Mobile trends - 2011

It’s been almost 3 years since my Boss came to me and told" Looks like mobile technologies is going to be huge. There is going to be a mass development efforts starting to happen on mobile. Let’s start having a look at it". That's when I started to read up and do some hands on mobile technologies, starting with J2ME and Windows Mobile. iPhone and Android were not the rage that they are now (at least Android was not). That's about the time when I wrote this blog. Now when I revisit that old blog, I'm really surprised at the change that has happened in the Mobile world. Mobile phones have given way to smart phones and they are now giving way for Super phones and Tablets.

While smart phones were about being a good media gadget (a good camera, a nice display with good audio and video capability) with a speedy processor along with 3G capability and a good browser and some fun to have apps, Super phones are all about being the media gadget with outrageous capabilities with a brilliant camera and brilliant displays, super fast processors (multi-cores), with 4G capability, great browsers and some serious apps. Almost all of the future phones announced by different phone companies almost all of them has plans to incorporate NFC technology in them. While Symbian was the uncrowned king 3 years back, the crown has moved to Android (in terms of market share at least...And I'm pretty sure iPhone owners will just smirk at market share).

Today mobile phones have become an integral part of our daily lives, more so than before. Let’s have a look at the current status of all the platforms mentioned in the earlier post and see where they stand.


iPhone (iOS)



Apple revolutionized the mobile world with its release of iPhone. They again did wonders with the concept of App store which became a raging success. Even though the iPod market was getting saturated, they virtually created a new market for tablets by releasing iPad. They brought out the Retina Display. Whatever the competition do as latest is already done by Apple. iOS has become the standard that other platforms are vying to become. Every product now wants a presence in the App store. But all this success was not without its share of problems. Apple is seen as closed and authoritarian system where they decide what apps to get approved or not. Their standoff with Adobe by not allowing Flash in iOS was major news. They had the infamous antenna-gate incident which took a lot of sheen from the release of iPhone 4 along with the search of Gizmodo heads house created a lot of negative publicity. Also they recently lost their superiority in the US market to Android. But by creating a CDMA version of the iPhone 4 and there by having it run on Verizon network could be a major change. All the folks that were running to Android because of AT&T will now have a choice to get iPhone from Verizon. The next version of iPhone is rumored to be coming with NFC capability and lots of other feature that the mobile enthusiasts are looking forward to.

Android



From being a small initiative from Google (via Open Handset Alliance) to the market leader, it has been quite a journey for Android. The growth for Android is just explosive. They grew from a 0 to more than 30% in just 3 years. In fact there was recent Canalys report where it said that Android has overtaken Symbian as the smart phone market leader in the last quarter of 2010. In these 3 years Android went through 5 new versions, each version bettering the product and bringing in more market share.(They also managed to give some interesting names for each versions, each being named after some dessert). Android is coming out in full swing with their latest version Android 3.0 (HoneyComb) which is said to made to target tablets. Tablets is the next arena where Android will have to fight it out with iOS and with the amount of new tablet releases announced for Android, it is going to be another interesting battle. Unlike iOS, Android is an open sourced platform and each handset makers have made different offerings (in terms of UI) to differentiate themselves from the competitors. This has augured well for Android (But this has also raised the fragmentation concerns amongst the developers too). The Android market is growing strong, catching up to the iTunes app store. One of the major negative feedback about Android market was about its usability and Google has heard those concerns and rectified it and come out with a new web version of the Android market.

Symbian



How the mighty have fallen. From being a Company that had more than 50% share of the smart phone market to just 30% (and eroding further) this is a big fall. While iOS and Android are in the next bout to retain the supremacy in the tablet segment, Symbian is still trying to be relevant in the mobile platforms. Symbian had gone through the cycle of being bought by Nokia, who open sourced it and later on pulled it back after some of the key members of the foundation like Samsung and Sony Ericsson has left it. And going by the response to the latest Nokia mobiles built on Symbian^3, it looks like it's about to reach its end of life. While everyone lauded Nokia N8 hardware, it was a unanimous review that the software (especially the UI) let it down. Rumor is that Nokia is shelving their plans to bring the next version of Symbian (Symbian^4) and put all their efforts in MeeGo (created by merging Moblin and Maemo. There were some other rumors that they might build phones based on Android or Windows Phone 7 OS (especially now that Stephen Elop is the new CEO, who was the head of the Microsoft Business division). But Nokia has denied these rumors. It looks like Nokia is betting on MeeGo for their future.

