Robin Jewsbury's Blog

I just read a good summary of what's happening with m-commerce from GigaOM.  He reports that in the US, m-commerce transactions have increased between 3 and 5 times year on year for this period running up to Christmas.  Note when people quote percentages and multiples its because the absolute numbers can still be quite low, but I think this is still very significant for a number of reasons. 

Traditionally mobile transactions have been for mobile content such as Apps and Music, but the implication is that this is changing.  With the advent of mobile checkins/location monitoring apps, the rise of the recommendation engine is becoming significant.  People are being  persuaded to use their mobile to aid the decision making or even suggest physical goods purchases.  It's still really early days.  This morning I watched Robert Scoble interview Dennis Crowley at LeWeb.  Dennis is now putting big emphasis away from checking in for mayorships and pushing the concept of their Explorer recommendation engine - he sees this as the future of Foursquare; and so do I.  In fact I see it as the future of lots of companies.  M-commerce is in transition, whilst apps and music purchases may still dominate the transactions today, there is some evidence something new and very different is about to happen;  people are beginning to make physical goods purchases from their mobile.  I can envisage me making most of by physical goods purchase from my phones with the help of tools such as recommendation engines.

So who commercially is going to benefit from this new area.  Well, the usual suspects of Google, Twitter and Facebook are there along with the new kids on the block of Foursquare coming up quickly.  But I began thinking where are the operators?

The operators have had all the building blocks to enable such services for years.  They have identity, location and charge to bill capability.  So what are they doing?   Well I'll leave that an open question but here's a list of what they should be doing...

1) enabling identity everywhere (so they can recognise their users on Wifi as well as when they're on their network) (NB this is technically possible).

2) the big operators should be working together to enable cross-operator services which work no matter which operators they are on.

3) they should be enabling commercial 3rd parties to create services which use their information, such as identity, location, charge to bill etc. 

They should be investing in these heavily because there is still time to effectively compete with Google and Facebook but that window of opportunity will disappear unless they do it now.

 

 

 

The world has noticed that we're about to reach 7 billion people on the planet.  What was not noticed that we just went through today the 6 billion connected phone barrier.  See phonecount.com

It's been pointed out to me that there are actually only 5billion users of phones because of multiple sims per user.  A detailed report from Ericsson on these stats has recently been produced.

 

After spending just a couple of days looking at Windows Phone development for the first time, I thought it worthwhile to record my findings as it could be useful for other developers now making the transition to the new platform.

The installation of the Windows Phone tools is relatively simple although you need Vista or Windows 7 for the install to work.  Once installed you end up with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Express.  Also download the WP7 Training kit offline, this is a tutorial which takes you creating your first application.  It's also worth watching a few of the videos (watch these ones on this page step 3 as some of the other introductory videos are decidelly poor) which explain development.  

 Once you're up and running with Visual Studio you can create your first app.  You actually have 2 main choices at this point, you can either create an XNA app (if your app is going to be a game) or a SilverLight app if it's a page based app.  In my case I wanted to create a page based app; you can follow the tutorial so I want go into the details here, but there is also a tool called Expression which allows the UIs to be designed graphically. Either way you end up with an XML definition of the UI and at the same time you can see what it will look like on the screen.  Once you're coded up you hit debug and the Windows Phone 7 Emulator runs and you can interact with your app, set break points and inspect data values.  All these tools are absolutely first class quality and completely faultess as far as I can see, so that's all great news.

Now the next thing is what to do with the apps and here it gets more complicated, control is more similar to iPhone's approach to treating apps.   Apps are a bit more controlled than with today's Nokia phones.   Apps can only be downloaded from Microsoft's own appstore called App Hub and no where else, not even operator appstores it seems (correct me if I am wrong someone).  As a developer you can declare your phones as a development device and install your own apps on it.  You can also email the apps to people who have also declared their phones to be development phones and there is a tool called Application Deployment to install them on their phones but no other distribution approach is allowed.

