Well, maybe not, but BMW think they are worth the effort. Another entertaining chapter in the never-ending-story of app stores whose revenue is small but whose potential end-user stickiness gets everywhere. BMW will allow application, phone number and address download to the car and sync with the mobile phone …. and no, you cannot surf on the big color screen while the car is moving, only your passengers can surf on theirs. But the driver does get screen info like news and weather … from my previous experience there is a fine line between driver/pilot assistance and driver/pilot distraction, I hope BMW puts being on the right side of the line before sticky services.
How do you get mobile users to download applications if you don’t have users ‘captivated’ by a native App store (as Android, iPhone etc…)? GetJar has a simple answer which probably started by answering the question I have often posed over the last three years: where are the people?
One answer is the mobile web, that’s become something of a lowest common denominator of mobile data usage. So, what GetJar has basically done is to go to a popular brand mobile site. Get a download link on that site for the application that corresponds to that brand. The application is of course hosted on GetJar, and GetJar will return the application best suited for the mobile phone in question.
That’s it. No new technology, personalisation server, extra content awareness etc etc. It’s that simple.
GetJar have been getting about a million dowloads a week of the Facebook app from the Facebook mobile site (remember, there are 65 million active mobile users of Facebook so this is definitely ‘where the people are’).
Next in line is Photobucket, says Patrick Mork (VP Marketing, GetJar). I would call that ‘working the brands’
One of the biggest challenges I meet in the industry is not the lack of new user experiences, but getting those experiences to users. A sure place to start is going to where the users are ‘at’ – that doesn’t need to be so hard.
The fun thing about blogs is the interactivity they can generate.
the day after my ‘korean RCS’ post last week, I was corrected by some people that this wasn’t RCS in is ‘pure’ sense. Then I got a blog comment saying the same thing.
I wanted to highlight that here was a unique implementation on a unique market of a messaging solution that from my experience of ’stuff that works’ has a couple of promising traits. It remains to be seen if ‘it works’.
The fact that this is called RCS by some people and non-RCS by others is really secondary in that context. Nonetheless, I find it fascinating the stir that three letters can create. Hope you’re still reading out there, anonymous@anonymous. Your comment was appreciated, and I will continue to give this some thought and hopefully dig deeper into this particular case.
I’ll be taking a few ‘IT-free’ vacation days, see you later next week.
Yes, a Rich Communication Suite implementation is going live in South Korea according to the GSMA, with the three major operators ensuring the necessary interwork. The services offered by the three South Korean operators include:
KT’s ’show moov’,
SK Telecom’s ‘Mobile Messenger’ and
LG Telecom’s ‘OZ messenger’,
with features such as phonebook driven buddy lists, presence capability that includes taglines and status, voice calls and messaging. KT’s ’show moov’ client application is available for mobile and PC platforms (a key feature of the RCS specifications say GSMA). Also, SK Telecom and KT are actively collaborating with fixed line services. For instance, KT ’show moov’ is integrated with one of Korea’s major portal’s e-mail, search services and SK Telecom’ s mobile messenger is linked with one of Korea’s most popular messenger ‘Nate On Messenger’. Well, that sounds sensible to me.
There are two elements here that I have harped about for some time as being key in getting a critical mass on any messaging service :
Access from any device (PC’s as well as mobiles is a start)
Links to popular messaging communities – ‘where the people are’.
South Korea has the almost unique situation for an IM service where the operator-driven NateOn overtook MSN in popularity as far back as 2005, so you could say S.Korea is a safe harbor to launch RCS. But the principle of ‘finding’ people on existing communities has been used successfully by several messaging aggregators. So the conditions should help, now that the moment of truth is here.
It will be interesting to follow the usage over the coming months. (link to article…) Have a look at the ShowMoov video below, I don’t understand a word of Korean but I think it gets the point across.
Joost launched as the killer online TV app back in 2007, but ad-financed video is a tough proposition if you don’t happen to have loads of quality content (or just loads of content – Joost was rather limited, and the TV companies started pushing their own online video).
That’s unlikely to be BBC or FOX (they have their technology in place), it’ll be interesting to see if someone / who grabs the bait.
Footnote: This comes at a time when Dawn Airey (chief of UK commercial broadcaster Five) is beating the drums for the Canvas online TV project which is backed by the BBC, ITV and BT. Why? Hulu is rumoured to be set for a UK launch this Autumn, with a “ferociously competitive” alliance of US broadcasters – Fox, NBC Universal and Disney ABC. For UK broadcasters at least, Joost’s demise might be the symptom of a big problem rather than the removal of a problem. Dawn is not so diplomatic, the problem is a big black hole hence her warning ’staring into the abyss’ (more reading here).
Some more interesting statistics .. 3 UK says it has shifted about 700,000 handsets of the INQ1 variety and its predecessor, the Skypephone, since November 2007.
Of these users around 65 per cent, or 455,000, use Facebook – the main application pushed by the INQ1 – on an almost daily basis. Moreover, around 30 per cent of users are regularly using email, and this is on a slider form factor device with a standard non-QWERTY keypad.
Around half of INQ1 owners use Windows Live Messenger and around 19 per cent are regular users of Skype.
700 000 INQ users of 5 million 3 UK users isn’t bad.
“The iPhone and Blackberry are great devices, but it is important to remember that smartphones only make up 12 per cent of the market [according to Gartner]. We see a huge opportunity to provide an internet and social networking experience on a handset that costs operators a fraction of what they’re paying for higher end phones,” said Frank Meehan, CEO of INQ Mobile
I have said earlier I have called INQ1 a smartphone which is technically incorrect. It is just a smart phone, so I stand by my mistake and don’t regret it.
Thanks to Sanjay Kaul for snapping this one up from
http://labs.moto.com/android-meets-energy/ .
Certainly opens up my eyes for the possibilities of Android beyond phones, and sustainability is ‘in’ these days.
TechCrunch published a useful report from Funambol on the usage of mobile sync with different services/devices. Funambol deals with mobile sync, and they come out rather well in the report – but if you put that aside, the comparisons are interesting because of what isn’t said.
Microsoft, Nokia Ovi, Palm, Apple and Funambol come out as places where people sync “four plus” data types. Vodafone’s Zyb comes out strong on “contacts sync plus social networks”. Google Sync is an “only contacts and calendar” story. But is that the whole story regarding mobile data usage? Of course not.
I have been using Android as my work phone for a few weeks now, finding I gain a lot and lack little. Gmail is online via the client, corporate mail is online via the browser – so “email sync” isn’t relevant as getting my mail. Android is built with an “always online” philosophy. iPhone is of the same stable but more of a ’sync’ device (the iPod hertitage no doubt). Windows mobile devices have always given me a feeling that they are happy when they get a connection, but will make the best of life without one, ie strong ‘offline’ capabilities.
Please peruse the report, I just want to underline that mobile sync can be part of having a great online experience but it’s definitely not the whole story.
Yesterday I listened to Philips talk of their NetTV deployment at Kista Mobile and Broadband Showcase.
Compare this to the Yahoo! TV Widgets, or other IPTV solutions and you have two fronts in the battle for ‘Internet on the TV’.
“You will have two remotes – one for the TV and one for the set-top box. You wll choose the one that gives you the greatest user experience” said one of Philips’ partners.
Enter a third element – www.youtube.com/xl – It’s a version of the video sharing site optimised for large screens, with giant, visible fonts and control buttons. It’s just a re-skinned YouTube, but good enough I believe for people to take the laptop and connect it to the TV. As I have written earlier, millions of people already use the laptop alongside the TV, YouTube will learn from live user feedback. Try it out and let me know what you think.
