In my post about internet-based mobility earlier this week, I mentioned that the hype around mobile devices we endured during the 90's and early 21st century is finally being realized in 2004. Mobile phone market penetration is running at 70% where I live, up from 10% in the mid-90's. Other devices such as PDA's, the iPod and the Tablet are also being increasingly used. Whichever mobile device or combination of devices you have, it seems that information increasingly wants to be not only free - but mobile.
With all these devices and accompanying types of data I can now record - text, audio, video, photos, etc - it is apparent that I have a need to connect all the different pieces together. Not only that, I want to place myself at the center of my digital media.
Joining all the pieces together, using myself as the locus, is how I strive to retain a sense of control over my technological environment. So naturally I want the process to be as easy as possible, so that my sense (illusion?) of control is greater.
I want to be able to connect my mobile phone to my PC, for example. And connect to the Internet on my PDA, via a bluetooth connection on my mobile phone. And I want to synch PDA data with my PC. There are lots of other scenarios, particularly as there are an increasing number of software applications and services I can add to the mix. For example, I recently signed up to Flickr. So now I can take a photo on my phone, email it from there to the Flickr server, then copy it across to my Movable Type photoblog. To view it I can hook up my PDA or phone to the Internet, via my bluetooth phone connection, and view the result in a WAP browser. Or simply log on to my Tablet (if I had one).
We're approaching the long-held dream of total connectivity. Whether wired or wireless, we're at the stage now where we can connect a variety of devices together via a variety of software apps or services. The issue we're having in 2004 is that total connectivity is far from a polished reality. It still takes a fair bit of configuration effort to hook up your mobile phone to wirelessly connect to the Internet, for example. It takes some technical nous to automatically send your phone pics to your blog via Flickr, to use the example I quoted earlier. Things aren't as user friendly as we'd like them to be in this new Mobile Internet world. Which is to be expected - it takes time for new technologies to piece themselves together.
Even self-confessed geeks have trouble connecting all the bits together. I know I do - for example getting my Palm PDA to speak to my new mobile phone via bluetooth took a bit of to'ing and fro'ing (and googling). Another person who has been writing about connecting technology together is Lilia from Mathemegenic - in her case it is WiFi, Tablet PC SP2, SkypeOut and Bluetooth headsets. I think that even outgeeks me ;-)
That's the six million dollar question. I think this is where the Digital Lifestyle Aggregation concept and similar ideas come in. The DLA is Marc Canter's baby and at heart it's all about making it simple for people to easily connect all their digital appliances and services together. In Marc and his company Broadband Mechanics's case, the DLA will be like a wrapper for all the open source digital services in the world - Flickr, blogs, Open Media and others. Well, there's more to it than that - but I'm trying to simplify it here :-)
Other companies, notably the "big co's" are taking a more proprietary approach. For example Apple's iLife suite of multimedia tools - made up of GarageBand, iPhoto, iMovie, iDVD and iTunes. According to Apple, they are "tightly-integrated applications that work together seamlessly". In other words, Apple is pushing the 'user-friendly connectivity' angle too. Further proof is that the word "easy" (or a derivative of it) is mentioned 10 times on the iLife homepage!
A key part of Apple's general strategy is to position themselves as a hip and trendy "digital lifestyle" company. The uber-cool and mega-successful iPod is the cornerstone (currently) of that strategy.
As for Microsoft, well their strategy has always been to bundle as many products and services as possible on top of their dominant OS. Exhibit 1: Windows and the attempt to integrate the Internet Explorer browser. Exhibit 2: Longhorn, which is being designed to be a kind of 'Desktop Web'. Which is to say: browsing, search and a lot of other Web things are going to be integrated into the Longhorn OS.
Until recently, Microsoft hasn't really challenged Apple on the Digital Media front. But their new MSN Music Service is a sign of a change in strategy and is a direct challenge to Apple. In a recent interview Bill Gates elucidates on where Microsoft is heading with digital media.
For example, Gates said (specifically about digital media in the living room): "We see these things as connected. But this isn't the point yet where consumers see those things totally connected. Over time, a lot of the advances will come through the simplicity of how those work together."