So you have to sign up to AppHub in order to distribute your apps.  It costs $99 (£65) per year to join (free for students) and you then there are some further rules.  You can only have 5 free apps per year per developer but as many paid for apps as you want.  There's the usual QA of course and as yet I don't know how painful that is.  Apparently sign up involves being given a Verisign certificate and this involves having to let Verisign phone you up and sending them a scan of your passport etc.  I've been through similar things with some other appstores.  Then finally in order to get paid you have to submit a W8-Ben form (although there is no hurry for this as it's not needed until you've actually earnt some money) if you are not an American and don't want the US Govt to withhold 30% of your income as tax.  This is a complete pain as this form requires you to get either an EIN (enterprise identity number if you are a company) or an ITIN (if you're an individual).  I've been through this pain already for a different appstore but getting the EIN for my company cost me £300 (inc VAT) and several weeks, so be warned.  There are only 2 companies in the UK who can get you the EIN or ITIN so also quite involved.

OK so what's the phone like and what's it like to write code?  Well, it's really very easy to create great looking apps.  I have two issues but I've heard both of these will be fixed before the end of the year.  Firstly Apps are subject to single tasking OS today, anything that happens eg a phone call or even screen lock and the app is closed and you have to code the saving of state (similar to what you have to do with the iPhone and Samsung Bada) and then of course when the app is resumed you have to code the loading of the state info to resume where you left off.  The other issue I had was the browser only supports HTML4 and CSS2.1.   So today I watched Steve Balmer's key note at Barcelona and he announced both issues will be resolved before the year is out (as if he was reading my mind).  There will be an upgrade which allow multitasking (I suspect the suspend and resume functionality may still be required though) and they will be supporting HTML5 too and I suspect it will be a subset of CSS3 too.  The goiod news though is they said the IE9 engine going on Mobile is code identical with the desktop version (whether this is really true I'll wait to see of course because I wonder how they deal with the scrolling issues that Apple Safari and Android Chrome treat very differently.

Overall the new world of Microsoft tools is a very smooth process just a shame about the additional expenses of a new appstore to deal with.

 

Friday was a sliding doors moment for me.  Nokia could have gone in several different directions and the decision was taken which surprised and shocked me but that decision is now made.  One of the beauties of real life is there is rarely a wrong and a right choice;  all choices have wrongs and rights about them and, unlike the film, we will never know what would have been the result of any alternative path - you have to live with decisions like these and move forward with them.  The good thing for me about Stephen Elop's decision is that it is very decisive, clear and simple.  We are now all on a different path in our lives working with Nokia and that path has been very clearly stated. 

So I've just been downloading the Windows Phones developer tools this afternoon and going through the tutorials.  Exciting times are indeed ahead.   All I can say to any Nokia techies reading this please push for HTML5 and CSS3 (preferably webkit and not IE please) support as soon as possible; you need it to compete.  I've read HTML5 is targeted for WP7.5 and that's the version which will be used but push for a webkit browser if you can please please please.

I tweeted a quote from Eric Schmidt a few weeks ago

"while mobile is growing faster than desktop, [mobile] monetization has not been optimised yet"

I was quite pleased to see the Head of Google admitting that mobile monetisation (and by that he mostly means advertising) was not optimal, because I have known for some time that currently mobile advertising just does not work for the small mobile web-site owner,  it only makes money for the aggregators such as Google and the small guy with less than 1 million hits per month is getting very small amounts of money.  Even bigger players such as publishers and operators are usually very disappointed with the income they get from mobile advertising.  Why is this?  You just know that this is wrong, it does not feel right. 

The reason is that the way advertising on online and in particular on mobile is done is not the right way.  Today advertising has evolved from the way print and the broadcast media do advertising.  You hear statements that targetted advertising is the answer but targetting means putting a music phone advert in an X-Factor (UK popular Saturday night TV program) ad-break - you know that young music lovers watch X-Factor so you hope they will buy your music phone.  This works for limited number of cases, but not every advertising use case; in fact it's not optimal; in fact it's a million miles from being optimum.  And if something is not optimum then its not earning enough money for anyone. 

