This week I was wondering what it was that drives the self-destructive fragmentation endemic in mobile. It struck me that what we call the mobile industry is, forcibly, a land of immigrants - there are no natives, yet.

So where do these mobile imigrants come from? Quite a few places, and that explains many of the tensions and contradictions that plague the market.  Here’s my analysis of the characters you’re likely to meet in our mobile melting pot:

The Hardy Boys

Mainly clustering in handset manufacturers, these people perform miracles of miniaturisation and wonders with wireless, but they’re not too sure about that software stuff, and feel uncomfortable about users actually using services in case they incur charges. Capable of reaching the the pinnacles of industrial design, they are strangely tolerant of completely unusable and buggy software that blights their otherwise gorgeous devices.

Bell’s Boys

Spiritually these people are direct descendants of Graham Alexander Bell and still think they run monopoly telephone companies. As you’d expect these people are most often found at mobile operators, although some of them find their way into IT functions. Capable of incredible feats of resilience engineering at vast scale, they tend to render their own prowess less valuable than it might be by a pathological dislike of people actually using the facilities they work so effectively  to create. Total control freaks, they really do know what’s best for you, honest.

Txtniks

Nobody knows where this particular tribe emerged from, but they’re one of the oldest settlers in mobile land. They see everything, no matter how complex, in terms of SMS interaction. Unintimidated by arcane codes and mechanisms, they can implement the most unlikely systems by exchange of 160-character messages. Despite having made huge amounts of money out of all sorts of messaging applications they are perplexed by other interaction models.

Gameboys

Being compulsive game players, these people immediately leapt on the games potential of phones, no matter how limited. Coming into mobile from console and PC gaming, this group treats phones as if they were gameboys and don’t take advantage of all the communication facilities that handsets offer.

Internutters

Largely coming from failed internet startups, this group leapt on the availability of data comms on phones and built apps and mobile internet services to take advantage of it. Unfortunately in their enthusiasm they didn’t realise that Hardy and Bell’s Boys have done their best to make that difficult and expensive for the end user. Limitless imagination for new services but too many incapable of not thinking in terms of a large-screen computer or realising that not everybody shares their enthusiasms.

But natives names are coming, but they won’t reach influential roles for a little while yet. Having grown up seeped in startup culture, mobile natives are all struggling to make it big in their own companies. Once they are acquired or fail they will infiltrate the rest of the industry and will, hopefully, inject a much-needed dose of sense and co-operation into the industry. Then we’ll see some really interesting things happen.

——-

I’m firmly in the Internutter group.

Use of “boy” encompases people of all age and sex. The word boy is used for aliteration and product name compatibility, although the industry does, sadly, reflect this gender bias.

For the first time I’m a contributor to the Carnival of the Mobilisists, hosted this week by friend and neighbour Geoff Ballinger. My last post Who will be the Railroad Barons of Mobile? has been picked for this 179th outing of the Carnival as Geoff’s post of the week. I’ll try and become a regular contributor as this will force me to make time to write more.

I’m sure all of us in the mobile industry will have noticed a big change in attitudes in the last year or so. Much of this is, of course, the iPhone effect which is a global extension of the well-documented Steve Jobs reality distortion field. I’ve come to sum this up as being a move from total ignorance to complete confusion. Used to be that folks didn’t believe that their phones could do all this neat stuff even when you showed them how. Now they think that they have to have special devices to do it. A great example of this is the success of the Facebook Phone from INQ.

Maximum kudos to INQ for this achievement; we built a demo multi-site social networking app back in 2006 which was much loved by teenagers but was beyond the comprehension of the people in social media itself. They believed that they had to have an operator on board to “do mobile” – despite the obvious limitations of restricting your audience to those on one network.

This operator envy has now moved on to device fixation. In a strange mirror of the US market, those looking at mobile now believe that a smartphone is essential to do anything. By smartphone they don’t mean what we used to mean – largely Symbian devices – they mean iPhone, BlackBerry and, if they are feeling generous, Windows Mobile. You can demonstrate that all the other mass-market devices can do all the same things, albeit on a smaller screen, but there is a strange mental block about doing this on a wider scale.

This is because the technology adoption curve has been turned into a rollercoaster ride by the Apple hype machine. Like one of the modern linear-motor accelerator rides that blast you onto the coaster from a standing start, mobile has been blasted up to the top of the curve, sitting between early and late majority adoption while the reality of mobile is till back in early adopters. This creates quite strong cognitive dissonances which need constant reassurance about making the right technology choices. That’s why there is a barrage of advertising and PR that makes iPhone the aspirational personal device, BlackBerry the perceived ideal business device, and INQ the teenage-kicks-in-a-box device.

