App Store Insights

I came across a great article on App stores and why they might fail...

The insights into app stores and carrier stores are spot-on and quite similar to the views expressed in this blog.

I particularly like the fundamental requirements for a successful mobile content business-

1. Discovery
2. Billing
3. Positive ROI for publishers

You can read more here

The App Store Fever!!

‘If you can’t beat them, join them’ is probably the mantra for all the iPhone Rivals. I don’t blame them, with estimated revenues of US$50 million to $100 million from the app store, I would be enticed to do the same (maybe, I will! :))

Well, one thing Apple has going for it is the fact that the app store caters to only one handset model (and the ipod touch, but that too has the same o/s)! I can’t think of any other device maker who has generated so much hype, revenue from just one product (slight variants have released but it still is just the iPhone).

I believe that this is one advantage and a big driver in the success of the App store that many rivals are overlooking. Think about it, the mega project- Nokia OVI (which launched early last week) is already experiencing the problems associated with catering to a bazillion handsets and to offer a consistent great customer experience. Running the OVI operationally is going to be one uphill task. We all remember what happened to Preminet, NGage Arena etc...

The other App store that has all the marketing and money muscle behind it is the soon to be released Vodafone App store. Well, being in the business, I can’t begin shuddering about the complexity of the Vodafone App store business. It will have to cater to the largest universe of handset models ever, offer a great seamless experience and simultaneously not antagonize its subscribers with messages stating that their handsets don’t support the ‘cool’ apps (dont know about you but I sure do get a lot of those messages on various wap portals and it really dissapoints me).

Still, it’s very exciting. If the Vodafone app store does succeed, and I hope it does, it will bring back the spotlight on the mobile operator as the driver of the mobile entertainment and lifestyle space, not just a dumb pipe. With its traditional strengths of distribution, billing and subscriber relationships, it has half the battle won.

Hey, you can't use that!!!

An interesting article in the NYT about how internet users in "developing countries" are harming profits and increasing costs of web companies...

Essentially, Web companies that rely on advertising are enjoying some of their most vibrant growth in developing countries. But those are also the same places where it can be the most expensive to operate, since Web companies often need more servers to make content available to parts of the world with limited bandwidth. And in those countries, online display advertising is least likely to translate into results. Perhaps no company is more in the grip of the international paradox than YouTube, which a Credit Suisse analyst, Spencer Wang, recently estimated could lose $470 million in 2009, in part because of the high cost of delivering billions of videos each month. Hence some web companies are taking the drastic step of cutting of services to these countries! Smarter companies are "effectively managing bandwidth" by making sites lighter, less features etc to reduce bandwidth costs

The recession has brought in a lot of prudent measures that were never thought of in the heady days of the boom where more users meant higher valuations.

I think this unique situation might be relevant to the Mobile Internet too very soon. More page views = more profits? Time will tell.

Article here courtesy NYT.

Am I right or what?!

I’ve been blogging about the Mobile internet since Jan of this year and the theme has been that of not going down the route of the Internet where all services are free and monetized through advertising.

I’m not saying that there is no role for ad supported services on the mobile...there might be, but not at present.

The trouble with giving away free mobile internet services is that we are destroying a perfectly great economic model that is prevalent in the mobile phone services industry. Subscribers are willing and quite used to paying for services available on their mobile devices which would be available for free on the internet. Millions of subscribers across the world pay sms subscription fees for sports scores, horoscopes and even news. They download Games, ringtones, wallpapers from Carrier decks. However, there’s a new breed of content services companies who are trying to replicate and extend their FREE SERVICES model straight from the internet on to the mobile. So they give away scores, news, astro, and other web services for free on the mobile internet hoping to translate them into page views and thus monetize through advertising. Unfortunately, this has not really been successful till now.

Carriers are too unaware or turning a blind eye to these free services on the mobile internet (since it helps them sell data plans!). In the long run however, a great foundation laid will have been destroyed- where carriers end up being Wireless ISP ‘dumb pipes’ with no control over content/services and content companies that will worryingly kill the golden goose of paying subscribers.

Here is a similar opinion in an article published in the NYT on April 5. Very interesting.…wonder If they’ve been reading my blog? :)

Disruptive Technology Alert !!

Skype has all the makings of doing to the Carriers what Napster and P2P networks did to the music industry...

Here are 2 interesting articles on Skype-

One from the NYT on iPhone's deal with Skype-

So Skype has come to the iPhone.

Skype, of course, is the free software (for Mac, Windows, Linux, BlackBerry, iPhone, etc.) that lets you place free "phone calls" (or even video calls) to other people who have Skype. That's now over 400 million people,so it's not so hard to find someone to call.

The calls have better sound than phone calls, and, in case you missed it, the calls are free, even to people in other countries. That's what makes Skype so irresistible to students and anyone with loved ones living abroad.

More here

The other one on T-Mobile blocking Skype from Moconews.

The times they are a-changin...

Opera Mini- Friend or Foe?