Search advertising might get closer to true targetted advertising because someone who is searching for something can be targetted for that precise thing.  That is why Google has been financially successful in online advertising.  But, by their very nature we do not use phones as much for search as we do for the fixed web.  We use our phones more for viewing content not searching for it.  A new model is needed for creating targetted advertising on mobile.  This is why Google have resorted to creating their own phone with their own search button, but this is not the real answer for the user, advertiser or website owner; that is just Google's answer.  What we need is truely targetted advertising, where the targetting is based on what the user is reading, the time of day, their exact location and their history of being interested in similar adverts. Hopefully this will be obvious to those reading this.  If an advert is truely relevant to a reader, it will no longer be viewed as an advert it could be viewed as a service providing useful info and where I can purchase this thing I am interested in.  This is the future of advertising - fully targetted adverts which are fully optimised and will then make money for everyone.  So why is no-one currently doing this?   I think that people are only now waking up to these ideas and how significant they really are.  Social sites such as Facebook also provide some targetting data and are toying with getting location information from users (in an inefficient way), but again it not opimal.  Let's say currently mobile advertising is only 5% efficient and that with full targetting it is possible to get to 80% efficiency (both made up numbers but hopefully you get the idea), there is a lot of improvement and money to be made in this area.

 

 

 

 

I am pleased to announcement that 6 of our apps created on eyemags.com which have been uploaded to Ovistore have today crossed the 1 Million download level.  The highest downloads come from an app called "Optical Illusions" which on its own has had 1/2 million downloads.

 

 The Mary Meeker Internet Trends report from Morgan Stanley and at http://www.morganstanley.com/institutional/techresearch/cm_summit_june2010.html is an excellent summary of the state of play in the mobile market (although at times a little US focussed).  One of the many fascinating items is the predicted decline in the number of feature phones to be sold in the US and replaced by Smartphones.  I am sure this is the reason for increasing the standing of Symbian for the mid tier phone market.  This is very nicely shown in the above graph.

Another interesting discovery was the $50B gap between market share and advertising spend on the internet on slide 25.  Obviously advertising on mobile needs to improve significantly before this gap can be filled but I am sure this is going to happen some time soon.

Lots more interesting discoveries such as the rise of mobile ecommerce in Japan which is an indicator that it will happen elsewhere too.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Back in November I wrote my first advice for entrepreneurs article and it's taken me 6 months to write this second article. I've been busy trying to make money from my business and one mechanism I've explored is mobile advertising and I want to share some of those experiences here.

Firstly I have to say that I've never seen mobile advertising as a main stay income for my business.  It has been consistently disappointing at the levels of income it has delivered, but at the same time it has been a welcome background trickle of small amounts which can keep the business going whilst we search for a real effective business model.

Secondly as well as being consistently disappointing is also been consistently inconsistent.  From one day to another I see massive swings in the income coming in and I've struggled to understand why that is.  The problems are that it's a complicated area.  My service has changed its geographic spread over the months and this has changed my income.  In general Europe and the US can pay 10 times more per click than India for example.

I quickly realised that using a single ad provider like Admob was non optimal.  The initial issue I had was dramatic changes in the fill rate from one day to another.  This led me to adding a 2nd provider to place ads when the 1st was unable to give me an ad.  As my service grew in volume I added a 3rd and a 4th provider because each was failing to provide sufficient inventory - even now 4 is still not enough. 

The next issue I saw was that as my ad impressions increased I was not seeing a consistent increase in revenue - it was not scaling.  What was happening as I requested more impressions I was being given lower quality ads which generated lower quality revenue.  The graph at the top of the article plots ads impressions per day against eCPM (the effective income per 1000 impressions).  This graph shows the variable nature of the income and at first sight there seems no pattern to it.  But there are conclusions I have drawn.  I think the algorithms are favouring companies with small number of impressions (eg 5K per day) and also there is an optimum number of impressions I should not go beyond.  Above 30K impressions the eCPM starts to fall off.  

Because of the fill rate issues I had taken a waterfall approach to allocating ad provider (ie if one failed then I allocated the next).  However, because of the 30K optimum impressions I then modified my allocation to only allow my main ad provider 30K impressions on adverage per day and then allocate impressions to other ad providers.  This has the effect of inceasing my revenue with all the providers including the primary one.  That is less page impressions generated more income.

Now I have to give a health warning with these findings.  They may well be somehow related to my own circumstances and/or a flaw in the Admob algorithms (my main ad provider) and this will not remain the same over time.  However, for my own circumstances I have found less can be more and anyone in a similar situation I'd encourage you to investigate their own figures.

 

 

 

I've just watched a programme I now watch weekly called "The bottom line". It's available in the UK as a video but in the rest of the world it's a podcast only but well worth listening too. It's very clever in that every week they have 3 business leaders from different industries but with a balance and mixture which helps complete the true story that Evan Davis the presenter is trying to convey. This week they talked about outsourcing and the magazine industry and they had the Head of O2 UK (Ronan Dunne), the CEO of Future Publishing (Stevie Spring) and the CEO of First Source an Indian outsource company (Ananda Mukerji).