Windows Phone 7



Microsoft understood that carrying along dead weight won't do much help and no amount of beautification on the existing mobile will sell the Windows Mobile. So they stopped with Windows Mobile 6.5 went back to labs and came out with a brand new platform OS in Windows Phone 7. They clearly had put some thought and effort into it and the new Tile UI was unanimously appreciated. Even though starting afresh meant building apps from the scratch, Microsoft has always provided one of the best development environments in the form of Visual studio. In the new platform the UI is build using Silverlight and you can use the all familiar C# as you language. Windows Phone 7 started off with rave reviews and a plethora of devices from partners like HTC, Samsung, LG and Dell. They also made a good start with the Microsoft marketplace with a good number of apps to support. But even after this nice move from Microsoft, they are still not able make any dent in the market share. Microsoft has also made a nice move in the form of porting Windows 8 (an OS especially being made to target tablets) to run on ARM processors. But Apple has already had a great head start in the tablet division with its iPad and Android is now coming in there with their Honeycomb and it could be another case where Microsoft is a bit too late. But knowing Microsoft, you should never count them out; it might be a matter of time.

Blackberry



RIM is another company that has kind of lost a lot of its appeal. The 'crackberry' addicts are now moving away towards the iPhones and Droids. The enterprise world where Blackberry had a stronghold with its mail infrastructure is now waving. With Blackberry too the problem was about not innovating in the OS and the App store. While iPhone and Android built a fantastic environment with plenty of apps Blackberry was slow to move. The touch screen mobiles in the form of Storm were major embarrassment. The media capabilities were bad and the browser was one of the worst. Recently they tried to rectify these issues with releasing Blackberry OS 6 with a brand new webkit browser and better media capabilities. They also showcased a new tablet (Playbook) which has got some decent attention. RIM is still a major player in the mobile market but they are in a position from where they could go further down if they stop being innovative.

WebOS



Palm was becoming irrelevant in the mobile market after the rise of the iPhones and Androids. The first thing they did was to get Jon Rubinstein from Apple. Rubinstein was one of the brains behind the development of iPod. Then they did something similar to what Microsoft did. Then went back to the labs and started from the scratch and came out with webOS. webOS was reviewed positively by technology enthusiast across the world. Their deck of cards concept of UI was an entirely different offering compared to the competitors. Palm Pre and Palm Pixi were the two flagship devices for WebOS. Unfortunately for Palm webOS really didn't really hit it off even after all those hoopla's. One of the main reasons was the unavailability of apps in the palm web store as compared to the iPhone or Android offerings. Also the limitation in the number of devices could have been an issue. It looked like Palm was about to shut shop when HP bought the company over. Recently there have been announcements from HP about several new tablets coming to market running on webOS. This could mean a fresh new lease for webOS. But the choice on apps is something that HP will have to work to really push webOS to the top league.

Here is a graph showing the current market share of each OS



There are a few other platforms out there in the market like Brew from Qualcomm and Bada OS from Samsung which are trying to get into the main stream. It will be fun to see what’s going to happen in the mobile market in the future and what will be the status of each of these platforms.

HTML 5 video tag codec issues

One of the most hyped features of HTML 5 is the video tag. A proper implementation of this would spell trouble for the third party browser plug-ins like Flash, Silverlight, Quicktime etc. But there’s a big war going on in the browser world regarding the implementation of this tag. The video codec that will be used for implementing the video tag is still under dispute. W3C has not yet concluded on what codec to use and each of the Browser builders are thinking of their own options

Mozilla and Opera wants to go with Ogg Theora, which is an open source, patent free video codec. But the issue lies with the fact that it is of not so great quality and will be unable to give out high performance videos.

