DeepDarkSee

This is a great story of an iPhone fan that wants to get ahead of the game and switch from T-Mobile to Cingular now. What do you know, Cingular can’t get out of their own way.

Info from Red Herring about some of Verizon’s “Location Based Services” plans here.

CNET says: “A consortium of U.S. cable companies announced on Wednesday that they will form a joint venture with Sprint Nextel to offer mobile service to their customers.

This is huge, not from the point of view of more bundled services, but as an enabler for handsets that would use cable/VOIP voice services in the home, and switch to Sprint wireless when away (with the same phone number and handset). It’s strategic for the cable companies, and for Sprint.”

A few years ago, right in the tail end of the internet bubble, I was part of the launch of Dotcast. The company barely survived, but more because of technology delivery problems than funding problems. Dotcast could raise money because it offered the promise of something extraordinary - a high volume content distribution pipe that bypassed cable, and DSL.

A key financial player for the company was Disney, who launched the MovieBeam service using Dotcast’s datacasting (data over TV) technology. Disney loved Dotcast because if it worked, it offered a distribution channel for Movie, TV, and other content without any toll takers. It bypassed cable and DSL (and for movies, even video rental stores). In the end Dotcast’s technology took too long to develop, didn’t work as well as expected, cost too much to deploy, and with the delays got squeezed by the plans in the US to phase out NSTC broadcast technologies.

But content companies HATE having to pay for distribution (and even want to be reverse the role)! Look at the RIAA now wanting a share of iPod revenue…they want to be paid BY the distribution channel. In the other direction, here is SBC’s CEO, now saying they want payment from companies like Google to let them deliver their content over SBC DSL lines - even after they have charged the consumer for the DSL in the first place. I’ve been playing around with Vonage, but am just waiting for Comcast to start mucking with connection quality for Vonage voice traffic (and demanding revenue share from Vonage). I recently tried to use Skype over a Verizon wireless data connection and guess what - the Verizon connection dropped every time I tried to initiate any VOIP traffic.

So when I look at the next generation of wide area wireless technology just reaching deployment stage in 2006, I find it very interesting. When I hear about Google buying up dark fiber everywhere and their bid to offer free wireless in San Francisco as a prototype for bigger things, I smile. I think we will see A LOT of non-traditional money get sunk into multiple competing wide area wireless solutions in the next few years. Those that currently control the broadband pipes into consumer homes are going to see incredible competition - mostly made economical by the high tolls they are imposing (making these other huge technology investments look cheap). I’m annoyed that greed drives this, and pleased with what I think the end result will be.

Beware of fishing expeditions:
…it is always nice to have a large company call you and express acquisition interest. That being said, go into the conversations with a skeptical eye and make sure you do not waste your time as these strategic discussions can quickly lead to a dead end if not managed appropriately. The tricky part of the dance is trying to establish early in the process a range that the acquirer will potentially pay for your company assuming everything you tell them is true. The sooner you can get to this answer the sooner you will know if you should continue talking or just walk away. If you manage this process appropriately you may find yourself in a great place as many of the best acquisitions happen when companies are bought and not sold. The downside is that these discussions can suck up lots of your precious resources and be a tremendous distraction to your management team.

Did you know that here is a HUGE variation in the amount of radiation created by the highest and lowest radiating cell phones? Huge! My Moto v710 seems to want to burn a hole in the side of my head with a SAR (W/kg) of 140, and it’s not even on the worst 10 list.

Chris Heathcote published a really interesting post on Subscription Fatigue. Mobile carriers in the USA continue to push subscription for downloadable handset apps for the many reasons Chris describes.

Carriers in the USA have moved away from free trials for downloadable handset apps because there aren’t enough conversions. When consumers do buy, they prefer one time to subscriptions. If you’ve been watching the Get It Now store on Verizon handsets, you will have observed that one time purchases have turned into one time purchases that expire after a while, with a monthly subscription as the only other option. You can ‘feel’ the carriers trying to manipulate consumers and extract dollars.

