Come and See ADO at Canadian Music Week

It is no coincidence that the term “Smart” TV has started to come into play around the connectivity. Of the Three Screen, it could be that the TV drives smartphone and tablet buying decisions for consumers led by the OEM’s and the Carriers.

Besides, LG, Panasonic and Sony, Samsung presented its own revitalization of the TV market by adding live and on-demand content to its Smart TV and turning mobile phones and tablets into remote controls and guides. The mobile device will become the way to guide, select content in the future and with their announcements with TimeWarner, Hulu and Dreamworks it is clear that the majors are on board with the Samsung smart solution.

The cloud will provide unique storage and access via a connected mobile device that can give the users the ability to search the content and web in a unique way moving forward.

The big industry concern has been around the fragmentation of these different TV formats.  Will users purchase decisions be driven by what TV they purchase to buy a complementary smart phone? or will it be the other way around?

If it were me, I would give away FREE phones ( and specialized data-plan)  if you purchase a TV and package from the Carrier.  This would be a very interesting approach by Verizon and Cable providers.

I Just arrived here at CES…. Clear day, but cold here for the desert! Definitely Android’s presence at this major Consumer Show will help warm up the mood.  2011 is going to be a great new year in the mobile industry in North America as both Apple and Google battle it out for the leading market share of smart phone devices.

#1- Devices, Devices and more  Devices

We are all looking forward to some of the new devices that will hit the street with Android.  As an open system and an entry platform into the mobile area the competition with ensue between Consumer electronic manufactures, PC manufactures, incumbents and anything you can embed an OS.

The Apple vs. Google’s Android (24.6% vs. 23.5% respectively according to Comscore) competition has first of all made a major dent in RIM’s leadership.  Will Blackberry move from #1 to #3?

At CES this year we expect a fresh taste of many of the new devices to come.

#2-  The blurring line between Smartphones and Tablets

This jostling is not only in the Smartphone race, but in the tablet market as well.  Apples iPad with its 44% marketshare getting nibbled to death from Android’s estimated 39% marketshare by 2010 according to the Piper Jaffray’s estimates.

Although there has been polarization of the different formats, a new breed of formats occupying that middle ground has started.

What makes this interesting is in the multiple forms of display sizes from the 3.5 inch Retina displays, advanced OLED’s all the way up the spectrum to the 10.1 inch and larger.  How will content itself polarize for these different formats? Or maybe not?

#3- Apps and Media Marketplaces

The big differentiator in this new era of advanced internet devices is in the content.   Apple’s leadership in the iTunes marketplace ( more then 300K strong)  has not been threatened yet, but with Android’s openness as the angle for developers to bring in new and exciting things in parallel to the shear volume of content.  The Android Marketplace has will quickly reach the 200k level and continue to grow strongly!  HTML5 mobile apps and content that blend web experiences on native app experiences is something we should keep an eye out for this year with the overall Android App and Marketplace experience.

#4 NFC and the mCommerce explosion

It has been a long-time coming to see this opportunity of Near Field Communications baked into devices.  The quiet release in Google and Samsung’s Nexus S with the Android 2.3 and the NFC chip is an indication that these enablers will be aggressively now released into the market as part of the competition to bring in these new business models. Apple, RIM, Microsoft as well as the mobile operators have all entered this foray becoming the next big battleground for local and location based payments.

#5 Connected and Suggest Advertising

2011 will be a year of advertising innovation beyond the basic impression based CPM models of past.  Android will be a unique platform where Google will bring out is best of ideas of mobile and local advertising that will go beyond the basic behavioral response, but to include the context of location and push.  How will this be mitigated so that our social privacy is not evaded? The debate will continue as the competition ensues.  Google’s Admob vs. Apple’s iAd will be two of the big battle grounds, but expect to see all of the local retailers, commerce and media companies bringing in new and exciting formats to make it more relevant for advertisers in this cross-media, physical and local connection.   The shear volume of Android handsets entering the market should make this a very dynamic addition to Google’s strength, but with Facebook’s Places Mobile Application and the opportunity to bring advertising into this mix as social ads will be another interesting spike in this evolution.