I was fascinated by what this mixture of people would say about the magazine industry and in particular Evan's question to Stevie on how she thought the magazine industry would look in 10 years time.

So the answer from Stevie was surprisingly honest: she did not know but they would try lots of business models, but she still thought that physical magazines would exist on the shelves and said that magazines needed to be "keepable", "portable" and have "serendipity". The answer from Ronan was he thought there was a great compliment between online and physical magazines. For me, Ananda's answer was even more interesting; he said that in India people were not using the fixed Internet with only 12M users but there were 450M users using their phones and that the interest in magazines was becoming more of a microcosm; more granular.

I loved these answers because for me they answered it perfectly but did not quite come to the conclusion I would make. For me it's obvious what will happen and they nearly got to it but did not quite get there. Increasingly over the next 10 years people will be using mobile devices to read magazines - in the west this will be devices such as Internet tablets and high end smartphones but in places like India it will be all models of mobile phone.

Of course in 10 years, in India, the smartphone will be the low end device for magazine consumption anyway and will almost certainly be a Symbian device as explained by Anssi Vanjoki on All About Symbian latest interview with him. These magazines on tablets and smartphones will be "keepable", "portable" and have "serendity" because they will be delivered by tiny apps (hopefully using my own technology); they will be physically on the phone and they will in many case be purchased using micro payments systems such as premium SMS or through Appstores such as OviStore. This is not the online website technique they thought they were talking about and which exists today. Online websites will continue to exist as complimentary multimedia to the "keepable" and "portable" magazines which themselves will be delivered content applications delivered to the mobile device.  And the physical paper delivered magazines will always exist but will continue to decline over the coming 10 years.

Whilst 3D TVs made the big headlines here in Las Vegas, I have my 3 most interesting items from the show:

 1) The QUE from Plastic Logic.  This amazing e-Reader is only 3/10th Inch thick - I thought it was a cardboard demo until someone clicked something.  What's really interesting is built on new technology - there is no silicon in it, its all plastic - this is the future of electronic devices.  Wired Magazine said the Kindle should fear this one.

2) The FemtoCell devices were here from Ubiquisys and the chip makers PicoChip were here too.   MagicJack announced an disruptive versoion which will retail for $40 with a WLAN subscription in a few months.  The disruption is that they bypass the operator and use VOIP over the internet.  If this device is found to be legal it will bring femtocells to millions.  On the UKTI stand the BBC R&D group were demo-ing streaming to 3 cell phones at once with no intrupption using a Ubiqusys femotcell.

3) PassivEnergy announced a home heating control system which pays for itself within 2 years and saves the environment too.  CEO Colin Calder pointed out that the world has concentrated on improving cars and forgotten about the home - he is correcting that change.

See UK Technology Live site for more details about these companies.

 

 

 

Well is today, the 1st Dec, is the 30th anniversary of Pink Floyd the Wall album being released? 

No, that was yesterday.  Today, is the 30th birthday of the mobile phone according to Tomi Ahonen.  Many think that the first mobile was created by Motorola, but Tomi has correctly identified that it was first released in Japan by NTT.

Phones have changed significantly in the last 30 years.  Just think what phones in 30 years time will be like.

 

 

 

 

 

 

A month ago, I started my second startup and whereas I now know all the things I should not do again, I can say its just as hard this time.   I continue to make mistakes but at least I've learnt from the previous ones and they're different mistakes this time. I thought though for all the other aspiring entrepreneurs out there it's worth blogging about some of my experiences.  In this first article I describe my choice of where and how to host my new service.

In our previous startup, we'd used a managed hosting service from Rackspace from a server farm here in London.  Rackspace have always been good and we had no complaints.  They're ideal for what we wanted: they provide a server(s) which is/are 100% ours sitting in their server farm in a resilient network and have excellent "fanatical" support. The only gripe has been they always seemed a bit expensive and it seemed a big bill to pay on day 1 o f a startup, so when I started this time I looked around for possible alternatives.

