When iPhone4 launched, I could not stop thinking how much this design aligned to the thinking of a small device that could be mass-configured with changeable covers.  In many ways it is what Modu wants to become!  As I was a lead architect back in the 90’s when Nokia had the mass personalization effort around changeable covers,  we debated as to what would hold true in the future of personalization.  The mobile world has come a long way since the 90’s, but if you have a chance to watch Frank Nuovo on Charlie Rose in 2000, you will see clearly that Nokia had painted a very good picture of what was to come in the future on personalized experiences. Frank was a thought leader 10 years early…

What I beleive has happened is that we have evolved this  unique opportunity of two different types of devices.  Of course there is the personalization of the services and the overall internet, but I am referring to the Hardware aspects of personalization.  Mixing hardware with Fashion.

1) Devices that have hardware that is designed with fashion in mind that target a certain demographic. Multiple colors of the device, target look-n-feel to meet a certain market segment.   ( Mainly this has been the latest thinking of Android HW manufacturers, RIM, NOKIA, Microsoft)

2) Devices that are skinned down simple designed basics that then offer a chance for mass-customization via personalized accessories ( APPLE, MODU)

While Google Android, Nokia and RIM have gone down type 1),  Have a look at the recent announcement of Motorola with Android blasting Apple because they have a cover and used the Antenna issue as a way to market their products.   In many ways, I beleive this is unique approach as blasting them based on a feature, but why kill the Jacket?  As well, Nokia has recently abandoned the concept of simplicity with changeble covers ( Even though they invented it) to build full design elements to target certain demographics.   Then look at Microsofts KIN.  They build hardware to target a certain demo ( young students) and we saw where that went…

On the other hand we have two unique companies, Apple and Modu.  That are building out a strategy of a simple elegant product that is small and that is a starting block for massive personalization.  Yes, users can have the product on its own as it stands alone in its beauty, but how it fits into the accessory ecosystem is a key part of the overall product strategy.

I was sitting in a cafe recently and across the table from me was a police officer from the NYPD.   He was playing with his iPhone while waiting for his lunch to be served.  The beauty of all of this was that he had a very unique leather, urban with rubber jacket on his device! It matched his personal style and his needs.  iPhone’s basic design can reach everybody and then they have the ability to not only personalize the overall look, while still keeping the product small, but the user can as well customize the screen.    We will see Jackets of all kinds…. Metallica Jackets, New York Yankee Jackets…. Ferrari Jackets, as well as Company Jackets…. so what is wrong with the Jacket?

Even though Apple designed a product that was as small, simple and clean as they could go, with a fundamental beyond-physics strategy of embedding an antenna into the body of the product ( nobody had ever succeeded with this really in the history of mobility) they were bound to take criticism and it was a risk!  But in my mind a very amazing risk in that having this kind of simple product as a base to a variety of other accessories and architectures is an avenue to hardware personalization as a means of fashion.   They pushed the envelop to get the size as small as it could go with such a large screen and keeping the product very thin.  Having the antenna in the body was a very difficult and yet impossible challenge, but it was a method for getting the smallest product possible potentially.

I personally think the view of personalization and small framed designed products with ability to add accessories  is a  key driver to real Fashion statements, mass-customization and mass end-user adoption.   The very simple strategy like in the case of Apple that can scale to build its business for starters, is key as part of this thinking.   I think bringing the Press over the Jacket was potentially the wrong thing to do in the long-term….  Apple should highlight more about the opportunities for customization over the fact they pushed the envelop a bit too far with Antenna design.

So where is MODU in all of this?  I would image these Israeli’s are in the labs looking at the smallest iPhone killer Android device that could be configured or skinned with multiple accessories.  They have done done the small match-box route…. why not the Android with a large screen thin route like Apple?  This would be a very interesting competitor of Apple!

Frank Nuovo, ex-Chief of Nokia Design,  talks about mobile devices as “Objects of Desire” and he personally moved down the Fashion route with his move to run design over at Vertu.  In my mind,  this architecture of design personalization and mobile  has really taken form and that these simple products with less buttons and objects of design can now grow toward multimedia rich and configurable products along with the hardware configurations.  Apple is clearly on the right path as a vision,  lets see if this media and the antenna challenge is not big enough for them to get pulled off this strategic path?