Emphasis in that last sentence mine. I think Bill Gates hit the nail on the head there - but then hitting things on the head is what Microsoft is good at. In 2004, there are too many media products and services to connect together and so mainstream users don't know where to begin. Not only that, connecting those things together can get complicated pretty quickly (Bluetooth is a prime example).
The key - for Broadband Mechanics, Apple, Microsoft and whoever else wants to jump in the ring - is to make connecting digital things together as simple as possible for the end-user.
Currently users are forced to fit technology products and services together like a jigsaw - except the pieces have jagged edges and often don't match. For this reason it's usually only geeks who attempt to fit together the jigsaw. That's the situation in 2004, but it's slowly getting better. DLA's hold the promise of making the jigsaw user-friendly for everybody and smoothing out those edges.
UPDATE: I HAVE NO MORE GMAIL INVITES, SO DON'T EMAIL ME ABOUT IT.
It's about time I published my strategy for my new topic-focused blog, eBook Culture. Although upon reading Erik Benson's post tonight about getting on and building something rather than "talking about it but never building it", I now feel a bit guilty about writing yet another grand plan instead of getting my hands dirty with implementation work. But I did promise you that I'd publish my strategy, plus it will serve as a public reminder of what I have to do.
In a previous post, I explained that my personal goals with eBook Culture are four-pronged:
1. Explore the niche world of eBooks.
2. Build up a weblog community of eBook users.
3. Prove to myself and future employers or customers that I'm able to successfully
implement a web strategy and build a social media website.
4. Earn some money and potentially grow a business.
So let's start with asking: what's the business problem I'm trying to solve with my new website? Crudely put, it's that eBooks aren't accessible enough for mainstream users. The technology (hardware, software) is still too hard or too messy to use - it's not user-friendly enough. eBooks have too many obstacles in front of them.
I started the new blog to help remove some of those obstacles and make eBooks easier to use.
Now let me define who my 'target audience' is with eBook Culture. Basically I want the site to appeal to ordinary but tech-savvy people. The sort of people who currently use iPods/iTunes, only they'll be readers. Note: I expect this will be a much smaller user group than for music, because - well frankly, reading isn't as cool as listening to music. I'm specifically not targeting people who are already converted to eBooks, because a) that group is very small, and b) they know much more than I do on this subject. I do however want to earn their respect and links with good content.
Let me refer back to goal #1 - explore the niche world of eBooks. So really, my target audience is me and others like me! That is, I'll be learning as I go and my aim is to bring others along for the ride.
I expect this will be the most difficult of my goals to achieve. I don't have many social contacts on the Web, indeed I'm not even a very sociable person. How can I expect to build an eBook community when I won't even participate in social networks like Orkut and Friendster? Well, I need to take a different approach. And that approach will be based on trying to make eBooks as user-friendly as possible. It's also important to point out that I don't necessarily want to be come a focal 'place' on the Web for the eBook community. Let me explain...
One strategy for building a community is to provide a platform for community. Enable and encourage people to contribute reviews and content and participate in community discussion. I doubt I will go down this route, because a) developing such software isn't my strength, and b) other people have already created social platforms for the eBook community.
My approach will be to provide information and services to take the pain and hassle out of eBooks. And believe me, there's a lot of pain and hassle with eBooks at this point in time. Some things I can't control - like DRM. Other things I can make an effort to influence - like providing easy instructions on how to read eBooks, download software and convert texts into eBooks.
So I will put a bunch of things that eBook users want on my site and hope that people travel through it often enough. This is similar in a sense to the portal strategy from the Web world, although what I have in mind is less ostentatious and more focused on useful content (rather then e.g. fancy web services). Things like: news, reviews, content summaries, conversion tools, articles, analysis.
Even though I won't end up as one of the 'places' where the community gathers and meets, I'll be doing my bit to make eBooks easy to use and share. I'll be providing a useful service to the community and hopefully helping to grow it. That's the sort of community I'm aiming to build - one that visits my site often but doesn't necessarily use it as a focal point for discussions and collaboration.
I'll also be an evangelist for eBooks, which is an important role in a community.