H.264 is another codec build and patented by the ISO Moving Picture Experts Group (aka MPEG). This has a great quality associated with it and follows all the standards too. Another big positive for H.264 is the fact that all the You tube videos are in this codec.. Sounds great? Well the problem is the fact that you have to pay licensing fees to MPEG to use this codec. Microsoft has already approved this codec are going to use this in their IE 9 browser. Mean while Google Chrome uses ffmpeg library that supports both Ogg Theora and H.264

Apple Safari wants to go with their custom quick time implementation.

You see… it’s a mess. It will be sometime before we see anything meaningful out of HTML 5 video tag.

Beware of your data in social networking sites !!!!

I recently read two different articles which say about the Data collected by social networking sites used out in the open. Facebook and MySpace are the sites which started off this whole social networking paradigm and popularized it. MySpace might be on a decline when compared to Facebook but they still see close to I billion user status updates every month. Moreover MySpace under the new management are trying to revive their position by realigning their business model and trying to be a major music seller. And the story of Facebook is known to everybody. Recently there was an article which said Facebook traffic has surpassed Google in the US to become the most visited website for the week (Of course Facebook still has a long way to go if you include Google's non-search properties)

Here is the article

Coming back to our original topic, there is a huge value on the data collected by these sites which mainly includes the web usage profile of each user. One of these articles talks about FBI and Feds collecting Facebook, social media data for identifying relationships, chasing the bad guys and going undercover etc. The other one includes news on how MySpace has put up user data for sale. According to the article the 22 sets of data being made available are cheap. Prices range from $10 for raw dumps from the MySpace API to $300 for everything broken out by latitude and longitude.

Here are the two links

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/myspace_bulk_data.php

http://blogs.zdnet.com/BTL/?p=31996

Now what do you make out of these news. Do you think Privacy is a big concern in social networking? Will these moves avert people from getting into social networking? Should there be some sort of law that protects these data from being utilized by Governments and big corporations???

Google Apps MarketPlace

After the success of AppStore from Apple every other Mobile vendor has rushed to put out a AppStore of their own. No one has attained the sort of success and buzz generated by Apple. Android is the only other market place where some sort of activity is happening, but even that is nowhere near the size of Apple AppStore.

Now Google has made a new move. They have opened up a market place for Google Apps. This though is more of a headache for Microsoft. This is clearly targeted to increase the popularity of Google Apps and take away some market share from the Office. Especially since Microsoft is pushing out Office 2010 with cloud capabilities. Google will be hoping this move will allow them to create a developer ecosystem around Google Apps. I wouldn’t be surprised if Microsoft came out with a similar one very soon.

This program enables integrations with such applications as Google Gmail, Documents, Sites and Calendar. All told, the effort begins with 50 vendors participating, including Atlassian, NetSuite, Skytap and Zoho. Users can link to an application via the UI in Google applications, offering benefits like single sign-on and sharing of data between Google Apps and third-party applications. Centralized administration also is featured. Participation in Google Apps Marketplace is open to customers of the Premier, Standard and Education editions of Google Apps. Applications are linked to the marketplace via REST Web services and APIs including OpenID and OAuth.

The real sweet part in this whole deal for Developers getting in is the fact that Google will pass on 80 percent of revenues from Google Apps Market sales to participating partners and keep the remaining 20 percent. Well what are you waiting for….There is money to be made!!!!!

Here is the link to Google Apps Marketplace

Google Ad Preferences

This was an interesting piece of information that I got from one my RSS feeds from Digg.