With some of the recent advances in HTML5 and the lastest roadmap shared at the Google I/O conference, it makes one wonder if fragmentation was part of the master plan over at Google.  Let all the device manufacturers fight over there differences in features and functionality of the OS, but keep one thing consistent and moving forward…. the browser and the web.

With the release of Froyo ( Android 2.2), again there have been lots of complaints from partners like Sony-Ericsson and others.  However, what Google has shown is the convergence between online-mobile with the HTML5 feature set.

I am convinced that there is some kind of thinking and strategy around fragmentation driving users back to the browser and the growth of the Chrome Web-App storefront that will shortly converge with mobile.

It seems like this week was a key milestone for the HTML5 world. Google opened our Friday morning with an example of HTML5 Game ( PacMan) being added to the Google logo of search.  With approx 2B searches a day, this shows the scalability of having an active game embedded just as there was once a static logo.  Did Google pay for the rights of Pacman for the day? My wife thought her PC was attacked by a Virus!  Today was a great day for the progress of the web.

The Google I/O ( Input/Output) or ( Innovation/Openness) Conference was a great success in bringing more transparency and openness to web standards, and with the announcement of opening VP8 to the world as a royalty free licence ( I did not see the word perpetual???).  They launched Google TV, Music Streaming for the Android platform, and a wide variety of new announcements surrounding the Chrome App Store.  As for Wave, it has now moved from the closed invite only option that makes it very difficult to have a social network to being officially launched.

Yahoo announced the launch of a new class of interactive mobile display ads leveraging HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript technologies.  Yahoo stated that traditional static banners across the top and bottom of the mobile device screen were not optimal  and with–the new format promises to solve those issues via rich media content optimized for next-generation HTML5-based browsers. Yahoo Mobile product marketing staffers Mandar Shinde and Calvin Hung stated that this will enable  ”creative executions of interactive advertisements” on the Y! Mobile Blog.

Yahoo will launch its first interactive display campaign  with Paramounts and DreamWorks Animation release Shrek Forever After. “Going forward you can expect to see more ads that are tailored to the way people use mobile or that take advantage of particular attributes of mobile devices,” Shinde and Hung add. ”For example, we know users like to ‘content snack’ on mobile and ads that offer video or creative interactivity can be very successful.”

Now Adobe…. With all the chatter back and forth between Apple, iPad and the release of Flash, you think that Flash was the lifeline of Adobe.  Looking at this revenue breakdown of the company, it is clear that Flash is only a small part of the overall revenue strategy of Adobe.  What was very assuring is that now with HTML5 being the next coding platform for the Web, everybody is working together…

HTML5 aims to eliminate the need for web plug-ins like Adobe Flash. Instead, the functionality of Adobe’s Flash platform will be available right in the code of the web.)

The gradual elimination of Flash sounds like a bad thing for Adobe, but it’s actually not a huge problem. From a revenue perspective, Flash only accounted for 7% of the company’s revenue in fiscal 2009, or $231.2 million, according to Citi analyst Walter Pritchard.

While losing a revenue source is never a good thing, the widespread adoption of HTML5 can actually be good for Adobe. The company is introducing a bunch of tools for web developers to make HTML5 sites. Its Dreamweaver software, in particular, is getting an update to help web designers. There’s no reason that Adobe couldn’t even built an “export to HTML5″ command in Flash. As HTML5 grows, Adobe can offer new tools, and thus drive revenue growth.

Both Flash and Dreamweaver are part of Adobe’s core business — “Creative Solutions” — which generated half of Adobe’s revenue last quarter.

