Open Handset Alliance, Google and Palm

So we received the news a week or so ago that the GPhone is in fact a platform for open development of mobile devices and applications. Today we received the development tools and I must admit these are impressive. What Nokia has failed so successfully at doing for so many years Google and the delivered. Now to their credit Microsoft's IDE is impressive also and has been around for quite sometime but this new open platform is exciting.

Firstly to the ease of installation and configuration - brilliant, nothing else needs to be said. Moving on to the documentation and samples, it took me less than 10 minutes to get a basic rich application up and running - brilliant and finally to the emulator and flexibility in configuration - well done.

This platform is exciting, with that said I am suspect about so many components including just bringing another mobile environment to the table but as a platform goes what we have seen of Google and the broader Open Handset Alliances' (OHA) efforts to date indicate that Microsoft and definitely Nokia have a fight on their hands (atleast from an IDE point of view).

Oh Nokia, how you have provided such brilliant devices over the years but how you have truly failed at delivering a simple, easy to configure and used IDE. You should be nervous and very ashamed!

LCD with embedded optical scanner

This is piece is a little off the path of intelligent content however in many ways compliments what I blog about here. It seems that Sharp has announced that it is about to release in September this year a LCD which has a built in optical scanner.

What this means is that on top of complete removal the the exiting touch screen component from today's mobile devices, we will also be able to use the scanner to scan images, fingerprints, business cards and the like. I also suspect that the impressive multi touch functionality of the IPhone (actual created by an external researcher) will be possible with this new screen.

The piece mentioned above goes into a little more detail and is worth a read if so technically minded.

Patent submission

Finally after about eight months of part time work we have submitted our patent. I will go into more detail at a later stage but the one will end up becoming two and covers our work in multi-sensory enabled content and variable charging for media.

Vlad's and I are very happy to have hit this milestone!

It's not just about the Map

A variance of Lance Armstrong's book title 'It's not about the bike' has been ringing in my ears for several weeks now since Nokia launched their new advertising campaign for the N-Series. The campaign (atleast in Australia) is using a new catch phrase which I believe is something like 'Maps, Pictures, Video and Music' or something to that effect.

Now as you will be aware I am a big fan of Nokia due to their quiet but continual innovation around sensory addons for their devices (see previous blogs). This has not changed since Nokia's aggressive push into the navigation market with the 6110, E90, N95 and other devices. The concern I have though is that 'It's not about the map' or better still 'It's not JUST about the map'.

I can understand that we need to slowly and easily introduce these concepts to the masses but for those of us who are actively creating, developing and supporting these new technologies we need to look further outside the traditional uses.

GPS is not only about navigation, it is not only about location based advertising, for me GPS (and other sensory devices) are about enriching content of all kinds. Yes we will be able to navigation between A & B and push advertisements to those who want it (opt in) but we need to start talking about the additional opportunities, the travel content, fitness commentary and even general publishing content which can harness and be enhanced by this new and exciting addition which we will all be utilising within 18 months.

Traveler based GPS enabled rings

The BBC is running an interesting article on a British Royal College of Art student Gail Knight who has developed a GPS enabled traveling companion which vibrates a ring based device to notify the traveler of potential danger or points of interest. It is a great concept by which I draw great parallels with what we are doing at Indaran. Travel and the services which will evolve over the coming 18 to 24 months excites me greatly. Being able to harness technologies such as GPS to provide the user a richer experience be it travel or other is extremely interesting.

Similarly an old colleague of mine Alex Craxton who is now over at Ymogen have started working with the BBC on slightly different but still very interesting project linking BBC information with actual physical locations. They utilise GPS coordinates and BBC URL's to provide markup to physical world locations.

JSR 256 Motion Sensor API update

JSR 256 had a major maintenance update release in the last couple of days. JSR 256 is a API for controlling sensors in mobile devices. It is interesting to see how this development library is utilised in the coming years.

Technical folk can find the Java docs here

Nokia's pledge to GPS in all phones & future phone must have's

There was an interesting article over at ZDnet last week in which David Watkins, Multimedia Sales Director Nokia APAC was quoted as saying 'GPS will work its way from niche product to mainstream functionality and will one day be considered as ubiquitous as the cameraphone is today'.

