News from the other side of the mobile world

One more reminder of the size of the global market for non-smartphones: Wikipedia announced plans to offer SMS access to its articles, opening up that service to the 75% or so of handsets worldwide that have limited or no access to the web.

On that subject, I refuse to call non-smartphones “dumb” phones, just because they don’t have multitasking operating systems or big app stores. Businesses and consumers around the world are taking advantage of these “no-frills” devices to develop sophisticated financial services and innovative advertising models, in markets.

The financial service case is particularly interesting. As the Washington Post article mentioned above reports, one of the big news items at this year’s Mobile World Congress was the success of mobile payment and banking in developing countries with low smartphone penetration. The simplicity of the technology may even be an advantage, as service providers have focused on core services without being distracted by technical features like NFC. The French company Tagattitude rolled out a mobile payment solution that uses sound to communicate among devices. Their CEO noted (quote from the Post article):

All these phones have a microphone, and all those microphones are capable of capturing data from a financial transaction,” said Yves Eonnet, the voluble chief executive of Tagattitude, showing off the clunky Nokia and several other handsets. “At the end of the day, there is no business model that is sustainable for NFC,” or “near field communication,” an advanced technology used for payments.

Don’t get me wrong; I love my smartphone (Nokia Lumia 800) and find myself quite dependent on all of those fancy features. If you’re in the business of creating mobile solutions, however, it makes sense to not forget that 75%.

Instagram, Flickr, and the price of free

The changes that Instagram announced to its terms of service a couple of weeks ago provided an excellent reminder of the real cost of “free” online services and the need for us as users of those services to be realistic about our expectations. The brilliant xkcd explained this in case we missed it:

The new terms that Instagram announced in early December were so extreme that some tech writers recommended the old-fashioned notion of paying for software and services. The most prominent of these paid alternatives is flickr (still my favorite photo sharing service), which has been quietly going on for years, despite the negative press it attracts from the digerati.

Even though Instagram backtracked on the most extreme clauses in their new contract, I think it’s still worth considering flickr or other paid options as a safe place to store and share your images and videos on line. Here’s one important reason why. Instagram may have backed off from using your name and photos in ads without asking, but they still require that you grant them “non-exclusive, fully paid and royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, worldwide license to use the Content that you post on or through the Service.”

As a Pro (paid) member of Flickr, on the other hand, Yahoo! also requires a similar license, but “solely for the purpose for which such Content was submitted or made available.” Now IANAL, but I think this is a more restrictive set of terms as far as what they can do with your stuff. Furthermore, you can choose to impose terms on the use of your content by others. You can go the “all rights reserved” route, or choose from a selection of Creative Commons licenses that encourage sharing and reuse within defined limits.

These more robust terms are one reason, I think, why flickr partnered with Getty Images, a top stock photo agency, to offer a commercial licensing option to select flickr users.

Even if you’re not interested in possibly making a couple of bucks from your photos, I think the paid and (more) protected option is still worth considering.

Tumblr love

Looks like one of my Flickr photos has become something of a Tumblr sensation:

Or does everything on Tumblr end up like this?

Scariest picture in the mobile industry

The latest blog post from VisionMobile includes what is possibly the scariest image in the mobile industry, unless you work for Apple:

The most impressive achievement of Apple in the mobile space is not the number of devices it has sold, but the amount of profit it has managed to generate on those devices. Apple’s makes the sort of money on hardware (60% on iPhone 3GS according to this article) that was one thought impossible even for software businesses, where the cost of “hardware” is essentially zero. To put things in perspective, when Nokia was on top of the mobile world in the early 2000′s, their hardware margins of 15-20% (and overall margins above 10%) were considered extremely impressive for the industry.

Of course, the chart above shows percentages, not absolute numbers. Apple’s impressive position is due both to its own success and the inability of its competitors to keep up. If those competitors (or new ones) get their acts together, then Apple’s dominance of the mobile profit pie will be challenged.

According to Business Insider, this may already be happening, as competition from lower-priced products is forcing Apple to ship more lower-price (and hence lower-margin) products itself. Samsung, the profit number two, is producing impressive devices, and one can never count out Amazon, which is willing to sell products at cost in order to attract more customers to its ecosystem.

After all, nothing lasts forever…

Fixed!