As this is going on in the background, Lenovo’s CEO  Yang Yuanqing announced on Monday the Company’s entry into the mobile arena citing that he expects about 10~20% of their revenue to come from mobile in the next 5 years.   He joins his fellow PC Manufacturers: Dell, Acer to the mobile movement powered by Android.   Many of these players are building product in China and or Chinese manufacturers that are beginning  to drive Android’s presence to the marketplace.  There was a story in history about a walled garden and China, and it is strange at this time we are potentially seeing a lesson in  history repeat itself.  The Great Wall of China

As Google continues to rope in more and more manufacturers to the table with the Android system,  Apple is living off a one-trick pony of a strategy with only its one product roll-out step by step.  Yes there is an advantage to having a very strong pillar of a strategy and the consistency for all the developers of the world, but with one crack and this pillar could come down?

As it took a simple guardsman to let through the Mongol’s in the quest of conquering China, the Great Wall was rendered useless by the act of a few.  A simple mistake at Apple could cause the entire thing to come tumbling down amidst the competition.    I found this quite interesting on the day Lenovo announces thier entry with Android,  Apple / Gizmodo/ Techcrunch/ Mashable and others  while Apple is requesting its lost prototype back and squabbling  with the media.

If Apple is to take on Google and Android, they need a bit more of a diversified and syndicated strategy.  So that they are not missing a Bang with one product release affected.  I guess we can say that now is the time for History to repeat itself, or live and learn from History?

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Additions to the blog-post [ june 24, 2010]

After the release today, there have been rumors of recall due to  a miss design of the Antenna grounding. When left handed people use the device, it drops calls instantly.  Mobile devices are complex as as Google has mainly focused only on the OS and the Cloud services surrounding it, they are leaving all liabilities of hardware up to the phone manufacturers.  One blip, and Apple could loose it all with the IPhone.  They need to diversify fast as this Chinese Wall could potentially come down fast….

Chris Anderson talks about the Free-Conomy in this session at the Commonwealth Club about how to leverage free to build and grow a business in the digital economy. Google clearly had the vision and prowess to leverage this philosophy and become the giant we all know and love.

….But now, Google is getting into the hardware business.  We all thought that they would enter the mobile space with Android only based the software model of opensource and free, but somewhere along the line their complete strategy and vision seemed to change dramatically with the launch of Nexus One.

Moving from free open source API’s and software to the pains of managing inventory ( PCB’s. LCD’s, Batteries, etc)  and building products is quite a different animal and business.   I originally thought that the purpose of Google’s journey surrounding the Nexus One was one of creating a reference platform for them to build and develop what they believed was the ultimate mobile device in order to better serve their efforts around the building the best Android platform possible, but now the gPad?

We all wonder that when something goes up, it must come down… and this Nexus One to the gPad example reminded  me of the old Jewish folktale from the Wise Men of Chelm called “Ruined by a pair of shoelaces”. Is entering the hardware business and chasing after Apple, Nokia and Rim the first step to getting to over abundant and completely getting out of control? It at least made me think about it, and even though there is a long way to go in the evolution of media, why now to become a hardware player?

It has been 7 years since I lived in Japan or have been fully operational in Japanese.  Last November, I visited Japan on a M&A due-diligence project and found the changes to the mobile landscape overwhelming.  About one year prior, I was fortunate to be invited by a Canadian Government trade mission on the cross-border business development of the independent music industry and felt that Japan was still locked in the closed internal format wars that separated them from entire planet over the last 15 years.  Japan was a leader in the development of the 3G ecosystem, but it was very Japan focused.  Companies like Nokia and others attempted to bring in Global 3G products,  but it proved to be very costly to reset all the device requirements and to develop a separate category for a Japanese only marketplace.