This is great news for the location based content market and for anyone looking at harnessing the new age of integrated sensors.

So a quick question I would like to pose - what is the sucessor to GPS in the line of mobile device 'must haves'? Personally I think it will be a mix of varied user interfaces including ePaper, OLED wrappable screens and sensory devices.

On the sensor side I would have to suggest digital compases (we will talk about these soon) heart rate monitors, motion sensors (see Nokia's 5500 which came out last year - no it wasn't you Apple who were the first to integrate one even though you like to say so), temperature and light sensors (the later Apple does have in the IPhone) are close followers in my books.

Apple's Innovation?

I just wrote a piece on sensors in which I mentioned that Apple has been claiming innovative integration of the motion sensor into its IPhone. I would further direct users to the patent which has been submitted by Apple (patent). It outlines apparently an innovative way to stop theft of their precious IPhone.

I find two points very interesting here, firstly as I blogged about in the earlier piece Nokia's 5500 had a 3d sensor in it last year so Apple don't try and claim your integration as innovative.

Secondly I ran across this interesting web article from Brad written back in March 2004 on the motion sensor for sensing emergencies .... Hmm now I see my phone being stolen as an emergency, don't you?

Someone here is not being honest, either Brad's blog entry for March 2004 is a fake, Apple stole the idea off Brad or Brad had inside knowledge about the patent idea and posted it on his web site.

Something does not smell right here!

Is the IPOD and future IPhone stifling innovation?

So we have well surpassed the 100 million IPOD's shipped globally and we have a week or two until the IPhone is released. Apple is not the only player in the market as we all know and arguably they are not the best innovator however they do own the market. Why because of their amazing ability to make complex processes extremely intuitive and easy to the consumer.

We all love the IPOD's user interface and seamless ability to purchase and transfer content to the mobile device. It serves its current purpose reasonably well however with the upcoming release of the IPhone and the announcement yesterday of third party applications only through the Safari browser it urges me to ask the question - Is Apple's monopoly of the media player market stifling innovation?

The closed even communistic style control which Apple brings to its offering allows it to retain a very high level of quality however at the sacrifice of many other elements. In the IPOD and IPhone space I see this as being innovation, it is innovation which suffers from the closed view of Apple. If the monopoly player locks its platform down no third parties can innovate!

I would love to see our companies future offering on the IPhone, hey I would buy one myself if I could deploy applications onto it (no no through Safari!).

So the question I pose, is Apple's dominance and reluctance to have an open platform stifling our mobile innovation?

Self Aware Content

We have seen a lot of press of late on Location Based Services, especially Personal Navigational Devices such as the Tom Tom and more recently the Nokia N95 coming to market. In the US, Networks In Motion announced the 1 millionth paid subscriber to their GPS navigation service and could an article go without mentioning the allusive Google Phone now with fresh rumours linking it to Orange (UK) and HTC as the manufacturer. All market indicators are talking about GPS and the major services it brings.

Well Rahil Aggarwal's blog has an interesting and well rounded view on several suggestions of what the next killer mobile phone app (after voice and SMS) is including my favourite Location Based Services. I would like to further this article by stating Sensory Based Services of which GPS is one will be the next killer app.

Services and content which utilise the quietly approaching sensory revolution in mobile phones will bring with them significant opportunity. On the hardware side take what Nokia has been doing with technologies including NearField Communication or the Motion Sensor Enabled 5500. Here is a company that has been quietly testing the water with several different sensory devices and there is a growing developer base to go with it. Why would they be doing this? Because they are the most forward thinking device manufacturer on the block.

How long will it be until we see the first mobile phone integrated with heart rate monitor? What do all these types of sensors have in common? They help differentiate the devices since the last 'must have' items became common place in all phones - the camera and media player.

So getting to the point, I believe the next killer application is the creation, sale and sharing of content that is self aware. By this I mean content that is created in such a way that when some preset sensory rule is triggered the content is activated or the user is notified that the content wishes to be activated. This could be arriving at a certain location, my heart rate reaching a certain point or even a combination of several events. This type of content will be a mix of professional and community contributed (user generated content).

