is potentially going to waste. Moreover, when you consider that, to date, UK and US businesses have already spent an average of $431k on mobility projects and plan to spend an average of $456k on employee-facing mobile development in the next 12-18 months alone, it becomes clear that we’re talking about a lot of time and a lot of money. If businesses are consistently getting a poor return on their investment in mobile it is likely, highly likely even, that they will limit their spending in this area (despite demand), and that’s where the threat to the mobile business budget growth rate comes in.

So, the obvious question is – what’s going wrong? Why are so many enterprise mobile projects being left on the shelf? In my opinion, poor aesthetic and technical design is to blame. Too many apps and mobile websites are built without reference to the end user and without due consideration of the ‘use case’, i.e. why the mobile project is actually being undertaken in the first place. Through speaking to customers about their former/failed projects, it has become clear to me that too many mobile enterprise assets are built without the requisite offline functionality, and suffer from poor user interfaces and/or a failure to leverage the capabilities of the devices they’re running on. It’s also clear that the mobile software implementations which succeed do so because they are dedicated to one specific task or set of tasks (e.g. co-ordinating meeting room bookings), have the capability to keep the user informed as to what they’re doing at any given moment (e.g. they ‘notify’ the user when they are working on a calculation or accessing specific information), and are aggressively tested, in prototype form, in the wild, before they are rolled out across the business as a whole.

As an industry, we need a higher proportion of mobile projects to succeed. To make that happen we need everyone to join in the discussion about best practices and we need to champion them with our own work. The result of failing to do that is unthinkable. The result is less pie, for all of us.

Have you had a challenge rolling out an enterprise mobile app?  What’s been the main issue?

The following is a guest blog post, contributed by Mobile Masters reader and member, Tyler Moore. Tyler is an alumni of the University of Utah and is a tech, mobile and social media enthusiast. He is a professional writer for SatelliteInternet.com.

It was really only a matter of time before other designers and companies took a look at the iPhone and said “You know, we could probably do this or that better than Apple is doing it.”

The Android was a big step forward, offering an open source app store allowing anyone to publish without fear of censorship under Apple’s iron fist; and now Nokia is getting in on the action with the Lumia 900. Addressing “poor design” in the iPhone, here’s what it supposedly does better than Apple:

It’s 99 Bucks

The iPhone’s steep price tag seems to get steeper with each generation, so the 99-dollar Nokia will offer users a chance to play palm-sized games, browse the web and chat online all for a reasonable price tag. Right in the middle of a recession, not everyone can afford an iPhone, but most of us have spent more than 99 bucks on a nice dinner.

Easier Interface 

While the designers have been somewhat vague about this, they have promised an easier interface for the phone, suggesting that users won’t even have to touch the screen if they don’t want to. Whether that means improved voice command functions or a phone that reads your mind remains to be seen.

Streamlined Usability

Along with the easier, hands-free interface, we’ve also been promised streamlined usability. Where Android and iOS are compared to “dollhouses” with furniture that users can rearrange, the Nokia is promised to be more in-depth, intuitive and open-ended without sacrificing ease of use or clarity of design. This is in part thanks to the Windows operating system, which we will also see in the upcoming Microsoft web phone.

This is what’s promised of the phone, which just hit the market, but there’s no telling whether or not the product will be the groundbreaking new gadget that Nokia is promising. Voice command is already present in a lot of devices this year, and the new Microsoft Windows phone is offering much of the same open ended accessibility and user-friendliness.

In short, it’s going to be a crowded year for phones. This is for the best, in the long run. For the longest time, iPhone was really the only game in town, and then came Android, leaving users with two options, both a bit on the pricey side. Now, we may have half a dozen new phones to choose from by the end of the year.

Nokia’s statements would seem to be going after the iPhone demographic whereas the new Windows phone is likely to appeal to people who have never even considered spending more than $60 on a cell phone. Whether this proves to be a good strategy or not, only time will tell. What we can say is that they’re definitely going after a loyal fan base.

Where Nokia is promising a technological revolution, Apple is promising more of the same, but better. Microsoft is offering user-friendliness and Android offers a fun alternative. Users will simply have to wait and see what the future has in store for the phone market.