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.

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.

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.

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?

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. 

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.

In the mobile world, often times we – the ones who are building and deploying apps – get caught up in what is a real native app and what is not. A “real” native app, at its root, is one built on the native language and SDK of the device platform – such as Objective-C using Xcode for iOS. This is equivalent to a “real” steak from a freshly butchered cow.

Can you tell if this is the real deal?

However, there are “native” apps built using non-native technology – such as PhoneGap, Appcelerator or AMP Hybrid Client which all use web technologies like HTML, CSS and JavaScript to build an iOS app (and for other device platforms as well), rather than that native Objective-C. But the output from these solutions is still called a native app because the app can be deployed and installed via the native app store and can utilize native functionalities of the device hardware and software. So in effect it acts, behaves and feels like a true native app. Yet many purists label these as hybrid apps or “wrapped apps” to denote their lesser pedigree; as if to say these are like meat grown in laboratories, not meat from a cow!

As a user, what do you care about? You get an app from the app store. It works smoothly and looks fantastic. It even has geo-location functions and maybe even an image capture feature. Do you care if it’s a “real” native app or one built with non-native tools? Chances are you won’t even know, and you probably don’t care as long as the app works well. Technology has caught up in the mobile world where the lab grown meat can now be passed as grade A steak! As Cypher says while savoring his cut of beef, “Ignorance is bliss.”

Meanwhile… Mobility has trudged on with or without me. I finally made the big switch from a Windows Mobile 6.x device to an Android device and have been very happy. But of course, after owning my Motorola Droid RAZR for a few months they now offer one with a battery that will last a full day. I should have waited longer. Or should I?

Each day, week or month that goes by affords more innovation and more new gizmos that can help us in our daily lives. We seem to be losing track of the things we couldn’t do from our phones only yesterday and now they are the minimum stakes to get into the game. I had an interesting conversation with my daughter the other day about cars that mirrors what we see in the mobile market.

The first car I ever owned was a very used 1978 Chevy Nova. I loved that car. It had serious issues but it was my first car so I

Ain't she a beauty?

overlooked all of them (a non-functioning heater/air-conditioner was the biggest issue). That car had nothing special. I had to install my own AM/FM Cassette player (the stock AM radio was not cutting it). It had manual crank down windows, manual locks, no trunk release (without getting out and using the key), manual mirrors (requiring you to slide across the bench seat to adjust the passenger side mirror) and almost nothing you would recognize in a typical car of today. In my first car, cruise control involved wedging your foot just right between the gas pedal and the transmission hump. In short, it was awesome.

This all seems foreign to my daughter’s generation where automatic everything is included or available for even the lowest-end cars. Most people wouldn’t buy a car without air-conditioning let alone a decent stereo and automatic locks and power windows. And even heated seats are now standard on many vehicles, a luxury that would have been very handy back in the days when my heater didn’t work.

The point of this trip down memory lane is simple: we use our mobile phones for things that never dawned on us only a few months or years ago. And more importantly, much like with our car’s features, we cannot remember how we lived without these capabilities in the past. As the available horsepower in these little devices ramps up we see more capability that we just can’t live without. But there is a dark and sinister side to this progress.

I’ve whined in previous blogs that I was promised a flying car by the year 2000. That milestone year occurred more than a decade ago and I still don’t fly to work each day (at least not in a car). The line between work and non-work life has now been blurred by the encroachment of mobility into our DNA. It was easy in the old days (ok, maybe even 3 or 4 years ago) to have a BlackBerry device that was issued by your work but still maintain your own cell phone for personal use. You could easily (don’t tell my boss this) turn the BlackBerry off at night or on weekends to get some time off. That process is completely gone for most people now. You have a single device. It’s your work/life/home/friends/coworkers/family phone. One number, one device and only one way to get in touch with you either via voice or any number of electronic options.

So now my phone, like everybody else’s, is on 24×7. I was used to being on call in a former life. I had a work phone and pager and got called out to find criminals at all hours of the day and night. That was “normal” for me. But when I went on vacation, I transferred the duty to my pal and never looked back. I’m not sure how that works now in the world of constant communications. I guess you never really go “off the clock” these days.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not complaining. This is just an observation. After all, I make a living in the mobility market and see the value it can bring, so it’s all good as far as I’m concerned. However, it does make me wonder if when my daughter is my age she will be looking back and longing for the old days. The days where you could get away and not communicate and nobody thought you were odd if you did. Who knows? By that time she’ll probably have a surgical implant for her phone and I’ll bet she’ll have that flying car too.

You never know what heights we'll soar to, with cars or mobile devices.

What do I mean by this?

Remember when you go to the optician for an eye exam?  They ask you to read a combination of numbers and letters on the wall – then using a phoropter they determine a prescription for your glasses, and all of a sudden the combination of numbers and letters come into focus and the ones you could read just become a lot clearer.

Well, this is the exact same feeling you get when you stare at the screen of the new iPad, in comparison to previous models. Do not get me wrong, the screen on the iPad2 is fantastic, brilliant – and definitely not blurry, but the new iPad just takes it to a new level.

Welcome to the post-glasses world — you never realise how blurry things are because that’s just how you’ve always seen everything, but then you put the glasses on and you are amazed at how you ever managed without them.

What we are now blessed with, thanks to Apple is a 9.7-inch slab of aluminum and glass that when illuminated,  a stunning display of light and colour. Do not concentrate on the similarities between the iPad2 and this new iPad because what really matters with this tablet is what you are looking at.

Web pages read as if they were on a high-quality glossy magazine; photos look like the printed out kind and text is, just like print.

What does this mean for the enterprise – as this is my market after all.

Well, the screen and its beautiful pixels will add to the consumer side of apps; allowing for more detail, more colour and more style, however back in the rough and dirty side of employee facing apps – the new iPad is still in the same league as its predecessor – the iPad2. The typing difficulty and inability to use several apps at once can be very debilitating, especially when employees are expected to work their hardest throughout the day. While the battery life and versatility is definitely a yay, most enterprises will probably find it difficult to seriously convert the non believers from moving onto this new device – but for us consumers, the big question is;

Do you upgrade if you have a previous iPad model?

If you have the original iPad, then the answer is DUH. Of. Course! If you have an iPad 2, the decision is a little more difficult as its almost as fast as the new iPad. However, if you choose not to upgrade, then when next in the Apple Store – treat it as if it was Medusa.

Do. Not. Look. At. It.