At Indaran we call this Intelligent Content. Content that is 'self aware' or more technically 'event driven' will drive the mobile content market moving forward. We see content as having many layers of creativity, firstly there is creativity in the research and writing of the content. Secondly in any rich additions which are done such as voice-over's or adding video content and finally we see creativity in the way the content is told to activate. In this last stage depending on the sensory type, content can be preset to activate based of a complex set of rules which help enrich the user experience. This is where we see the next killer mobile app or service coming from. Yes Personal navigation will be apart of this but there is more much much more.

GPS - The new selling point for mobile phones

A couple of interesting articles floated my way whilst I was on my break. The first was an article by Andrew Kramer of the Herald Tribune posted on the 3rd April 2007. In the article Andrew outlines the current market size and growth of the GPS industry "The global market for GPS devices hit $15 billion in 2006...... and is expanding at a rate of 25 to 30 percent annually".

Next an article which I read earlier this year in itworld where it states that Cambridge Silicon Radio in the UK will be integrating both a GPS receiver and Bluetooth transceiver into the same chip. The article also states that they expect GPS receivers to be driven down the sub $1 price point.

What does all this say to you?

To me it loudly shouts that we are in for a quicker mass market penetration of GPS into our mobile devices than earlier thought. This price point coupled with a consolidation of chips allowing more bang for the same footprint is a good thing for mobile phone manufacturers. It allows increased functionality without increasing bulk and only potentially slightly increasing power consumption.

Finally, with camera's these days no longer differentiaing the product mobile phones as they did in the past, the question has to be posed - Is GPS the new selling point for mobile phones?

India - Where traditional uses of GPS will rule supreme.

I must apologies for such a lengthy delay between posts. I have spent the last month in India and have only just returned. If there is one country screaming out for GPS enabled mobile phones it is India - especially Mumbai. India has become such a major international player both through its insatiable consumer appetite and its formation as the worlds back office however one thing which truly dumbfounded me was its complete lack of traditional locational infrastructure. By this I am referring to street signs. You'll find large banks, restaurants and men's tailors alike all having similar addresses 'MG Road, opposite the CitiBank' or 'Hill Road Bandra, next to McDonalds'. I am not kidding, you will even find it on people's business cards. The reason? There are virtually no street signs (comparatively) and literally no building or house numbers.

So if I had to pick a market where the traditional use of GPS will be most widely felt and utilised in the near term it will be India. It is like the proliferation of the mobile phone networks in countries with dense urban environments, there comes a point where certain fix infrastructure costs like laying cooper or affixing street signs becomes prohibitive in light of other means.

Potenitally this is what will occur in India to help navigate the masses.

RIP Standalone personal navigational units

Slowly but surely main stream press are picking up on the potential of the three way converged devices and the opportunities which they present. There is an interesting article by Chicago Tribune journalist Eric Benderoff discussing the begining of the end for standalone navigational devices. As we had discussed earlier in my opening piece sole purpose digital devices such as GPS navigators and music players have now been adopted by the mobile phone providers of the world.

I disagree with comments made about these type of devices debuting at Cebit this year, sure it might be the first time these companies have released this style of devices but what about devices like the Mio a701 announced in 2005 and debuting at Cebit last year?

Thanks to Roger Hart's GeoCarta blog for linking to this story.

Analyst reviews of the year to come

It is assuring to see the market awareness which seems to be building around the areas of Location Based Services or as they are now refered to Location Aware Services. The Gartner Group released their annual Emerging Technology report several months ago (report link) in which it discusses several items which I see as being key in this new era of intelligent content creation and consumption. These include:

• The use of technologies like AJAX, Flash, Flex in building Rich Internet Application
• The applications created from these technologies allow Social Networked Communities to further create innovative content pools
• These content pools can then be utilised by Location Aware Applications
• These applications used Location Aware Technologies like GPS to sense important information to trigger content
  

Take a look at the article, it sets out very well tools and services which are coming into their own in the coming 12 to 24 months.

