Monthly Archives: July 2006

Yiibu Presentation PDF Now Online

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If you’re looking for a copy of the Mobile Monday Boston, OZMAD, Boston Adobe Mobile User Group or New Media BC/UBC Magic presentation “Creating ‘Casual’ Games, Content and Applications for the (Mobile) Long Tail”—look no further. We finally have a PDF version available for download (500k)!

Thanks for being patient. We’ve been absolutely swamped lately :-) Thanks as well to Rodger from the Magic Lab and Dale from OZMAD/Moket for the recent opportunity to share our thoughts with their respective groups.

Carnival #38 and Post of the Month :-)

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Another week, another Carnival. Don’t miss this installment of the Carnival of the Mobilists (#38), hosted by Judy Breck at SmartMobs.

Carnival of the Mobilists

The Carnival has also announced the winner of last month’s ‘Post of the Month’ and ‘Host of the Month.’ Congratulations to Rudy who wins host of the month. And it seems, I beat out C. Enrique Ortiz’ ‘Mobile Perimiter‘ post (by a hair) to win the June post of the month with “Casual Mobile Snacks for Everyone“. :-) Many thanks to everyone who voted and to Khosla Ventures for sponsoring the competition.

LOL-I am an Infovore, You are an Infovore

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I think i’ll have to buy the New Scientist today to read the rest of this article…

Why are you reading this article when you could be watching paint dry instead? It’s all because of our innate hunger for information. Humans, it turns out, are infovores…The term was introduced into the scientific lexicon recently by neuroscientists trying to work out why we get a kick out of learning something new – why we have an appetite for knowledge…They claim that the neural pathways through which we learn about the world tap into the same pleasure networks in the brain as are activated by drugs like heroin. They say that, for humans, only the basic urges of hunger, harm avoidance and the need to find a mate can distract us from this info-craving…

This now helps justify the fact that every time we hand someone our Wee Tropical Fish Guide, we end up in a silly conversation about fish. I mean, it’s only fish. How many people can possibly care about fish? Shouldn’t they care about something way more real-time, interactive, data-driven, location-aware and cutting-edge (buzzword…buzzword..:-)

Turns out lots of people do care but everyone has a different reason to care (sushi, diving, memories of travel, aquarium fixation, childhood pet, heron in their backyard koi pond—all real stories BTW.)

Very cool. And totally long tail…

[And yes...data driven and location aware would also be great with a fish guide.]

Carnival of the Mobilists #37

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This installment of the Carnival of the Mobilists (#37) is hosted by Michael Mace of Mobile Opportunity.

Carnival of the Mobilists

This week’s issue has a great blend of technology and product news as well as industry research and commentary. Michael has also kindly included my recent post on Murdock’s ‘universals of culture’ and why they don’t quite seem to be well represented (yet) in the mobile content realm. As usual, it’s not an issue to miss and if you feel like lingering a bit longer on Michael’s site, don’t miss two of my favourite posts “Why are mobile application sales dropping” and “We need a new platform. Sort of.”

Mobile Gaming isn’t just Gaming on a Mobile

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An informative post by Chetan Sharma in Seattle yesterday. He offers a round-up of last week’s Mobile Gaming Conference and brings up a few points that I feel are specifically relevant to Flash Lite developers.

Missing the big picture – Except for some of the seasoned industry veterans like Daishiro Okada (Square Enix), Trip Hawkins (Digital Chocolate), Chris Early (Microsoft), Mark Pierce (SHFF), and some others, most (esp. the smaller players) seemed to be operating in a world of their own, unaware or uninterested in what’s currently going on outside the mobile gaming space and how it might impact their respective businesses. As pointed out above, mobile gaming is shifting gears and people who aren’t watching for trends and developments outside their sub-segment will be creamed within the next 12 months. Developers will benefit from looking at the developments in the areas of mobile music, mobile search, voice recognition, mobile video & broadcasting, mobile advertising, near field communications, etc. As Mark Pierce noted, his experience in working on projects with Jumptap (mobile search), v-enable (voice search), Autodesk (location), Mobot (visual search), Vibetones (vibration), GestureTech (motion, tilt) helped him gain a broader perspective of the industry that he can apply to his passion of building mobile games. Conference attendees would have also benefited from the perspective of infrastructure vendors like Ericsson and Motorola – what’s coming and when? For e.g. SIP and IMS will have a direct impact on the mobile gaming market but they were barely uttered by any of the speakers…