An obvious starting point was to look at cloud services.  An advantage for brand new startups is that they are really low cost at the beginning and they grow and scale smoothly as the service grows.  My selection list took me eventually to 3 possibilities:

1. Amazon EC2,
2. Google AppEngine,
3. RackspaceCloud

Amazon and Google are similar in that they abstract away the database functionality in programmable objects so you do not deal directly with the database in the way my own old fashioned mind expects.  For a brand new startup with no legacy code this is the ideal because the new system can be programmed directly for that system.  But the issue is also it potentially locks you as a developer into one particular solution ie the Amazon way or the Google way.  I did spend several days playing with the GoogeAppEngine and was very impressed.  The development environment is all built into Eclipse and writing, testing and deploying code is really just a few clicks and its live.  For about a week I thought this was the way and I was planning to take my code and abstract out the database and file storage layers so that I could interface with GoogleAppEngine. Incidently GoogleAppEngine has no mechanism to talk directly to the filing system and I was a little uncertain about this as it could lead to issues for my software which stores large number of images directly in the filing system.

Playing with GoogleAppEngine was free because below a certain threshold there are no charges for use - so this was also ideal for me. 

However, I then looked at Rackspace Cloud and suddenly I felt more at home with the approach they had taken simply because it matched the approach we'd taken in the previous startup.  With RackspaceCloud Server you get your own virtual server.  You buy from them the number of (or fractions of) CPUs you want and disk space you intend to use.  The lowest price is very affordable(although not free as with Google).  On this server you install what you want - in my case Apache, Tomcat and MySQL server and hey presto you have a fully working service and the legacy code I had which used this directly just worked first time without any modifications needed.  Incidently Rackspace have two other services called Cloud Sites and Cloud Files which are more akin with the Google and Amazon approach or taking away direct access to the low level access to the database and filing systems.

Finally, there is the issue of latency.  Google and Amazon are world scalable services, but RackspaceCloud is currently only available from their Texas data centre (although its due to be installed in London next year).  With Amazon you can choose for your servers to be located in the US or Europe - with Google its unclear where they are sited.

With some concern on this issue I was able to make some measurements on latency comparing the same service running in Rackspace in London with the service running in RackspaceCloud in Texas.  The graph below shows the findings:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First thanks for all the kind remarks about us winning the calling all innovator internet innovation award 1st prize.... we're all very pleased with that result.  It was a lot of hard work and its great to get something back.

Meanwhile this morning there's been a raft of interesting announcements.  The Ovi Maps API looks really good and very powerful,  Nokia Money have teamed up with Obopay to enable bank payments for billions of new users and finally facebook announced their new connection APIs for use with phones in applications and from the mobile web.  

All very exciting.  Yesterday's most interesting annoucements for me with the new N900 linux based phone which is sure to compete well and amazingly will appear as soon as Oct and the X6 phone which finally has a capacitive touh screen - its the way forward for Nokia.

 

 

 

 

This week Palm has finally released their SDK for Palm Pre development and Google have continued in their announcements that web technologies will be the eventual approach for mobile phone development. Nokia's WRT technology is now well established and grown signficantly with S60 Ed5 services APIs.  Meanwhile the real issue with this technology has been the speed of execution of Javascript is being solved using better Javascript engines and the emergence of new HTML5 functions allows browsers to get closer to native speed execution.

The common approach of all these methods is to use HTML, CSS and Javascript as the basis for writing applications.  Each manufactirer is enhancing their Javascript libraries to so that there is API access to system functionalities such as media, sensors, GPS, address book and other core phone functions.  Where some manufacturers have not opened up their APIs yet (eg Apple) other group are providing frameworks to do so (eg Phonegap providing plaform access for iPhone and Android).

Additionally W3C have their own widget development metholdolgy which is being supported by a number of operators via the jil.org. Ths technology is very close to WRT and indeed they provide very good tools to convert between WRT and the W3C format.

My own view is there is now a need for someone to create a framework sitting on top of all these technologies - they are all amost the same/compatible with slightly different wrappers and different syntax for the APIs.  The real need for all developers is to write their applications only once for all platforms - a framework can take away these diferences.

My own experience of working with these technologies is to develop using Nokia's WRT to create working applications.  I then use Phonegap to create the same applications running the same code on iPhone.  Its not as easy as it should be - there are all sorts of gotyas, for example scrolling is done differently on iPhone and Android to how normal browsers work, but it can be done and its the future for a new way of doing software development.