Gartner Report

Converging technologies, new content and market potential

This first post is well over two years in the marking. Long before Google launched Google Maps there was little talk of commercial location based services. Well that is not entirely true, whilst I was in the UK working in the mobility space we had been trying to get location based services (LBS) working. The issue at the time was the technology available, mobile networks were trying to push LBS using a technology built into the mobile networks. To cut a long story short this failed and in my opinion for several years the area went quiet. So where are we now and what has changed? This Blog will seek to investigate innovations in the area of converged devices and the types of services which they will enable.

At Indaran we have been quietly working on our market offering for quite sometime and now as we start to ramp up our first public pilot I thought it would be time to start to comment on this great industry we see about to explode.

So the topic for this entry is 'Converging technologies, new content and market potential', what does this all mean and where are we going?

Well quite simply today there are three key mobile devices which the public are using;

• Mobile Phone
• Music Player
• Personal Navigational Device

Within the next 12 to 24 months we will see these devices converged into a single device. No one will be paying the $500 for a standalone TomTom any more, neither will they pay the same amount for their IPOD. These will be a single device and with that single device comes some very interesting opportunities.

To be honest convergence started between these three areas back in 2005 and CeBit 2006 showcased three devices which were to hit the market with three way integration. Since then of course Apple have announce the iPhone which has brought great market awareness to the two way integration of the Phone and the Music player. Apple had to do this because it is playing in one of the fastest growing commodity markets in the world today - the digital media player market. Apple needed to deliver a product which allowed them to keep innovating but more importantly allowed them to keep their premium price tag attached to their devices.

So leaving the history lesson, where are we today? Well today we have a growing number of three way converged devices entering the market. These include Nokia, Samsung, Mio, RIM's Blackberry, HP, HTC and nearly every other Windows Mobile device manufacture on the market.

Market awareness of these devices are growing and people are starting to talk about being able to use your mobile phone to navigate or combining it with the mobile phone features - being able to allow friends and families to know where you are. Also if you look at what we were trying to do back in London in early 2002 and one of the primary reasons (in my opinion) Google bought Keyhole was to allow location based searching and advertising services to end users. Now currently this market is still in the 'Geek Road Test' phase as I call it, IT professionals and early adopters are using the devices but not the mass market - that is where things are about to change.

These types of services are what we will see a lot of in the coming years, that is location specific services allowing users to find people and places more effectively but also allowing companies to find and target users more effectively.

Well that is all well and good but I would like to pose the question: What else can we do, what new opportunities will emerge?

I suggest a dramatic change in the way we consume certain types of content. Take travel content for one, for over 100 years it has remained relatively untouched. If I plan on going somewhere, I go to my local bookstore and purchase a guide to the area. The guide is updated once every two years, is written for a wide demographic and I would suggest contains less than 20% of information valid to that user. This is not to say that the guide contains a lot of space filler, just that to make the guide profitable the publisher needs to target the greatest number of people without writing an encyclopedia (although some guide books are now that size). This process really has not changed since the first travel guides where written back in the mid 1800's.

So here are my thoughts:

• I don't want to carry a 500 page manual around in my bag whilst traveling,
• I want to be able to select content which is pertinent to me and store it on a single digital device,
• I want to be able to have travelers with similar interests to me suggest tour items which I don't know about, in other words I want to experience things I don't know I will like,
• 
  
• I don't want to be looking down at a guide book - how many people do you see in Paris or Florence with their head down in a book and not looking up taking in their surroundings?
• I want to be able to experience a site, head up examining the intricacies of the craftsmen of the era,
  
• I want to be notified when there is something I need to know about not have to rely on thinking I should open a guide book

I honestly believe that we are about to see a fundamental shift in the way travel content is created, selected, purchased and consumed. We live now in what is being called the 'prosumer age', an age where providers and consumers are one in the same. Where communities of interest or social networks are forming and growing to challenge traditional publishing houses. Take WikiTravel for one, what a brilliant idea and what an enormous threat to the traditional travel guide companies.

If you couple this shift in the way content is being created with the three way convergence mentioned above I think you would agree we are in for some interesting times to come.