The big thing to note here (I think) is that this whole paragraph is really about mobile—not gaming. Developing mobile games requires an understanding (and genuine interest in) all sorts of aspects of the mobile industry—including at times confusing and initially arcane sounding ones like:

  • differences between network standards and platforms (CDMA, GSM, UMTS, BREW etc.)
  • handset brands (not so much who releases what, but how OEM market share and brand perception varies and how this may affect your product’s marketability in a regional go-to-market scenario,)
  • cultural mobile habits
  • the differences in mobile marketing practices/codes of conduct that may also affect your product.

Whether we like it or not, mobile is a different beast. It’s really not that different from our early Flash (and web) experiences with clients and stakeholders who were stubbornly trying to reproduce print on the web. It’s also not terribly helpful that Flash means different things to different people—like an animator friend of ours who works in Flash all day producing award-winning broadcast shorts for the Cartoon Network but has no idea how to make a button. All these people (their employers, and clients)—with potentially no mobile background whatsoever—may soon be experimenting with Flash for mobile.

Is there anything we can do to make this transition a bit easier than the print-to-web one was?

[BTW—Before everyone freaks out, I'm not suggesting there are no good Flash Lite games, no great developers or that J2ME folks have it all figured out either. Just that those two million Flash developers Adobe keeps talking about come with a lot of baggage. Not all baggage is bad, but it's still baggage. :-) ]

Universals of (Mobile) Culture

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I’ll be the first to admit i’m probably not your typical consumer. I don’t own a home or car, have no kids, watch little mainstream TV, don’t eat fast food, live in a tiny flat with little interest in a larger one, don’t shop much for items to decorate my surroundings, don’t have a large network of friends or family and spend most of by disposable income on books and travel. I also have three nationalities and several adopted countries and cultures which sometimes leaves me with confusion as to where exactly I fit in.

So all this inevitably leads to doubt when designing products or concepts for clients. Do I really get it? Does research alone allow me to put myself in the shoes of consumers who are sometimes not-at-all like me—enough to create something they will enjoy or find useful? Is my cultural ‘confusion’ an advantage or a curse? I’ve had all these doubts when designing mobile products as well.

In a perfect world there’d be a cornucopia of mobile stuff out there for all age groups and interests—just like there is on the web. And I think this needs to happen simply because the mobile is the most ubiquitous device out there. It seems silly that 2.5 billion of us are right now carrying around something that—admittedly is already vital in the way we do business, communicate with friends and family, organize our lives—but so far somewhat lacking in providing us with useful, relevant and enriching knowledge or experiences delivered in the form of content (art, design, music, moving pictures, storytelling, etc.)

But then again. Maybe that’s just me…

Then a few days ago, I ran into a list of ‘universals of culture’ by George P Murdock. Now I hate generalizations but this list looks pretty good. As a matter of fact, I think it’s spot on—and certainly applies to many aspects of games, content, and social applications on mobile.

…age-grading, athletic sports, bodily adornment, calendar, cleanliness training, community organisation, cooking, co-operative labour, cosmology, courtship, dancing, decorative art, divination, division of labour, dream interpretation, education, eschatology, ethics, ethno-botany, etiquette, faith healing, family feasting, fire-making, folklore, food taboos, funeral rites, games, gestures, gift-giving, government, greetings, hair styles, hospitality, housing, hygiene, incest taboos, inheritance rules, joking, kin groups, kinship nomenclature, language, law, luck superstitions, magic, marriage, mealtimes, medicine, obstetrics, penal sanctions, personal names, population policy, postnatal care, pregnancy usages, property rights, propitiation of supernatural beings, puberty customs, religious ritual, residence rules, sexual restrictions, soul concepts, status differentiation, surgery, tool-making, trade, visiting, weather control and weaving.