Google logs an astonishing amount of data, including the search logs from its flagship product. Europe's data protection supervisors have called for IP anonymization after six months and competing search engines like Bing do just that. Yahoo scrubs its data after 90 days. But Google does the "anonymization" only after 9 months. This has raised a lot of questions in the industry against Google and Google as always wants to defend their methods especially since they have the now famous motto of "don't be evil". The explanation provided by Google for keeping this sort of information for this long is that it gives better results(read as context and people sensitive ads). So basically they track the users browsing habits and creates profiles around people based on their browsing history in Google related products and applications. So it will not be advisable to do a search in Google (especially if you are logged into Google) that says "How to kill my Boss" .Next time you login you might be prompted with ads about rat poisons and hired guns :-)

Now to prove themselves as the "good guys" and to mark themselves as the most transparent, they have build a service called as Google Ad Preferences. If you open this service, Google will show you the profile that they have created about you based on your browsing history. You can go in and either opt out of Google Profiling or Remove a particular profile that you think you don't want to be in.

How to use Ad preferences? As always with Google it's very simple. Log into Google. Go to Google search and type "Google Ad preferences" (or you can try this link www.google.com/ads/preferences/). The page that results will show the profile that Google has created about you , with options to either opt out or removing a particular interest from the list or even add any interests. Have a look at this service and see what sort of profiling Google has done about you!!!

Is Google testing TV Search Service

There is a recent report on WSJ which says that Google is trying to introduce Search into the TV services too. The report is available only to the Subscribed users, but still the idea is a very powerful one. The rumor around is that Google is testing a TV search service on Android OS set-top boxes. The service, being tested in conjunction with Dish Network satellite TV service, would allow users to search Dish programming as well as video Web properties, such as YouTube. But we will have to wait and see what would be the input controls in this case. Will our TV Remotes act like a Keyboard to enter the search terms and options?

Linking Web content and traditional TV programming into a searchable database for viewing is a smart idea. Eventually, TV programming will be funneled through the Internet instead of cable and satellite systems. Viewers will need a way to not only find programming but discover new ones, as well. Also the more interesting part is the role of Android in all these. Android has already been ported to Netbooks and Archos tablet like devices. So making a Set Top box run in Android might not be an impossible idea. Still, it’s hard to imagine that set-top boxes will be around for much longer as Web technology moves directly to the TV screen itself and eliminates the need for add-on devices.

Another interesting point to note here is, how Google is trying to integrate its Cash Cow (Search) into just about anything!!!!

Here is the WSJ article

Google PubSubHubbub (PuSH)

Google is developing a system that will enable web publishers of any size to automatically submit new content to Google for indexing within seconds of that content being published. Search industry analyst Danny Sullivan told us today that this could be "the next chapter" for Google.

Google would some day use PuSH for indexing the web instead of the crawling of links that has been the way search engines have indexed the web for years.Google senior product manager Dylan Casey said yesterday at Sullivan's Search Marketing Expo in Santa Clara, California that the company plans to soon publish a standard way for site owners to participate in a program much like that.


PuSH is a syndication system based on the ATOM format where a publisher tells the world about a Hub that it will notify every time new content is published. Subscribers then tell the Hub "when this Publisher posts new content, please deliver it to me right away." So instead of the Subscriber checking back with the Publisher all the time to see if there's new content, they just sit and wait to be told that there is by the Hub. The Publisher publishes something, then tells the Hub that it's available, then the Hub goes and delivers it to all the Subscribers. This can take as little as a few seconds.

If Google can implement an Indexing by PuSH program, it would ask every website to implement the technology and declare which Hub they push to at the top of each document, just like they declare where the RSS feeds they publish can be found. Then Google would subscribe to those PuSH feeds to discover new content when it's published.

PuSH wouldn't likely replace crawling, in fact a crawl would be needed to discover PuSH feeds to subscribe to, but the real-time format would be used to augment Google's existing index.


PuSH is much more computationally efficient for Google but Slatkin says that even more important is the impact of such a move for small publishers. Right now many small sites get visited by Google maybe once a week. With a PuSH system in place, they would be able to get their content to Google automatically right away.

A richer, faster, more efficient internet would be good for everyone, but the benefits in search wouldn't be limited to Google, either. The PubSubHubbub is an open protocol and the feeds would be as visible to Yahoo and Bing as they would be to Google.