I specialize in the Web. I'm also a writer and prolific reader. So another aspect of my strategy is to marry eBooks with the Web. I want to help provide a seamless integration of eBooks from the reading device (typically a mobile device like a PDA) to the server. This isn't a revolutionary thought, Apple are doing exactly this with iPod/iTunes and Tim O'Reilly is doing it with eBooks with his company's Safari service. Where I fit in is probably not so much in the software/hardware side of things, given I'm not a company (to paraphrase a Dave Winer line). My focus here will be to provide top-notch written content - how-to's, reviews, analysis. Playing to my strengths as a writer and analyst.
Come on, you knew the two-way web would stick its oar into the strategy ;-) Basically my aim here is to encourage people to create and produce eBooks, not just consume them. The key for this is to provide easy-to-use conversion services, or instructions / tutorials.
I think there's some overlap with blogging and eBooks and they could learn from one another. For example, longer blog posts could be converted into eBook formats. And some eBooks would benefit from blogging technologies, like finding ways to cut eBooks into digestible chunks (microcontent). So a part of my strategy is to push the two-way web philosophy into the eBook culture and see what evolves.
There's more to write, but I'll wrap up Part 1 and continue at a later date. So what are your thoughts on my strategy so far? Am I headed in the right direction?
September is the Month of Mobility at Read/Write Web, I've decided. This month I'm going to explore the intersection between the Web and mobile devices. Principally mobile phones and PDA's, although there's also a trend of convergence of those two devices into "smart phones". And let's not forget new ground-breaking devices such as the iPod, the Tablet, and the Sony Librie eBook reader. I'm interested in how all these mobile devices, not just intersect, but collide with the Web. For often it's messy, as I've already discovered with my experiments with Bluetooth. It will get simpler though and the iPod is perhaps showing the way for all mobile devices in this regard.
Why the sudden interest in mobility as a theme in web technology? Simple, I've just got a new mobile phone to replace my old 90's model (which last week a friend bluntly labeled "a brick"). My new phone, a Sharp GX15, is pxt/video and bluetooth-enabled.
Now the truth is, I've taken far too long to come around to the mobile phone revolution. This is particularly ironic, as I used to work for Ericsson - one of the world's biggest cellphone and mobile internet companies. I was there when WAP was in its infancy and broadband hadn't yet arrived to properly support it. At that point in my life, I was pre-occupied with the network computer version of the Web and so I was busy learning ASP and designing portals and so forth. So WAP was a curiosity at best for me back then.
Fast-forward to 2004 and mobile phones rule the technology world. According to MyMobile magazine, 70% of New Zealanders have a mobile phone. Not bad considering it was only 10% in 1995! ZDNet reports that Europe has "between 60 percent and 70 percent" mobile phone penetration, the US has about 50% penetration, Japan 60%, Korea 70% and Singapore 80%. China is a growth market - currently it's only at 20% but it's predicted to reach nearly 25% by end of this year. Given China's huge population, that is a significant number of people!
PDA penetration by comparison is low. It was around 7% in the USA at the beginning of 2004, according to Jupiter Research. So you can see why PDA manufacturers like Palm want to get into the "smart phone" market - the future is mobile phones.
Another one to make this point is DrunkenBlog, who says that the iPod's days are numbered:
"An iPod Mini is going to make a much better mobile music player than your cell phone. But when your cell phone has 5 gigabytes of storage and bluetooth headphones.... the writing is on the wall here."
So it seems all the hype I was in the middle of at Ericsson at the dawn of the 21st century is beginning to come to pass in 2004. Mobile phones are the centre of convergence - voice, data, Web, music, eBooks, PIMs, email, you name it.
I'll be investigating this convergence over the coming weeks and I'll mostly focus on where Web mobility is at circa 2004, rather than speculate about the future. On that note, I've now subscribed to Flickr and have set up (yet another) blog - ricmac photos. This will be used as a fun space for me to upload a bunch of try-hard artsy-fartsy photos. Warning: if you're looking for photos with real artistic merit, you shouldn't look at my photoblog :-) Try Cristian's instead, it is much better.
In my next post, I'll explore some of the current technical issues surrounding Web mobility. We're still at a stage where people have to technically configure their various mobile devices and synch things together with a variety of "loosely-coupled" applications. So I'll talk about this in my next post.
