Top Mobile Technology Trends – A Moving Target

The SIIA Conference marked its 10th year of bringing together an audience of senior executives to address important strategic issues and to network. The theme was”Moving from Wired to Wireless”. My role was to moderate a panel named Top Mobile Technology Trends – A Moving Target. The distinguished panelists were Bill Godfrey, Executive Vice President, Chief Information Officer and Head of Global Electronic Product Development at Elsevier, Oke Okaro, General Manager and Global Head of Mobile, Multimedia at Bloomberg L.P., John Paris, Sr. Director, Mobile Strategy at Time, Inc., and Bob Sutor, VP, Open Systems and Linux at IBM’s Software Group. See their bios on the speaker’s page. It was an honor to lead the discussion.

I set the stage with a few comments about the big picture. The mobile Internet is taking off because of a supporting takeoff in three areas. First, the smartphone is becomine a bigger share of mobile phones. It is still mostly dumb phones out there but the mix is changing and soon smartphones will be in the majority. Seondly, the Cloud is gaining a lot of momentum as an efficient way to store information. Dropbox is an interesting model to follow as it allows replication of your data from the cloud to all your devices. The third factor I cited is the explosion in social media. The comgination of these three areas is resulting in an Internet that is where you are, not where your PC is Lastly, the mobile environment is very personal. Power to the people! More on my big picture view from the Genesys Partners dinner that was held on Monday evening.

The panelists offered the audience a lot of insight. Although they were not able to provide specifics of time and price, it was clear that there is a strong commitment to get magazines on the iPad and other mobile tablets. There are magazines there now but not in a desirable way. The obvious change coming is the subscription model instead of paying $4.99 per copy. More profound is the commitment I heard to make tablet magazines compelling by merging the social media experience with the e-zine content. Imagine reading a Time Magazine story about electric cars and simultaneously see how many other people are currently reading the story, how many have read it and liked it or did not like it, and how many of them own an electric car. In the case of a Business Week story, imagine seeing live data about the industry or company you are reading about. When it comes to Elsevier professional and research journals, we can expect big changes with them also. Tablets are ideal for reading journals with the ability to take notes and add bookmarks. You can also imagine drilling down from a Google search to a Wikipedia article to a medical journal to a particular intervention to live data from a clinical trial that may be underway. All these things can be done in a browser on a PC or Mac but the experience is not as real or personal. The mobile Internet lets you have your content with you wherever you are and with whatever device you may want to use. You may read on the train with your iPad and then read with your iPhone or Droid phone while you are in line at the deli waiting for a sandwich.

Bill, John, and Oke were all bullish about the potential for the mobile Internet to extend the reach of their content and all are actively working on their delivery mechanisms and business models. Some say information wants to be free but good content developers and journalists and subject matter experts need to get paid. Advertising may continue to foot a significiant part of the bill, but the upcoming subscription model may be preferable to readers who prefer not to be tracked or blitzed with advertising. Bob was not as optimistic about an end to the format wars as the publishers were about their business models. It looks like HTML5, the new standard for web content, including video, that has the potential to subsume all the competing formats. Bob said the odds of Microsoft, Apple, Firefox, Adobe, and Google all agreeing on a single standards based approach are slim. The good news is that the technology for developing the content is getting sophisticated enough that the publishers will be able to create compelling content and then push the button to produce multiple versions of the content so that it can be consumed on all the various mobile platforms.

All in all, it was an enlightening conversation with four very knowledgeable experts. There was a consensus throughout the conference that 2011 will be the year that the mobile Internet reaches the tipping point.

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Tags: adobe, bloomberg, broadband, elsevier, fcc, flash, Healthcare, html5, IBM, ipad, iPhone, jeopardy, john patrick, Mobile, opera, siia, social media, supercomputer, time magazine, WiFi

Genesys XVII

The 17th Annual Genesys Partners Venture Dinner — Gen XVII– Monday night at the Union League Club in New York attracted more than 100 venture capitalists, investors, journalists, entrepreneurs, and industry executives. As always, Jim Kollegger — CEO of Genesys Partners and one of the pioneers of the information industry — was an elegant master of ceremonies. He introduced the various sponsors, next day panelists for the SIIA Conference, several startup CEO’s, and a few of us who have been around the block a few times, each to make some comments.

Like a broken record, I offered the normal upbeat view of the future of the Internet but prefaced my remarks by asserting that we are only 10% of the way there. In other words, of all the things that could be done on the Internet that would save us time and make our lives better, only 10% of them are there. It may sound low but consider retail e-commerce. Although there has been continuous and steady growth of retail e-commerce it still represents just 4% of total retail (as of the end of October). Why isn’t it 25% or more? Much is written about that here at patrickWeb but the short version is that there are still a lot of lame web sites. “Click here for the location of our nearest dealer where you can visit” or “call to buy the product you just found” or “Click here to download this form and fax it to us”. And of course there are the ubiquitous clipboards at doctor offices where we take a pen and provide a lot of information information that they already have.