However, Apple launched iPhone in Japan shortly after via Softbank.  Their visionary CEO Masayoshi Son ( an individual with his team that has built an empire on cross-border tech business/platform investing and facilitation such as Yahoo-Japan) championed the existing system with this some what risky proposition at the time. By Sept 2009, the iPhone was exploding in device sales and by the end of the year it was recorded close to 3M subscribers.  I saw in one trade journal that Japan was the fastest growing market for iPhone sales per capita and the transformation had begun.   The iPhone product was launched very much with the same business model as the rest of the world with a very small launch team just outside of Hatsudai station at the Apple Japan Corporate HQ.  By the time I had arrived the market was changing.  Techcrunch Japan had just gotten started, and the feeling of  the Silicon Alley entrepreneurial spirit had found a way in the Japan mobile space.  There were thousands of iPhone apps available for Japanese consumers, and the touch interface just did not seem to matter.   I found people proud to put their iPhone on the table in front of them at the local Kissaten ( Coffee Shop) as they chatted with colleagues with one had holding that exotic cup of Java, and the other a Marlboro.  I had heard that over 40% of the Apps came from outside of Japan, and it was the first time that the  international content industry had just blown through the Japanese system within the comfortable pipeline created by Softbank and Apple.

This experience got me very excited to see that now there was finally an opportunity for Japanese prowess in the mobile industry to start to go global.  Yes, this was a platform created by the North American Dev team in Cupertino, but the manufacturing was in China and now the content was coming from everywhere around the Globe in one scalable process.   This was a first step in the process for real cross-border development and innovation to begin that surrounded an App ecosystem.  Although, 3M is not a large number when we talk about the incumbents of the Japanese system, or is this the full game-changer to the Japanese market, but it was a beginning.

I decided that it would be time for me to start to bridge my consultancy practice over to Japan as my second International country of clients.   As of 2007, I had been working with the Finland tech scene and had the opportunity to work with several Finnish companies looking for global strategies and mobile market entry into North America.  That pipeline has continued to grow, and we will be visiting Finland at the end of this month on our periodic trade mission.

The mobile content industry has really now gone global with the explosion of the iPhone.  It has changed the dynamics of marketing, content delivery and advertising toward the dream all of us had in the mobile industry for many years.  2010 has really the year to define mobile as the transition has begun for media players to treat mobile on equal terms as part of the overall media strategy.  This is not just at a country level, but the cross-border international opportunities have really started to accelerate.

I returned back to Japan in January to speak about the cross-border opportunities surrounding North America.   In the 10 days I was there, it was apparent that Japan really was my second home, and my 7 years away might have just been too long.  My schedule became packed with meetings with a variety of different companies looking at their position for marketing and sales outside of Japan;  however, the focus seemed to be on China.  It is apparent as a first priority many Japan mobile companies  have looked for international expansion with this gorilla neighbor.   Over the last 15 years, the US Market had proved to be very difficult for many Japanese companies, and you could probably say that there are less then a couple mobile companies that have really been able to make their  US International efforts successful.   The odds have not been so great, and with the large market ( today there are over 500M subscribers) , the close proximity and the technology gaps, China is hard to ignore when it comes to the next step in an expansion  and an International strategy.

I hope my presentation has some effect, as I compared the opportunities between heading to China and then looking toward North America.  The room was filled with start-up CEO’s, Media companies and a variety of others interested in this debate.  The presentation went for over 2 hours into the late evening, and I was surprized I was able to bring back for the first time in a long time my dormant Japanese speaking skills for this kind of  format.  The big discussion points were of course around iPhone, but what I found that was even more profound was the interest in “Android” and the “iPad”.

Android….

NTT DoCoMo made it clear that they would be the leaders in bringing this to market.  Yes, we all knew that Softbank would follow and that we are now looking at a similar AT&T versus Verizon type of phenomena in Japan with Google and Apple playing tag-team to open up the marketplace ( at least it seems that way?)

Android was key part of my presentation as after being with Nokia for so many years, it felt like Google took the play-book right out of Nokia’s hands and have started to execute on the same dream.  Nokia had for so many years tried to bring an open philosophy to the market and the mobile industry, but they just might had been a bit too early.  I do not think Nokia has at all  run out of steam, but they did pull out of Japan and left a vacuum right when the time was for entry.   For Google to compete against Apple and to launch something fresh might have just been the timing for this perfect storm of a  teeter-totter like strategy.  Of course, Eric Schmidt sat on the board of Apple during the conception of the iPhone strategy, and it only makes one wonder if this was some kind of grand plan in market attack between the two companies at any level.