Some of these (weaving?) may be a tad less relevant today than when Murdoch wrote this in 1945 but I can’t think of a country I’ve ever been to where most of these aren’t true. And with high global migration—this stuff isn’t really defined by country anyhow. Depending on the group it can be regional, local or tribal—but also global—communicated and upheld over distances via devices like the mobile. Sure this global hodgepodge creates a blurring of culture but even MacDonalds realized long ago that serving halo-halo in the Philippines, koulouri in Greece and rice throughout much of Asia was more than just good for business. You can only disrupt culture so much before something has to give.

So—assuming you agree with Murdock’s list—why is the content available for download from our operators pretty much the same from country to country? You do find some variation in the area of ringtones (local music almost always trumps international brands) and wallpapers (esp. in areas of religious or inspirational sayings, depictions of beauty, use of colour etc.) But in games and applications—behold the mono-culture :-)

Admittedly, I am being a tad sensationalist and I did choose games that would prove my point. But the sad fact is, it wasn’t at all hard to find them—even in high growth areas like the BRIC markets where you’d expect volume to drive local content industries. There are lots of American media and pop-culture brands, lots of console (repurposed to mobile) gaming brands, and lots of low-hanging (casual-game) fruit like Sudoku, Mahjong and Tetris. It’s also pretty easy to see that certain regions or countries seem to favour certain types of content—and it’s in these areas that the cultural differences are now showing—even with applications purchased through a global aggregator.

  • Social applications to do with dating, horoscopes and luck seem more popular in certain regions than others.
  • Storytelling via historical or folklore settings seems very popular in South Asia
  • ‘Kawai’ or gaming-branded properties (Sanrio, San-X, Ragnarok, Pukka etc.) are popular throughout Asia.
  • Hong Kong can’t seem to get enough re-purposing of Mahjong,
  • Some local content does creep in, in the form of mass-media or sports brands (ex. Bollywood or cricket)
  • Then there are differences in design, which are pretty easy to spot in content you know is developed locally (visual style, use of colour, representations of male and female interactions or social settings, anthropomorphism of game characters etc.)

So overall, I don’t think we’re doing all that well on Murdoch’s list. Most markets seem to be getting maybe 10-20% locally relevant content, another 10-20% regional or cross-ethnic content (ex. Moroccan operators buying from the French. Thai, Malay, Indonesian and Singapore operators buying from China or India to cater to their multi-ethnic populations)—and the rest is mostly (North American?) big brand entertainment.

If anything, applications currently fare a bit better since they’re sometimes merely containers for interaction in the form of (user-created) voice, text or photography. Which brings me to my original point. Voice and text are vital and there’s certainly lots of room to innovate in that area. But with 2.5 billion of us (and counting,) couldn’t we do so much more if given the opportunity to simply and economically create, distribute, monetize and market content locally?

[Note: I chose not to include Korea and Japan in this discussion. They have quite a bit of local content due to a variety of factors that no-one can seem to agree on but certainly has something to do with high mobile adoption, a content-friendly payment infrastructure, smart operators and more flexible authoring environments. These articles on iMode provide insight into some of this.]

Thanks to everyone in Boston!

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A note of thanks once again to Alessandro and the whole gang at Mobile Monday Boston for the opportunity to present to the Boston mobile community last week. The MIT venue was lovely and the questions from the audience challenging enough to keep me pondering a few things on my flight home.

Thanks as well to James Talbot of Adobe for his patience throughout our technical difficulties during Tuesday’s Adobe Flash Mobile User Group presentation.

Both presentation are online. The Mobile Monday version includes some great questions from the audience, while the Adobe User Group version provides a better look at my slides (and the added bonus of some well timed snorts from James’ dog in the background.) :-)

Freedom, Openness and the Evolution of Business (in Response to Charlie…)

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.