I described one man’s view of the evolution of the Internet including the seven characteristics below. This parsed way of looking at the Internet has served me well for quite a few years. The things going on under each area continuously change and Jim asks me once a year to do a thumbnail sketch of my latest thinking.

Fast
Broadband in the U.S. is not a pretty story compared to other parts of the world. The problem is that there are too many lobbyists and the FCC is a political organization. The new FCC head is a very smart guy with venture and business experience. He totally gets it. The only problem is that AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon have more lawyers than he does. Meanwhile France is racing at full speed to offer 100 megabit access and WiFi throughout the country. Thanks to the telco lobby, many states have banned the offering of WiFi by municipal entities. Every citizen in Greenland has Internet access. We have 31,000 post offices.

Always On

WiFi is part of the fabric of the world. The big shift is streaming of data — not just tweets, but data from *things*. Bridges, toll booths, traffic lights and sensors, buildings, cars, and health monitoring devices attached to people. Hospital physicians will soon be adjusting the drip rate on infusion pumps in the hospital from their office based on real-time data from the patient. The WiFi infusion pumps enable hospital administrators to know where the pumps are (they never have enough of them) and which ones need maintenance. WiMax continues to struggle. Some believe it will replace WiFi. My bet is on WiFi and in a two years or less we will have WiGig — gigabit wireless. Ubiquitous wireless plus an explosion of tablet computers is totally changing the model of personal computing.

Everywhere
Cloud computing has become the mainstay for me and for millions. The convenience and reliability of the clouds is compelling. Add Dropbox and you have a completely replicated set of data, wherever you are and with whatever device you may be using. The next big wave underway is enterprise cloud computing. Virtualization is making enterprise servers more scalable, reliable, and efficient than ever. AJAX is enabling applications to run in any browser on any kind of computer including mobile. Especially mobile. There are hundreds of millions of PC’s but there are billions of mobile devices. Today most of them are dumb. In a few years most of them will be smart. Opera sofware is enabling even the dumb phones to have web access.

Natural
Social networking may not be a business model in and unto itself but it has become fundamental to all aspects of our economy and society. Integration of social networking with a full range of web applications will evolve to become the primary means of collaboration. The emerging issue is that many people are a bit liberal with sharing their every movement — what they are eating, listening to, where they are headed, their current latitude and longitude, and where they slept last night. They are not thinking that some day they may run for office or interview for a job.

Intelligent
The Semantic Web is the next big turn of the crank but the crank is moving slowly. Most web pages have links but do not have context. In other words the words on the page do not necessarily mean anything — but they could. If a web page said “Join us for a concert by The Eagles at Kimmel Center in Philadelphia next Tuesday” that set of words could have a lot of context. Clicking on it could add the concert to your calendar, knowing what “next Tuesday” means. It would also know exactly where the Kimmel Center is and that The Eagles is a performing group that performs a particular genre and your music player would receive a list of suggestions of music they have recorded or links to live concerts under way at the moment. This is the tip of the iceberg. The semantic web will lead us to a point where most of the interactions of web pages will be between computers not between computers and people. The biggest growth of intelligence is occurring in the field of analytics. Exabytes of data are being stored. Analytics will enable businesses to make sense of it, model their business and continuously adapt to what is going on. Stay tuned for IBM’s supercomputer to take on humans on the Jeopardy Show.

Easy
Technology isn’t the easiest thing at times. There are many dimensions to “easy” but one good example is the Nintendo Wii. At a local senior center, members find the Wii to be their exercise coach. It is not just for kids! The iPhone and iPad have shown how easy it can be to get applications on a handheld computer. Amazon has done the same with the Kindle. Most companies still don’t get the idea that the Internet is about power to the people. If you can’t make it simple, people won’t buy it.

Trusted
This is the big one. Will we trust the Internet? Security technology is available to achieve much higher levels of security than presently deployed both at enterprise and consumer levels. The bigger issue will be privacy. (Stay tuned for the Firefox “do not track” feature). Banks have our personal information and they are using it. Healthcare insurers have more information about our health than our doctors do. Nevertheless, there is much to be optimistic about when it comes to electronic medical records. Maybe 5% of doctors and hospitals use them but this will likely rise fast and the result will be better care, better outcomes, and fewer errors. And, fewer clipboards.

Tomorrow I will be moderating a panel at the SIIA Conference about the future of mobile.

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Tags: broadband, fcc, Healthcare, ipad, iPhone, jeopardy, john patrick, Mobile, opera, social media, supercomputer, WiFi

Email Basics

The posting last week called “Unsubscribe” seemed to resonate with a lot of readers. Dave Hart from Johannesburg in South Africa agreed 100%, but pointed out that there is another equally frustrating problem with many web sites. He said that many sites use a “contact us” web page rather than providing an e-mail address. He went on to say, “I appreciate that a company wants to ensure they collect relevant information to help streamline their response (as opposed to fattening their marketing database) but I like to have a copy of my correspondence and many “contact us” pages do not make provision for this.” I could not agree more.