Happy to report that I successfully replaced the glass & digitizer on my Nokia Lumia 800, thanks to a very informative video on YouTube and a friendly parts vendor in the UK.

The repair was just about as easy as promised: two small screws to release the old glass and two small connectors to connect the new one to the phone. Here’s the video in case you want to try this yourself:

It took a week or so for the replacement part to arrive from the UK (what I get for owning a European phone in the US), and I was happy to finally get it. In the meantime, I was starting to phone it old school:

Mobile Monday DC recap: Mobile Privacy

Finally getting around to the recap of our last Mobile Monday event, Mobile Privacy: Policy & Practice, which we held at the Venable LLP conference center in downtown Washington on Oct. 15. Our thanks go to Rick Joyce from Venable for moderating a superb panel discussion about privacy law and policy and its impact on mobile application and solution development.

Our panelists:

• Bryan Coapstick, HP
• Jennifer Wells, PBS Kids
• Jules Polonetsky, Future of Privacy Forum
• Michael Signorelli, Venable LLP

Here’s a short summary of a fascinating, wide-ranging discussion. If you were there, please add your comments and thoughts about the event

• Privacy, or to be more specific, managing personal information and who has access to it, is hard.
  • It’s hard to be sure what should be private and what shouldn’t. Jules noted that what used to be considered intrusive is now common practice. Not only that, but we can be be easily influenced to change our privacy preferences based on peer pressure and other “non-objective” factors
  • It’s hard to know what others are doing with our information. Bryan noted that most mobile apps in app stores use questionable privacy techniques.
  • It’s hard to manage our own information. Bryan explained that we all have multiple personas on line, and need to understand where our boundaries are and how we want to manage the balance of usability and privacy
• Protecting the privacy of children on line is even harder
  • Many services (iTunes, Facebook) have rules that prohibit young children from using those services, but parents help their kids use them anyway. As Mike noted, his kids sometimes want to see Dad’s iPad more than they want to see Dad. Parents download apps for their kids from iTunes, and create accounts for them on Facebook
  • As Jennifer noted, PBS prevents violations of privacy by not collecting analytics on its kids apps, but this then makes it very hard to learn what works in those apps so PBS can improve the educational and overall experience
• Government regulation is already happening, but may not be ideal
  • As several panelists noted, law and regulation cannot keep up with the pace of technology, and most legislators don’t have the necessary technical expertise to understand the issues
  • Despite this, when legislators and regulators see problems, they want to fix them, and will create solutions if industry does not do so first
• Industry has the right know-how to act, but that’s hard as well
  • Jennifer remarked that there are industry standards, but not everyone follows them. The mobile app space is still in many ways the wild West.
  • How you do something can be more important than what you do. Jules explained that good privacy systems require building the right kind of relationships with customers (and people in general). Those systems need to be built gradually, considering people’s responses along the way. His advice: Do things for people, not to them.

The tone of the discussion and the overall mood of the panelists was not nearly as negative as this summary may imply. The situation is improving, and business, government, and people are working out solutions to the challenges of privacy in the mobile world, as they have in other areas at the intersection of technology, policy, and law.

We will be back in 2013 with more interesting Mobile Monday DC events. Stay tuned!

Mobile Moo

I love stories like this one from the New York Times, which starts: “When Christian Oesch was a boy on his family’s hog farm, cellphones were a thing of the future. Now, Mr. Oesch tends a herd of dairy cattle and carries a smartphone wherever he goes. Occasionally he gets an SMS from one of his cows.”

Yes, cows. Swiss engineers have developed a sensor for cows that detects when they go into heat, sending an appropriate SMS about the event to the cow’s owner. This makes it easier for farmers to plan when to (as the article describes) “bring on the bull or, in about 80 percent of the cases these days, the artificial inseminator.”

What I’ve always found exciting about mobile technology is its potential to change how we live and work. Much of the mobile-related news I read, however, seems to focus on mobile devices as just one more content, entertainment, and advertising platform, not much more than a portable TV (with GPS). Of course that’s important (and profitable), but mobile devices have the potential to be so much more than that. This is why I’m excited to read about innovations like this. Here’s a solution that that truly takes advantage of the unique features of mobile devices and mobile networks to solve existing problems in ways that were previously impossible.

I’d love to hear about other solutions that use mobile tech in creative and useful ways.

Photo by publicenergy from flickr