Well Android looks like it is here to stay, and it has become a powerful force as a Global Open Framework.  Apple was able to “blow a hole through the window” and now all the flies and everything can come through.  Open is now the flavor of the month, yet Apple keeps coming out with new and exciting products and services that the balance between Open and Closed is still evolving.

I met with a representative from Nikkei BP, and they asked me if I would work with them on different mobile projects around  North America effects and the Japanese market.  I was even asked to  represent them by covering the CTIA event in Las Vegas this last month.   I look forward to more and more of these types of project down the road and will continue to fine-tune my writing and evolve my Japanese journalist skills.

I will publish an English version of the article on this blog shortly to follow.

With this rapid shift there is really still many opportunities for companies to join the competitive fray and  bring their products into the market.  This year at CTIA there was a flood of Android devices with many of the 2nd and 3rd tier handset manufacturers all getting on the smartphone bandwagon.  Even Tim O’Reilly ( O’Reilly Media) was recently caught Twittering about how surprised he was to see that ” the Android mobile web access is approaching the iPhone”.  Apple has just released its next 2 iPhones that should bring additional momentum to the smart phone battle ( Especially with Verizon).  Is this going to be enough for Apple to keep its lead? Where is the iPhone killer?  It was mentioned from an Apple employee that there is nobody that wants to create an iPhone killer more then Steve Jobs himself!

With this massive shift in Smart Phone devices and advanced applications makes you wonder how the Carriers are going to leverage this for longer term business models.  I have liked seeing the back-n-forth between Verizon and AT&T with 3G coverage.  This is the kind of  fuel needed to throw into the fire on the battle of capacity and end-user network needs.

By 2013 the overall Data consumption requirements are going to skyrocket and continue in a hockey-stick like pattern to 2015.  People will be consuming more media then ever from there mobile devices, and it is really fair to say that Mobile will really become the 1st screen in our lives by 2015.  However, with this growth, there is surely going to be innovation surrounding our online environment as well.  The seamless integration of websites, apps and the cloud is clearly the future in the next couple of years.  Therefore I believe it is fair to say that 2012~2013 is clearly the transition timing for real cross-media  integration.  For the companies making investments to be leaders  for the next couple years out need to really think of their strategies on how all their media strategies should come together with platforms that support all of the different extensions of access.

I  believe we will potentially see innovation in compression technologies and the efficient delivery of content. Companies like Speedbit and Strangeloop Networks are very well positioned to offer these kinds of tools that publishers need to deliver the right experiences to end-users no matter what device they are carrying.

So the transition continues from Feature to Smart Phone and the craving for new applications and services will continue.  This shift has finally happened and mobile is now here to stay.  Getting a mobile strategy that is sustainable is now the chance to grab this opportunity.

Again we are seeing a major shift in an industry that has been pretty well established with hardware and physical goods and the growth curve that existing from 200o~2006 with the shift from VHS to DVD’s is not showing the same spurt in growth like it did before.  We could guess that Blue-Ray and VOD will fill this new paradigm shift, but we must imagine with the fragmentation of media and the rise of consumer spending on mobile could really be the culprits that will this industry as well.

It would be nice to think that the $3B USD that disappears moves toward mobility and other consumer  services, and that the “Connected Home” as a strategy and philosophy will be made up of consumer spending on more of subscription and digital transactions to offset the purchasing culture of hard media.

Major Retailers such as Best Buy and others will really need to look at the strategy of mobile and consumer behavior of on-demand, real-time media with models that tie this all together to the convenience of anytime, anywhere as well, I believe.