For a company to provide an email address for their customers to use is email 101, but most do not. When I wrote “Get Connected back in 1993, I advocated that companies should use email more aggressively. Executives that I spoke to about this said they were concerned that they would not be able to handle all the emails they might get. I said that it would be a wonderful thing if you were overwhelmed by customers who wanted to tell you something, ask you something, or even buy something! Fast forward 18 years and we still find companies that set their number one priority to get information from you on their terms, in their format, so they can get and information (and you) into their database. They may or may not actually reply. When you click “contact us” you begin a data entry assignment to get you and your question pigeonholed and then after you enter your question–which usually doesn’t fit one of their predetermined questions and answers–you are asked to visit their wiki or blog or support site. They throw away the opportunity to have a human reply to the email and establish a relationship. The investment would be more effective than the wasted millions on yellow pages, print ads, and other old-fashioned forms of communication.

There is another important element of the “contact us” capability. Here is how I described it in Net Attitude nearly ten years ago.

If you use an email form on your web site instead of providing an email address, give the sender the option to receive a copy of their email message. People often don’t use the email form because they have no confidence it will get delivered and they have no record of having sent it. Allow them to attach a document that may contain more information about a situation at hand.

Tags: email, email marketing, get connected, john patrick, Net Attitude

Music Album Sales in Nose-Down Dive

The Wall Street Journal reported that for the ninth time in 10 years, U.S. music album sales continued to decline. The total of CDs and digital albums purchased was 326 million while the number of individual songs purchased was 1.2 billion. The album purchases were up 13% while the individual songs were up just 1%. Mozart is probably the longest running success but in the current age, the top-selling album was Eminem’s “Recovery” which sold 3.4 million copies. I suspect most of the readers of patrickWeb are not familiar with the rapper. The best-selling song was Katy Perry’s “California Gurls” which sold 4.4 million copies, a bit less than last year’s champ, the Black Eyed Peas’s “Boom Boom Pow” which sold 4.8 million copies.

It took the music industry a long time to figure out that digital music was for real. It took consumers seconds to figure out that buying a track of music they liked was better than being forced to buy an album containing the track they liked plus a bunch of tracks they did not like. Now the cable industry has to figure out that consumers want to buy channels a la carte. Newspaper and magazine publishers have to figure out that consumers want to subscribe to news on their own terms. Maybe Time or Wired are worth $5 for an occasional copy on the iPad but they are not worth $5 per copy to someone who wants to read every issue. The bottom line is that consumers want choice. That is what the Internet has given them. Industries that do not embrace the Internet and offer choices to consumers will be disintermediated. That is a fancy word which means they become toast. It may take some time but eventually the Internet will prevail. I only see three threats to the continued grass roots expansion of the Internet — AT&T, Comcast, and Verizon.

Tags: albums, music, tracks

Strawberries

There are a lot of subjects I do not know much about. One of them is genomics. I moderated a panel at a technology conference a few years ago that included three PhDs in bioinformatics and I learned enough to confirm how little I knew. I asked the three experts what book would enlighten me. They unanimously recommended Genome: The Autobiography of a Species in 23 Chapters by Matt Ridley. After reading the book I was convinced that the amount I did not know was orders of magnitude greater than I had thought. One thing I do know is that genomics is going to have a very major impact on healthcare in the years ahead — more like months than decades.

An early indicator of what lies ahead might be what is going on with fruits and vegetables. Elizabeth Weise, Science writer at USA Today, just did a nice summary of the latest genomic breakthrough with strawberries. Her story, Woodland strawberry genome sequenced, is about the genome of the woodland strawberry, a “cousin” to today’s cultivated strawberry, that has now been sequenced by an international research consortium.

The strawberry is the second smallest plant genome to be sequenced, with just 14 chromosomes. What sequencing means in layman terms is that the researchers have been able to construct a “parts list” of the strawberry. (See the actual gene mapping in Nature Genetics if you are curious about the details). Weise reports that as a result of the sequencing, breeders may be able to create tastier and hardier varieties of the popular berry as well as for other crops in its family, including almonds, apples, peaches, cherries and raspberries. The researchers are optimistic that they will also find new “parts” that will provide resistance to strawberry wilt, a common, soil-borne pathogen that spoils cultivated strawberries.

The consequences for humans are mind boggling. Gene hunters are finding more genes and linking them to diseases and predispositions to diseases. The next phase will be developing methods of prevention and cures. We may see more breakthroughs in the next ten years than we have seen in the last 100 years. If you want to get an idea of the scope of the human genome project, I recommend reading Medical and Societal Consequences of the Human Genome Project by Francis S. Collins.

Tags: bioinformatics, francis collins, gene mapping, genome, Genomics, health care, Healthcare, john patrick, matt ridley, strawberry