My article in Japanese for the Nikkei BP IT Pro [ CTIA 2010 has gone Android ]

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.

Despite the recent discussion that “WPP can not stop laying off people due to lack of growing revenues” http://networkedblogs.com/p12523536, there was a great inspirational session at the Mobile Ad Summit from WPP Digital’s Mark Read.  He said ” Mobile is not there year, but the key is for marketers to really look at the engagement strategies with thier customers and think of mobile as not the same, but Unique channel. With the explosion of Apps for dedicated experiences, the mobile experience is different and does require this kind of innovation.” When asked about convergence, he said” I beleive the opposite will be true. Marketers will continue to look for new creative ways to build relationships, and it is in the business model of the brand”

I have been a strong believer in a One-Web world where convergence will be the key. The reasoning is that the behaviors of Search and Social media link clicking is only growing and the glue for any digital strategy must be your website, untill all analytics of diversified customer engagement strategies can converge with analytics.  So even though there may be multiple different ways to market and build a media strategy, having cross-media analytics is going to be key.  There was not much discussion I have found so far on the Adobe-Omniture aquistion, but it is clear that the basics of analytics and search will be extended to widgets ( Air) and other dedicated marketing enablers in a site that need to be tracked in a systematic way.

My new interest in cross-media analytics has evolved to include a concept called ” Nested Social Media”.  We are starting to see where Facebook Connect ( by the way, of the Facebook users, 65% apparently access facebook from thier mobile), Twitter, MySpace, and the suite of mobile social apps are getting linked together for marketing delivery.  Twitter seems to be still lower in mobile access according the Jack Dorsey at the 140conf.com, but it is growing.  An example of this became very apparent to me when playing around with the mobile social app Foursquare.   I found it to be a prime example of a nested social application.   When I checked in using the app, and wrote a “status update”, it was spread to my Twitter, my Facebook and MySpace account.  Friends clicking on the link where then taken back to my foursquare webpage if they were not already users of foursquare.   This looping around between social media back to a landing page of the map and information on the club I was visiting became in my mind a nested social experience more powerful then just the Silo’d community generated site of Yelp……. So Yelp will as well need to become a Nested Yelp.

Martin Nisenholz, New York Times, gave a great presentation on “How to build a business model with their Developer API”. This again is another example of a brand that is driving distribution that nests back to the content and can be used in creative ways of linking to social media.  NYT has a great mobile strategy with their mobile assets, but still lacking a true one-web solution.

As the week is still just started, I am looking forward to the next couple days of mobile exploration…

Last year there was not much going on along Madison Avenue here in NYC during Advertising Week. There was a small mobile advertising event, but this year is a different year for mobile.  Regardless of what the economy did to the Advertising industry in general over the course of 2009, Mobile Advertising is big at Advertising Week.

Check out Microsoft’s Sponsored mobile website for on-the-go information  http://www.adwk.mobi.   ( Although it would have been better for the existing site to have gone mobile, it is a good start for anybody visiting the event to not have to carry around the large printed event book).

Also, there are going to be many panels and events at OMMA, MIXX and of course the MOBILE AD SUMMIT on Tues the 22nd.

ADObjects, Inc will be around and tweeting the event….

As we enter 2009, I wanted to get back to blogging. As you can see we have slightly revamped the ADO website and the blog. I just got back from Munich where I participated now for the 3rd year in a row at DLD 2009 ( www.DLD-Conference.com).

As it was a great conference and good to be back in the middle of the debates around the future of media, I would have to say that mobile was absolutely missed from the event.  The event was really about social media this time as a core underlying theme.  I missed many of the presentations in order to meet and discuss with friends and new friends, but knew I could get the entire program online once I got home.

I particularly liked Yossi Vardi’s session on ” How to get 100M eyeballs” . He distilled it down to the few things such as 1) emotional attachment 2) viral and flat 3) platform capable.   What I felt was missed from the dialog,  as it was mainly Yossi speaking while the panelists were holding back with an explosive force to get to thier turn,  was the idea of User Interface.  Getting to the 100M users really means that there is absolute magic in the user interface of the product.  Take Google for instance- The magic of the one-box and lightning fast results. Youtube created the simular phenomena.  When I see killer User interfaces in a product, I feel they have a greater chance to succeed.  Look at what made the iPhone- Its killer User interface.  Nokia is still struggling these days with getting this right even though they were the best in class on the 90′s of User interface.

Other sessions and dialogs I had will come a bit later, when I get back online….