Charlie had a great post a few days back.

When I review my notes I see that I have been asking myself in so many different contexts, how can we help the operators. How do we give them incentives to open one layer and then move money to another layer? How to we help them loosen control of one layer to enhance the value in other layers? How do we avoid an end-run around immobile operators (pun intended) and bring them in? How do we help them build a rich ecosystem for all to grow?

They are crucial to our success and we to theirs.

My suggestion is that operators spend more time trying to find other layers to get money from (not wring more money out of the same game), and make other layers a lot more free (can you say access?); that they open themselves up a bit in an enlightened way and not be over protectionist (as in locking phones, for one)…that they understand that control restricts and that easier distribution and lower barriers to entry lead to new levels of creativity; that they remove the complexity making it hard for even them to grow, and to keep things simple – in technology, in services, in pricing, in access, in everything.

I don’t have an answer but he’s bang on with his analysis of the problem as well as the reason this is a timely discussion. One upcoming challenge is that the off-deck conversations are heating up—so we may soon see the operators start to panic. To me, this is just proof that there are lots of people (big and small) who want to participate in our currently underdeveloped ecosystem.

If the operators were smart(er)—and I agree Charlie, they already are smart,useful and need to be there —they’d realize that providing access will only encourage participation.

The music business hasn’t exactly collapsed because of mp3 sales. Sure the business changed, and sales may now be occurring in a different way (smaller chunks for example) but then again some of the overhead has gone down (no CD’s to burn, no packaging to print, fewer distribution costs.) And discovery—although still problematic—has increased as well; which has likely provided increased global sales in music that was traditionally very niche or regional. Ironically—we used to have a hard time finding music because discovery was only local (your store, in your town.) Now it’s virtual and global but we have the problem of a bit too much choice—and discovery becomes a challenge once again. We also have to deal with the fact that we may be paying twice for the same music we bought years ago on CD.

So it’s a challenge for us as consumers and a challenge for ‘them’ as providers and promoters. But isn’t that what technology and ‘progress’ is all about? Show me one man-made invention of business, economics, technology or science that didn’t end up with negative un-intended consequences to balance out the positive ones? The idea that you can have your cake and eat it too every single time is unrealistic on both sides of the equation. And when you think of it in historical terms, it’s positively hillarious to keep having these hissy fits of “but it’s always been like this and we don’t want it to change…” about things that often didn’t exist five years ago. :-)

So I see lots of parallels in the mobile industry with what’s happened with music the past few years (and as Cory pointed out—with sheet music years ago.) What will make this all work out in the end is creativity and the ability to re-think our existing models and not be quite so greedy (and content creators, I’m talking to you too:-) Content that’s off-deck doesn’t have to be billed off-deck for example. As a matter of fact, it makes sense to bill it through the operator since the billing relationship already exists and lumping it into a phone bill also makes it easier to impulse buy. Of course the operators can then take a cut.

Then of course there’s data. Whether you scan a QR code, punch in a short code found on a subway poster, download a widget, access an on-device-portal, discover and click through a mobile ad, or use a scratch card to access or discover content—you still incur data charges. There’s tons of studies pointing to the fact that mobile data use is growing but still highly under-utilized by certain segments of the population. I don’t know about you but having an Alexandria’s worth of mobile content to choose from would certainly make me use it more. As would reasonable prices of course.

Diversity in the ecosystem also opens content up to the now well recognized principles of the long-tail. It’s way harder for an operator to interest their 50 million subscribers in 100 random games than for my local yoga studio to interest me in a bunch of yoga-related content that they know may already interest me. Sure the operators could start partnering with thousands of local retailers to sell carefully segmented catalogues of content but that’s just plain inefficient. If anything, let lots of niche aggregators do that (and there’s that access and openness again.) Or offer affiliate services so smaller organizations can hook into the on-deck or aggregate catalogues and promote products direct to their constituents. Then there’s the ability to self-publish (Web 2.0 style) which we’re beginning to see examples of but would also benefit from more access and openness at the operator level.