The Opera Mini browser has done more for the mobile internet than all the operators and device makers put together. With its awesome full web to mobile screen crunching technology, superior data compressing and rich experience, it has made the web accessible to everyone with a GPRS enabled handset no matter how feature rich the handsets are. And people love it- the billion page views that it serves month on month is a testament to its growing popularity. It’s surprising that the device makers, apart from Apple, have not been able to develop a worthy competitor to the Opera mini.

However, what peeves me is that content companies and carries have not been able to harness the potential of the Mini. The Carriers on their part have been silent spectators to the runaway success of the mini. Sure, they’re happy that it’s made a lot of people adopt the mobile internet and thus boost data volumes and internet plans. Again, this is another step that will lead to the operator becoming a dumb pipe in the long run.

More worrying is that content and media companies too have not realized that millions of subscribers have been consuming their content and services through the mini without any substantial benefit to these web media companies. You would say, hey, they are getting massive page views? Wrong! With the Opera Mini all the page views are meaningless since Opera Mini fetches all content through a proxy server that reformats web pages into a format more suitable for small screens thorough the Opera Servers based in the US or Norway. Thus, all the page views are just non-identifiable and not serve the basic purpose of any intelligible data that is traditionally known through normal web browsers which can be used for advertising.

Also, the monetisable services that are available in a wap/app format through the carrier decks are bypassed since users the Free to use internet services through the Mini instead! For e.g.- a well known matrimonial web services company in India runs its wap and sms services through carriers on a micro-payment revenue model. However, the same services are available to the user through the Opera Mini for Free!! Now why would anyone pay for the WAP/SMS services now?! Ditto for sport scores, infoservices etc..! Some smart internet content and services companies have thankfully taken this into account and are now identifying the browser type and serving only Mobile internet sites on the Mini like the popular Men’s Mag- Nuts or Loaded in the UK. Nuts mag offered the full web services on the Mini earlier but by the sheer traffic that it got through the Mini lead them into serving mobile users with the mobile internet portal only. Now users can download content from Nuts mag at a price- no more free web services and revenue leakages! Well done, Nuts.

This is a fine example of how web media companies and carriers can truly monetize the mobile internet through the Opera Mini. Sure, I might face some flak saying that it’s detrimental to the growth of the mobile internet etc but with the current economic climate and digital advertising hard to come by, some tough decisions need to be taken for the web companies and carriers to survive lest they get into the mess that the newspapers in the US have gotten themselves into.

Now everyone can Game...

It doesn’t take a Mckinsey/KPMG report to tell you that Gaming is exploding...

Every household has a kid/youngster whose wishlist is a gaming console for his or her birthday/diwali/[insert any random occasion where gifts are exchanged]. Heck, I know of many who have a number of Gaming devices- a Ps2, a psp and of course the mobile phone.

Yes, you read right- I called the mobile phone a gaming device...

For years, people have been dreaming of the day when gaming is accessible to all and we can all be happily twiddling our thumbs away killing monsters in distant lands or racing our fantasy cars on the winding roads of Monaco. Dream no more, the mobile phone has made that possible.

A few years ago, the mobile gaming experience was quite inferior- a poor man’s gaming console, due to the handset capabilities and inexperience on the part of mobile gaming developers on how to utilize the restricted environment to offer quality gaming experience. However, that has changed and how!

All the latest handsets support gaming experiences to rival the Nintendo DS and even the PSP! Mobile device makers have, to their credit, pushed the limits of hardware capabilities and game developers have exploited this fully. The Apple Iphone has to some extent shown the other device makers of how a mobile phone can be a great gaming console. Sure, Nokia had a great device called the NGage with some really good titles but the device had a love it or hate it ‘sidetalking’ feature and a bad game discovery process. The iphone with its superlative hardware and a great app store coupled with great low prices and top of the line titles has really infused new energy to the once-flaccid mobile gaming market. Gaming for the iphone is very profitable business line- evident by the number of games available in the app store- Games lead all iPhone categories with 6,276 titles, or 23.1 percent of total App Store applications.

Unfortunately, most carriers are still mostly grappling in the dark when it comes to Mobile Gaming. It all starts with the Carrier’s deck- most carrier decks are cluttered with too many inferior games selling at mostly inflated prices. Gaming for many in India begins with the Mobile phone (since consoles and high end PCs are still out of reach for the average Indian) and the first few experiences that they have with it will determine on whether they would purchase more games from the carrier or stick to their embedded ‘Snake’ Game for the rest of their lives (Read the Video Game Crash of 1983 for more). It is imperative that Carriers get quality titles that are reasonably or at least creatively priced with pricing options like Try N Buy, Micro-payments etc to get people to get their first taste of gaming. A large opportunity stands before the carriers in the country- they can quickly get an entire generation hooked onto mobile gaming and lead this initiative or watch the device makers, with their fantastic app stores, to snatch them away.

This is one real-world game that has a lot at stake for the mobile operators.