Interestingly these adverts are about adding to your lifestyle in some form or other. This is in contrast to Nokia’s expensive 3D billboards last year promoting maps or this year’s 5800 best-selling music device campaign, both which are feature driven. The latter example does, of course, come with heavy iPod envy.

All this confusion changes the business territory substantially. It’s certainly raised awareness of mobile amongst those that were previously unfamiliar with it, but not necessarily informed people of what is really possible.

As all of us in the app space will know, that translates into constant demands for iPhone apps. Patiently explaining that there are 950,000 iPhones in the UK compared to 43 million Java-enabled devices often just leaves them puzzled. We had a classic example of this confusion a few weeks ago. The night before the launch of a Java ME app the client asked if we could convert it to an iPhone app for following day. We had to explain gentle that it was not only completely different technically, but more importantly the route to market would involve a delay of at least a week for Apple approval.

And of course, the huge numbers of iPhone apps has lead to a belief that it’s easy to reach people via the App Store. As anybody who has looked into it will know, for any topic, no matter how abstruse, there are a dozen competing apps ranging in price from free to several pounds and ranging in quality from dire to poor. With the occasional professionally-produced app standing out as a beacon of what it is possible.

Popular stories of hobbyists making money from trivial applications only leads to people over estimating the value of iPhone apps while under estimating the cost of building them. The average marketer already had difficulty understanding the complexity of building powerful apps, as well as the importance of software quality. Yet another message for us to get over when pitching.
I was searching around for a historical equivalent to see if there was anything we could learn. The best match I found was the opening up of the US west coast. Initially only well-off professionals could join the gold rush. It was expensive, difficult and extremely demanding; you had to be well prepared. There were only two punishing routes – overland through the Anzo Barago badlands or a long journey by boat with a transit through the mosquito-infested marshes of Panama. Those that survived those ordeals had to grub it out in the dirt with no certainty of hitting gold. A lucky few could make good money if they could find a route to get their material out.
Then the railroads opened. The first was the Transcontinental Railroad, quickly followed by the Santa Fe  and Great Northern Railway changed everything. Now anyone who could scrape together the price of a third-class rail ticket could head out and seek their fortune.

Sound familiar? There are clear analogies with the iPhone, BlackBerry and Windows Mobile app stores. Conveniently the Great Northern Railway even terminated in Seattle.  Now we all know who made the most money out of the gold rush – the people who built the first railroads, followed by the suppliers to the mining industry. Luckily for the people of the time, nobody had invented open-source picks and shovels. The railways that opened later never made the same money of the first ones, a model reflected in railway development throughout Europe. First mover advantage is not new.

Clearly the people with the railroads now control the frontier, but what opportunities does this present to the mobile community? People contemplating opening their own app store should reflect on the aftermath of Victorian railway development – you’ll never make any money unless you have a community of people at either end of the railway who want to travel back and forth, and you have to let them know that they can travel. And it the process of travel has to be easy and affordable.

In the past application and content developers have struggled to reach the mobile market because of lack of awareness amongst users and an absence of route to market. Now we are facing different challenges: a plethora of incomplete routes to market coupled with customers that have been bewitched into desiring space in a crowded minority channel.

The end problem remains the same – how to get more people using mobile. Curiously I don’t think the solution has changed: brand. Brand solves the problem of discovery. Most people gravitate automatically to known, and where relevant, trusted brands. It works in news, music and video. It works in console games. It will come to mobile applications too – where existing brands will extend their reach, and maybe joined by a few new entrants.

Two more speaking gigs:

 IAB Innovators Award, Thursday 21st

 Mobile Retailing, 3rd June

Come along and join the debate!

Just back from a very enjoyable inaugural meeting of Mobile Monday Edinburgh. Twelve of us gathered for a Milano Lunch in Centotre’s elegant private room. A wide range of companies were represented, encompassing many different angles of the mobile business.

The topics of discussion were around whether there was a role for Mobile Internet and Mobile Applications, or if one was going to become dominate, cross-device delivery, testing,  openness of platforms and the future of Java amongst others.

We’ll be organising the next event for June 1st. Drop me a note if you’d like to be involved.

After a long break from the podium, I’ll be speaking at two events at the end of the month:

Internet World at Earls Court, London, on the 28th of May on a panel about mobile advertising 1200-1300.

Entrepreneurial panel session at Edinburgh Informatics Reunion, 30th April.