So maybe (in response to Charlie) the first thing we should do is begin to (regularly and aggressively :-) remind them of the past to better help them envision a future that will be sustainable for all of us.

Word of Mouth Marketing with the Nokia 6682

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I got an interesting email yesterday in response to my recent post about mobility in Canada. It seems that Rogers Wireless has partnered with a word-of-mouth marketer call Matchstick, to promote the Nokia 6682 through bloggers in Toronto and Vancouver. They plan to give away phones to people who meet this criteria….

  • Hosts a popular blog with 400+ hits a day
  • A current Rogers cell phone subscriber (phone only supported with the Rogers network)
  • Between the ages of 22-35
  • Keeps his/ her blog updated on a regular basis with pictures and video
  • Very socially active

So this is a wonderful idea but I have a few suggestions for them—specifically for the Canadian market.

Beware the Data Plan Dilemma

I’m assuming this promo will come with a data plan—otherwise what’s the point. Data use in Canada is very low (if you don’t count Blackberrys) so you really can’t assume that participants will have a plan. They’re also marketing this as a ‘multimedia smartphone’ (I’m surprised they were allowed to use the word ‘phone‘) so they will probably encourage participants to upload photos, video etc.

But here’s the thing. If you give them the largest Rogers plan (100MB,) they may still (very innocently) go over their monthly limit and be stuck with a large bill at the end of the month. If you give them an unlimited plan, you’ve opened Pandora’s box, because at the moment—Rogers/Fido doesn’t have such a plan. Be prepared for the fact that, if this promotion is successful, consumers may start to ask for unlimited data options! :-)

Involve Teachers

There are a lot of students and teachers blogging around the world. Canada is no exception. Your 22-35 age cap may sound reasonable from a marketing point of view but do consider that by involving a few teachers (some may be under 35 but many won’t be,) you’ll get way more participation and word of mouth. And, it’ll be more relevant to parents who may start to consider a smartphone as a family purchase (see the comments in this post about the ‘pass-back’) or school-boards, who are already experimenting with handheld devices in the classroom—with great results (American study).

And while you’re at it, why not involve some older, high profile professionals (TV celebrities, musicians, designers, authors etc.)

Give them a Bit of Support

This is not the Nokia Blogger Relations Program (no link available that I can find but we all know it exists :-) Your bloggers are obviously internet literate but in this market, they maybe not handset literate. If they lived in the UK, Malaysia, France etc. they would likely walk over to their local bookstore, pick up a magazine and discover all sorts of applications and services to try out on their new phones. Here, they may be hard pressed to find information and as most Nokia devices for sale in Canada have historically been lower end series 40 devices, they may not even be able to turn to a more experienced friend for advice.

So give them a starter kit. A list of (useful! or fun) applications and lifestyle/personalzation tools—Life Blog, Shozu, Widsets, Habbo Hotel etc., links to some non-traditional technology bloggers, moblogers, etc. You’ll get way more out of this (and so will they) if they don’t spend their first week fussing with settings and trying to figure out exactly what they can do with this new device.

Feel free to pass this information on to bloggers in Toronto or Vancouver. For more information, or to participate, contact Yvonne (yvonneATmatchstickDOTca.)

Carnival of the Mobilists #35

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This installment of the Carnival of the Mobilists (#35) is hosted by Xen Mendelsohn of Xellular Identity.

Carnival of the MobilistsThis week’s Carnival follows a World Cup theme with lots of good stuff including my recent Canadian mobile industry rant (I’ve been getting lots of traffic off this post already which is a bit of a surprise—quite a few people seem to be looking for this type of information within and outside Canada.)

I like the way Xen broke the Carnival post up by topic (mobile web, mobile marketing etc.)—could be great idea long-term from an search engine/findability point of view (especially if we all follow the same format and start using tags to format the sub-titles for added indexability.)