#6  Application Search… the other blurring line

Up until now, Applications have been silo’ed creatures that had activation to content only when downloaded and launched.   I would expect this to be another unique battleground as the plethora of content grows, access in-app will become more and more important as well as the indexing of relevant content on the go.  Twitter search has had the make-up to be the next big thing in the search space, but now will the growth of endless applications paralleling websites as the content for mobility; search will take a potential exciting new direction in the coming year with Applications.

#7  TV and Rich-Media Convergence

Android should make an exciting platform for the future of TV.  In 2010 we saw Google TV, Apple TV and the evolution of real-time video streams anytime, anyplace as a growing trend, now in 2011 with the advances in LTE and more and more content becoming available online this will be another battleground for the mindshare of consumers.

As the Android OS continue to show up everywhere in 2011 ( taxi’s, airplanes, billboards, etc..) this opportunity will make way for interactive video everywhere on the go.  However, how long will it last before content owners hold back from licensing content to Google’s TV initiatives?

This trend is also bringing in new entrants such as Vizio that has been a top Flat-panel manufacturer now entering into the smart device area as well.

#8 Chrome OS vs. Android OS cross-platform

Google has been strategic in keeping these two different platforms separated as they build within the two different marketplaces of mobile and online, but how long will this last. Android platform has been strong with the evolution of the opensource Webkit Browser based on a Safari core.  The Chrome Browser vs. The Safari browser dynamics has now put Google in a unique position for moving forward with its own enablers in parallel with taking the best from both worlds.   2011 will be the year of the Cloud when it comes to the connected OS cross-platform.

#9 Android , Google Music and Content Distribution

It seems like Apple has enjoyed the luxury of being predominant player for the last several years in the mindshare of the music industry. With the shear volume of Android handsets and tablets flooding the market, it would only make sense to see some unique play into the music space by Google.  This space has been a minefield of content rights licensing and business models.  In 2001, the world will begin to relook at the Limewire’s and the Bit torrents of the world that have made such dent on the business models of music.  Intel will launch a new architecture for content protection embedded on its chips that will find their way into the Android devices to come and the App Marketplaces will evolve with new dynamics for business models around the distribution and rights of music to attempt to give content owners more choices in revenue generation.

#10 Social Relevancy and the Android OS

It was rumored in 2010 that Facebook was attempting to launch their own devices the same way Google brought the reference platforms of Nexus One and Nexus S into the market.  There is no stopping Facebook from moving forward with this strategy, but it is clear that further enhanced and improved Social Relevancy will become a key part of the entire OS of Android in the near future starting with Android 2.3.  Facebook and Google have not always shared similar views, but with the large market penetration of Android moving forward they will find the right mix of cooperation strategies that will make this a platform that will leverage social interactions and conversations as a core to the overall user experience.

We have entered 2011 and I have to say the first decade did fly by rather quickly for us in the mobile industry.   I am a big fan of JWT and their things to watch deck.  I thought I would share it and highlight the top 10 in my mind for those realigning and creating a  mobile strategy this year.

Here are some of my favorite links to either help you through the Thanksgiving Holidays or just Apps of Thanks!

1) Top Thanksgiving Survival Apps ( PCWorld)

2) 5 Apps to be Thankful for if you are Flying this Thanksgiving ( RRW)

….more Apps for traveling

3) Some of the top iPhone Thanksgiving Apps ( MacWorld)

4) Great music to listen to over the Holidays ( CareyOtt)

5) Top Apps for Cooking (Blog)

6) Epicurious App

7) Vegetarian Cookbook App

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.

Comscore just published today the latest statistics on mobile content consumption.  They compared the 3 months preceding Dec 09 vs. the 3 months preceding March 10.

Althought Text Messaging is still on the rise and occupies over 60% penetration from users, the growth was slightly up.  Most of the other services all live between the 10~30% penetration range.  Surprisingly, Social Media. Downloading Applications and Browsing were the three big growth areas of approx 2.6~2.8% increase since last year.