In a recent interview on Charlie Rose with Paul  Otellini, CEO Intel Corporation, Paul mentioned that in the next 5 years we will see changes in consumer products like we have seen with mobile devices. Everything will become “Smart” in the next 5 years.  Today Intel has been a leader in providing the brains behind the PC, but with Intel’s strategy behind the “Atom” processor ( A chip that is minimum in size with the most advanced processing power) to become the low-cost solution that powers everything. ” We will see chips in TV’s, in the car, in appliances- for what will be the SMART era”- he stated. ” Today we have over 10K engineers working on these software solutions that the consumer does not see”. As Paul sits on the Board of Google, it is pretty clear that we can see that this might lead to a strong alliance to Android, but most recently at MWC ( Mobile World Congress) in Barcelona,  Nokia-Intel announced their strategic partnership around the next generation OS called- MeeGo.  So there is that angle to think about.  ”No we are not creating another WinTel”- he stated, but the battle will ensue between Android, iPhone and now potentially MeeGo that will be the OS that not only occupies those 1.2Billion mobile devices shipped yearly, but all of the consumer appliances and electrical objects around us.

So where does this leave the Best Buy’s of the World? Yes- they need to grow the Best Buy-Mobile business, but it really opens an interesting opportunity for customer support and services.  In a recent presentation I heard from the VP of Marketing of Best Buy Canada, Angela Scardillo, she stated that the core of their marketing strategy is to build the brand around the “Connected Home”.  What a phenomenal strategy! Geek Squad will now be the customer support function to help us fix all of those problems that the online services have left us in utter abyss? We hope that Google and the rest of them will offer more customer support services instead of inanimate forums to answer questions, but if this does not happen, it will potentially be your local Super Geek ( A close colleague of mine that invented this concept way before Geek Squad) to now come to the rescue.

So I think that this shift has the players and the strategies in place now to really take us forward in this new decade.  The big losers could potentially be the hardware manufactures that will need to look for new avenues to build revenue streams  around ” Smart” objects.  We have seen the release of the iPad from Apple in 2010, but how cool will it be to start seeing the new “Smart” TV’s, Cars, Refrigerators, Washer and dryers, Rice cookers all connected into a grid that is controlled by our mobile devices.

Given that Google has greater then 70% of the search traffic share in the US and over 50% globally….they do have the ability to market themselves all the time, and make it clear there value proposition of their products front and center.  It has become routine in our lives to use Google as a search engine…..  it is even a “VERB”.

Getting back to my story…. This evening,  I went to Google to check out something on Google Maps, and searched “Google Maps”.  Yes- it has been my mapping search of default these days.  Even though  I used to be a big fan of MapQuest, Yellowpages and others,  it has just become routine for me just to use  Google out of pure convenience.  This  again is a key factor and asset they have going for them all the time.  It validates why search is so powerful as the first point of the User-Interface we all use, and Google is clearly leveraging their search asset to drive business leads to their other services and products.  I guess why would they not do this?  It is only smart business practices.

Well what I found was shocking.  The first results for Google Maps  search was the Nexus One from the Google News…. [See picture below]  It was not the Google Maps product or something pertaining to this, but it was traffic to drive me to that feature on the Nexus One.

The only results on the page were about “Google” ( www.google.com) .  None  of their Strategic Partners?  No iPhone with Google Maps? etc… As this was one of the key features for many of their Partners, developer communities, it is very clear that Google has an incredible position to trump the very partners now with Google maps when it comes to marketing the feature with their new device.  So as a company that partners with Google to embed maps into product as part of your core business, you must have a very careful strategy on how you market Maps and Location based services as part of your product. It is clear that some of that marketing  spend could even drive traffic to Google’s mobile initiatives.

I tried to find “iPhone and Google maps” as one of the results as this should be very relevant today.  Well, I looked on page 2 of the search results and then finally found a reference for iPhone at the bottom of the second page. Not many of us users go to the second page.

I then wanted to see what Google Maps search result would be on the site GoogleminusGoogle ( www.startupbin.com).  I found these results.

This time we do see iPhone.  It is #6 in the search results behind Wikipedia, etc…. Not many bloggers sites or third party developer sites talking about Google Maps, and no other handset manufactures on the first page.

So from now on, regardless of the mobile device we own….. any time we look up any of those Google Services, we will get information about Android and Nexus…. It is just the way it is going to be I guess.   There is clearly a price for using Free services as part of your product strategy.  In the case of Google, their ROI for the Free offer is clearly leveraging your marketing spend and distribution to continually drive more traffic back to Google.