You can also see my colleague Jeremy at World Telemedia 27th April, also talking about mobile advertising.

Not been posting since Barcelona, as you’ll have seen, due to pressure of projects. I have the good luck to be generally pushing at the rough edges of device capability. We were doing that back in 2004 with just getting fast updates of complex data working reliably. Now it’s a different set of features, but just as flaky. I’ve not seen so many device resets, blank screens and generally weirdness in a long time.

I’m always in two minds about why app environments handsets are so unreliable. The first is sloppy QA to get devices out to market quickly, but that would suggest that there was ever a plan to test and fix the edges of capabilities. The second view is simply that advanced application development has still to make it into the conciousness of manufacturers and marketers. Essentially coming from the hardware end of the business, they tend to regard software with suspicion if they think about it at all.

For once the reporting community is remarkably consistent: there was nothing exciting at MWC last week, but overall the event was much more serious. By serious I mean that the people you spoke to might actually do something, unlike previous years where it was substantially a fishing trip.

Last year we were on the Scottish stand on the upper floor of Hall 2 in a very mixed area: antennae mixed with software which jostled with components. This year we were in Hall 7 and the flow rates of people were very different. We were constantly busy from about 9.30am to close, with no long quiet periods as we had seen in Hall 2.2. And the people we spoke to were generally interested, to be qualified of course, or else disengaged politely if it was not of interest.

From our point of view, last year was the year of being asked about mobile internet. The year before, 2006, had been largely blank faces as we talked about mobile advertising and application delivery. This year it was all about applications and provisioning, an area we’ve been automating since 2004.

We also got good reactions to our non-banner advertising capability, offering much greater creative options, including special iPhone ad units that we were showing off. More on that soon.

The other trend that I noticed was more ties. I’m convinced that more people were wearing ties this year. Is this a sign of a maturing market or economic tough times? Either way I’m not joining that trend.

Another sad trend was the increase in crime - we had a bizarre incident of stuff being taken from our flat and then returned after some vigourous phoning to agent and owner. Clearly a scam. Anybody else who saw this happen please get in touch. Some of the team also had a attempted theft/mugging at 8pm, although they scared off the perpetrators. This is the first year we’ve experienced this. Sad. Puts you off visiting.

Equally annoying were the organisers who moved our stand without warning to an enclosed space from an open-ended one. We found out late last week by checking the website - too late to rework our stand artwork. And our internet connection, which we had ordered, was not connected. It took six hours of complaining to get the internet connected. Nothing to be done about the stand, but the level of “customer service” from the GSMA was attrocious. We were not alone in this - the UK Trade and Industry cabin had been placed 20m away from the site where they had paid a premium to be. Does it have to be this difficult?

I’ve put a selection of photos of the show on Flickr, and as one wag has commented on MoMo, as usual there are more pictures of the CBoss dancers than of any handsets. I would have taken a picture of the LG Watch Phone if it had been allowed, as it was the only hardware of note at the event. And it doesn’t have a browser or Java so ever it’s not that interesting. I’m sure it will be upgraded soon - and couldn’t it use traditional automatic watch winders to charge up?

Well, it’s Mobile World Congress time again and we’ve been busy readying stuff for the show, hence the lack of blogging. But here I am now sitting in Newcastle International Airport departures lounge waiting for my flight to Barcelona. Last three years we’ve had direct flights from Scotland, but this year there can’t have been enough demand so my nearest airport is Newcastle.

Since I’m the advance guard I’m taking a pile of baggage that will become our stand, so I had a lot of stuff with me. Too much for the train and metro route so I rented a car one way. Since it was a relatively short distance I didn’t take the fueling option Hertz offers planning to fill the car up when I got here. Good plan, it seemed, until I got here are there’s no sign of any petrol stations.

So I stopped and whipped out my G1, turned on the GPS and pulled up the map. Unlike the N95 it localised me immediately.  A quick search for “petrol” gound the nearest station stuck down a side road 2 miles from where I was. I then tracked progress to the destination with the phone and, after a slight detour, filled up. Awesome.

Now I’m in a diner awaiting an American-style breakfast that will stand in for lunch in Barcelona, and the WiFi in the airport is free, sponsored by British Airports. Nice. I’m flying easyJet (of course), so BA are making a great  play for my attention. Well done chaps, someone there has understood the future of advertising.