All I really ask as a consumer is to be treated well. Let me try an app before I buy it. If it’s crap on your deck that I wouldn’t buy after trying, take it off! Don’t try to force me to buy it just to see that it sucks. The price you pay for manipulating me is higher than you seem to understand. Let me choose to pay once, or for a term, or for a subscription. Show me fair pricing and let me try before I buy, and I’ll appreciate my carrier rather than feel that the oligopoly is trying to manipulate me.

Wikipedia has a great page on mobile phone carriers, worldwide and by region, ranked by size. It kinda puts China in perspective, even before you think about level of penetration and expected future growth rates.

• China Mobile (GSM) - 204.3 million
• Vodafone (GSM, UMTS) - 154.838 million
• China Unicom (IS-2000, GSM) - 100.1 million
• T-Mobile (GSM, UMTS) - 78.9 million
• movistar (GSM, UMTS, IS-2000) - 51.3 million
• Cingular (IS-136, GSM, UMTS3) - 50 million
• Orange (GSM, UMTS) - 49 million
• NTT DoCoMo (PDC, FOMA) - 45.9 million
• Verizon Wireless (IS-2000) - 45.5 million
• Mobile TeleSystems - MTS (GSM) - 34.22 million
• Vivo (IS-2000, IS-136) - 27 million
• Turkcell (GSM) - 23.4 million
• Sprint PCS (IS-2000) - 22.2 million
• O2 (GSM) - 21.3 million
• TIM (GSM, UMTS)

I was recently asked to brainstorm messages for the carriers. What would an LBS handset application developer like them to hear? So I got together with a couple really smart people I know and came up with the items below. Interestingly enough, most of our answers applied to the non-LBS space as well.

We want to do innovative things with your handsets. Insist that the handset manufacturers implement the features that will support this. Examples:

• APIs for full featured access to Camera and Gallery resources
• APIs to send/receive MMS and SMS
• APIs to hand-off to the browser with a destination URL
• APIs to access the serial port and bluetooth
• Much better font support
• Launching a Music Service? Think of the innovation you could enable if developers could manipulate play lists and music player features from the application environment.
• APIs to write to the external screen (and support running with the handset closed)

It’s not enough that it is in the general framework for the phone. It has to be spec’d and acceptance tested. Too many handsets don’t do things that they should because reliable delivery wasn’t enforced by the carrier. It requires specification and acceptance testing.

Many of you control which apps can run on your phones. There is no need to arbitrarily block apps from access to handset features, your test/acceptance business process can limit access, and grant it where it makes sense.

LBS Specific

• Elevation/Altitude data is very weak, we need your help there.
• Don’t restrain us to carrier sanctioned GIS data sources. Give us the flexibility to differentiate our apps.

Russell Beattie is moderating the panel Obstacles in the Mobile Platform at Where 2.0 next week. I think the panel member choices are great…mostly carrier, plus a biz dev guy who has been dealing with carriers…it should be interesting. Being in a startup doing LBS product development I’m interested, but can’t justify the cost of the ticket to get in.

Russ put out a call for questions for the panel. Here is a set that I think, if put to the panel, might be good…

Mixed Messages: What’s the breakdown between “LBS Apps”, and apps that use LBS as one tool in creating a useful product? Where are the carriers focused and how will this change over time (this is important, because it may impact whether an app gets on the deck)?

Getting on the Deck: Tons of developers out there hawking ideas and prototypes - what does it take to get “on the deck?”

Premium Fees: Will carriers charge premiums to consumers to ‘turn on’ LBS? Will carriers be looking to charge a premium revenue share percentage to developers?

Deployment Delays: The roadway is littered with LBS pioneers that ran out of runway as ‘unofficial’ LBS deployment schedules came and went. What are the prospects for 2005 and 2006?

Limited Handset Availability: It’s probably a safe bet that the first phones to support LBS will be on the high end. When will LBS capability reach a broad set of handsets (in the US it’s starting to broaden on Nextel, but what about others)? When does the GSM world enter in a meaningful way?

Content: Map content, and queries to geoservers are expensive. Map images don’t display all that well on small screens. Elevation data returned from handsets is horrible. What can/are carriers doing to help with this?