The segmentation of the Facebook ‘friend space’ is about to happen, friends will be chosen to play a role in influencing one’s life and choices.  You have about two weeks to decide how you want to be positioned.

I was trying hard to understand what is behind the recent Facebook home page makeover - why throw all content items into the same stream?  Why break the established multimedia storytelling paradigm?  The answer lies in the need and ability to segment your friends into ‘friend lists’ which channel - hopefully - topical info into streams that have some consistency and focus. Continue reading this post…

My former colleague from Macromedia, Laurent Sellier, just launched yesterday the Kindle i-Phone app.  This and the new Kindle (which I got last week) show the direction where Amazon is going with their core offering in books and digital media:  it is a full-fledged monetization platform for creatives of the future.  It is one of the most probable companies to face an anti-trust lawsuit in five years.  It is addressing the web 3.0 opportunities with a solid backing of an e-commerce operation of gigantic scale: unlike most Internet portals still today, these guys are actually selling something.  And those e-books are expensive: $9.99 is a lot for a product that will be locked forever in the walled garden of Jeff Bezos.

Julia Borstin writes on Seeking Alpha:  “Publishers can get e-Books onto consumers iPhones and Kindles so fast, it should encourage the e-publishing of more books on current issues. And because they’ll be more relevant upon release, more people should want to read them. Since it’s so much less expensive to distribute a digital book, it should allow for more niche products to be published electronically. And that should be good for all the out-of-work writers desperate to write the great American novel or historic tome.”

I fully agree.  It is all about ‘frictionless’ knowledge creation, oiling the process sometimes presented as three types of knowledge appearing sequentially: productive, transformative and representative.  Those who can develop their brain into a frictionless transformer of knowledge and produce a constant stream of monetizable pieces - and still be sane after living a life like that - will eventually lead a successful life.  But like anywhere in life, success increases competition and the need to learn faster.  It had better be a lifestyle - there is no rest.

I am a bit worried that the market is at this point going into the direction of further verticalization.  No matter what people say, Apple and Amazon have walled gardens.  They have built those walled gardens in a legitimate fashion: they let the customer choose freely, after each purchase.  And in most cases the customer will return.  In the mobile industry we don’t have such luxury - we have 2-year contracts and penalties.  Apple and Amazon are building their power bases outside the crippled mobile ecosystem and preparing for an attack.  Poor Nokia.

That Bob Dylan analogy seems appropriate…  I recall sometime in 2003 I visited Nokia’s application store for the US, run by some obscure e-commerce service provider in Eden Prairie, Illinois.  One of the ten offered business productivity applications was titled ‘Biblical Quotes’.  In a subsequent conversation the then-head of Forum Nokia, Lee Epting, admitted that there was some room for improvement.

The recent announcement seems fairly encouraging, though.  The lineup of content partners looks impressive - getting onboard names like Fox, Myspace and Facebook tells about a won battle fought since quite a while ago.  And the ’smart store’ concept of auto-personalization based on context, location and behavior is nothing but a materialization of those visions we all in the mobile industry have been discussing at conferences.  It is nothing more than what Amazon has executed really well.  Except of course that the true mobile aspects such as context and location can now be included.  Comparing with the iPhone app store, though, the proof on the market will heavily rely on how well Nokia has been able to innovate on usability to narrow Apple’s lead.

As my better-informed friends point out, Nokia is a slow train - but it is a train, not a bicycle.  It can shoot with heavy impact roughly 18 to 24 months after having been hit first.  To quote my friend’s insight here directly:

“Nothing that is happening at Nokia today is surprising or unforeseen.  Cycle times are such that what we see now was set in motion at least 2 years ago.  Platform issues are 4 years in the making.  Nobody is being stupid, just doing their bit in a process-heavy organization.  Apple is a priority-heavy organization.   Getting the priorities right is more important at a time when fundamentals change rapidly from under you.  You can’t rely on process optimization since what you are optimizing is evaporating.”

That’s what we Finns have become.  Finns who once used to be famous for keeping the silence in six languages.  Finns who when encountering an elephant in the jungle would go: ‘I wonder what he thinks of me?’.  This is now a hotspot for innovation.  People say it is because of Nokia but I believe it is more because of those who chose not to work for Nokia - the entrepreneurs.  Now apparently there will be hundreds of people ploughing through the snow to hear what the most successful of them have to say.  They say a lot but with few words.  They have been nurtured in incubators, world-class ones.  They are proud of their Linux and open source heritage - for a reason.  And they have this whole new generation who have been brain-radiated by mobile phones since they were five.  I am just a humble listener, very curious to hear what they have to say.