Amazing how time flies - but that’s given me a couple of extra weeks of experience using the Android G1 Dev Phone as my day-to-day comms device, and it is still growing on me. As an example, my wife and I were talking holiday destinations, including one in Florida where some friends moved recently. Unsure of the distances involved, out comes the G1, into Maps and found it very, very quickly and allowed zoom and pan at stunning speed. Ok, you can do this on other devices, but there was something very low friction about how this worked - it’s a good user experience for me anyway.

The most famous feature of Android has to be the parallax scrolling. For those who have not seen it, it means that the background image, screen furniture and icons scroll at three different speeds providing a sense of depth in the user interface. It’s one of those little tricks that keeps the eye busy and makes the brain subconciously happy.

The desktop control is fine - just poke your finger at it long enough and the context menu pops up. No cutesy dancing icons, but a nice blib on the vibe and highlight on the menu tab to let you know you can drag things to it. The ability to bring just the items you use the most to the front is good - much easier to track and use the key apps than on the iPhone where most people seem to be perpetually hunting around for the right thing.

The dialer application is excellent, quite the best I’ve used - it’s just quick and natural. The favourites list of the people you call most is a nice feature. Contacts are well managed and easily navigated, especially compared to the iPhone where scrolling is pretty much the only option unless you want to sharpen your fingers to a small point and have particularly good eyesight.

Alphabetical scrolling is achieved in two ways on Android. You can whizz along with momentum scrolling from your finger, as in the iPhone, and when you do a finger tab appears which you can touch and pull up and down while the letter on display appears. Nice.

Lots of people having been dissing the e-mail app, and while it’s certainly not perfect, it’s better than most mobile e-mail clients. In particular it renders HTML e-mail properly, even complex and large items which normally crash(ed) the iPhone e-mail app, and that the Nokia client didn’t even attempt to render. Suffice to say that as a means of checking e-mail between laptop sessions it works fine for me. The only benefit the N95 had was that you could disconnect the e-mail so that it didn’t go beep in the middle of the night. I now turn the phone off. Initially I found the lack of push e-mail irksome, but I’ve got used to the regular check, which is what Outlook and company do anyway.

The Messaging app offers nice threading of SMSes which are presented in a pragmatic, space-saving and easily read list.

Contacts are cool - you can have as many numbers as you like per person without having to invent strange labels for them, and then it is all synced directly with your gmail account. Very smooth. Even smoother if you use gmail, which I don’t but I’ll forgive them as I can manage the content via the web when I need bulk updates.

E-mail, messaging, and Twidroid, the Twitter client I use, all use the notification mechanism. Icons appear in the top bar of the window, which can then be pulled down to reveal what the alerts are. Twidroid even puts the text of the tweet in the list. It’s quick and efficient, but probably too techy for normal people to use.

The music player is rudimentary, especially the means of putting music on the device (mount a filesystem and copy!), but I don’t use it much anyway. The camera software is as bad as the iPhone one, but thankfully you can download others, including SnapPhoto which includes an image stabiliser. Picture gallery is ok, but it could do with better rotation control.

The alarm clock is basic but effective, but is a useful comparison with the S60 alarm clock. The latter is a piece of arcane technical excess designed by someone with an overactive imagination and no clue about user experience or flow. The Android clock, in contrast, is delightfully simple. However there is a limitation: the hardware doesn’t switch on if you set an alarm and turn it off. I suppose off being off makes sense for power consumption, but combined with the nocturnal beeping on e-mail arrival makes it all less useful as a travelling alarm clock.

The Android Market is not, thankfully, swamped with millions of useless apps hiding the occasional delight. I’ve downloaded a few very good apps, SnapPhoto included.  Compass is very nice, if somewhat academic, but the best is Skymaps which is perhaps the best use of novel UI features I’ve ever seen. Well done to the guys behind it. Like others, that’s the app that I use to show off the device.

One of my principle gripes about the iPhone is that screen rotation is not universal. With the exception of the rather pathetic Telegraph application, everything on Android rotates correctly. And everything works with the real keyboard. Nice!

And as before and as others have noted, the phone is much faster than anything I’ve owned before. I tried a HTC Touch HD recently and it was somewhat faster even running WinMo. So clearly for sheer performance HTC is the one to beat.

The 3G service, which for me is on Vodafone,  is also very fast most of the time, and the device is reasonably good at connecting to remembered WiFi networks. Occasionally needs a hint and I think it gets confused when there is more than one available choice.

Perhaps the most telling observation is that I’m using the device significantly more for internet work, eg looking things up when talking in the family, that the N95 or even the iPod Touch which I bought pretty much for doing that.

Looking forward to the updated software, but very happy with it as it is.