It has been quiet on my blog for the summer but as we passed Labor Day it is time to take up the drum and see how the jungle echoes.  My summer has been actually very busy bringing to the market RealityServer, a collaborative real-time 3D rendering solution from Mental Images (an NVIDIA company).  Our idea is simple: when Internet connectivity (both wireline and wireless) improves we will be able to move realtime graphics computing into the ‘cloud’ and to make multimedia experiences available on any device running a full Internet browser.  In the past month I have been exposed to the creme de la creme in multimedia at both SIGGRAPH 2008 and at NVIDIA’s own event called NVISION08.  This is an amazingly dynamic and exciting industry and I am proud we will be able to bring new multimedia experiences on even mobile devices with our technology.Let’s see how the Virtual Worlds Expo will stir the industry now when things have matured a bit.  I attended the inaugural VW Expo in New York in March 2007 and the general tone of the event was ‘futuristic’, philosophical and tarnished by the excessive hype offered by consumer brands and interactive agencies as well as received by Second Life.  Today it seems people are better aware of the multiple facets of the business opportunities virtual environments offer and when and how those opportunities could be materialize.  So I am digging up my social networking tools and researching all 300+ conference attendees ahead of the event, using the event’s own social network.   It is amazing how much preparation one can do these days upfront, hopefully my physical self will be more effective tomorrow…

We are now 46 hours into the new reality of the new iPhone 3G and how it will change the competitive landscape.  I have conversed with many of my Apple-evangelist friends who always have the latest on the announcement - including rumors - and who are irritatingly sure that Apple has a genial master plan is doing absolutely nothing wrong implementing it.  Well, this is what all religions tend to do, right?   I agree that the new phone is going to sell beyond the overall 10 million worldwide sales target.  I agree with the evangelists that the enhanced monthly data ARPU and the ($200+?) activation kickback the carrier pays Apple are going to make shareholders in all parties happy.  I agree that the app store has a lot of potential as a revenue generator.  But there is one concern the industry (=carriers) have fought for years now: converting pre-paid users into post-paid users. In the new Apple model there will be less and less technical possibility (according to Apple) and economic incentive to unlock the phones, therefore the model is purely based on a walled garden built around post-paid carrier subscribers.  As an example, Apple has announced that all Latin American countries except Venezuela will be part of the phase 2 launch of the iPhone 3G (totaling 70 countries).  But according to my consulting partner and LatAm expert Carl Gunell only 19% of customers in that region are post-paid.  (Combine this with the fact that gifting a phone will be more difficult if it implies having a credit check done on the gift receiver - a large portion of the expensive phones in developing countries are given as gifts - and you will see how the adoption may be curbed.)  So Apple needs to push the envelope of expanding the postpaid market and here lies its biggest opportunity, nicely aligned with the strategic goal of the carrier partner. Continue reading this post…

I just wanted to throw my two cents into the mix.  Everyone seems to be wanting to know what Apple will announce later today as if they could not just wait and let it happen.  Well, it will sure give indications on where we are going.  Remember, though, that it will give indications on what Apple chooses to launch, not what they have been capable of developing.  I think Apple has set itself a rather modest target of selling 10 million devices this year - this should be well doable now with the new carrier deals worldwide.  The bigger question will be: how will they set themselves in a position to sell 30 million devices in 2009?  We will get indications for that today.  Not everything will be announced - you will need to read through the lines for cues. Continue reading this post…

Today we saw an interesting announcement between Orange and Nokia: the companies are going to integrate their proprietary content services and promote them together.  The co-promotion will be implemented on ten Nokia handsets in Orange’s ’signature range’.  This is exactly what Nokia needs to do - move the operators away from ‘EITHER me OR you’ thinking into ‘BOTH you AND we can do this together’.  This will incres the barrier of entry of other handset vendors as Nokia will soon have significant assets to offer to the carriers when mega-acquisitions such as NAVTEQ will have been integrated into a seamless part of the Nokia machine.  A bigger question will be how the music offering will be differentiated both in terms of technology platform and content so that it is not the ‘me-too’ offering we see today go head-to-head in competition with carriers’ own offerings.

MocoNews today picked up an interesting story on Orange having cut a deal with Facebook and MySpace for free browsing on those sites for their prepaid users.  According to the article, by giving access to those sites for free data cost, Orange is trying to attract more users to their mobile portal.I think this is a move in the right direction from a carrier: riding on the success of a company they cannot fight but rather support and try to extract some juice out of it for their own efforts.  It requires the rare notion from a carrier to recognize that they themselves would not represent the center of the world.  Well done!  I would be curious to know what the deal terms look like. Continue reading this post…