Posts Tagged ‘mobile’

Monday, April 1st, 2013

Does Facebook Know it’s Mobile?

Facebook is a mobile company. Already. FULL STOP. In fact, as much or more so than AT&T or Vodafone or Telefonica or whatever local carrier you use in your country or region. In fact, as much as Google or Microsoft or Samsung or Nokia – only different.

So I am mystified by the digibabble and speculation surrounding a potential Facebook phone – whether a good idea or bad is a secondary issue – and the continued chatter and noise that refuses to acknowledge what is versus the continued hope for what might make money for investors with little or no value for users like you and me.

First and foremost – more photos and status updates are posted to Facebook from mobile sources than from computers – DUH!!! Why is this a surprise? Why is it even written about? If all we did was sit at our desks…think about how boring life and Facebook would be…we are all out and about – restaurants, shows, museums, movies, stores (yes…stores), parks, vacations, sports events, you name it – with our friends, significant others, families – whomever – OF COURSE WE POST…that is the point – NO?

Cell phones began our liberation and smartphones continued our exodus from slavery to freedom. No longer were we chained to cables and no longer were we limited to voice calls.

The carriers were at a loss – they wanted greater value than they could get from a mere pipeline – they wanted to charge premium prices for the data they carried – and while they were the original abolitionists of the tyranny of place – they became complacent…collected fees and engaged in price wars. Meanwhile the Googles and Apples of the world were re-imagining the way we untethered.

Search went local – as did we – and as we go, so goes Facebook and Instagram and just about every other social platform idea you can think of – not to mention those that were created to be obviously walkabout like Foursquare, Waze and OKCupid, which allows people to scout dates based on their location.

Bottom line: Facebook is mobile – as mobile as you and me. What they haven’t figured out is how to charge for it – make money from advertising – create bigger shareholder value…although I’d bet most of us agree that user value is still fairly high….

All of which leads us to the matter of the Facebook phone. WHY? Limit development to one maker of hardware? Limit access to holders of a piece of plastic and metal? CRAZY!

Access is in fact the new ownership – who cares what hardware I have so long as I can access the Facebook platform? Make me better apps, more useful sharing tools and YES, please figure out how to deliver me the right advertising in the right way so you can make some money and continue to develop your platform and not end up charging me for access….

GUYS – follow the content…please – don’t follow the analysts who still don’t get what mobile is….and who only want to drive stock price, not user value…Listen:

“The only reason I made a commercial for American Express was to pay for my American Express bill.” Peter Ustinov

I hope that Facebook doesn’t lose the plot….

What do you think?

Posted by David on 04/01 at 04:14 PM
  • David, totally agree. FB has been late to the game in figuring out that everything is mobile, when I am sitting at my desk it is only another view into my connected world. Until recently FB mobile client did not allow for me to create a group! It said go to a computer...at least that is fixed. I have been using ...
    Read more >
    Posted by Jacob Ner-David on 2013-04-03 07:21:29
Monday, March 18th, 2013

Remember Cell Phones?

Do you remember cell phones?

We used to use them to make calls….

Today we have smartphones.  We use them to communicate, but also to take pictures, consume content, play games, buy and sell stuff, find our way, store data and get advertised to….

We pontificate on mobile – it’s here! Its time has come! It’s the future…you know the drill.

Frankly, it’s a lot of digibabble – and I thought it might be interesting to do a little archeological digging and uncover the roots of this “new and amazing” trend, so that we can burst the digibabble and really get to its power and possibility.

Where to begin?

How about with this….

WE ARE MOBILE…LIFE IS MOBILE…THE WORLD EXISTS BECAUSE OF MOBILITY….

If you begin everything with the Bible – the first mobility began with Adam and Eve getting thrown out of the Garden of Eden.  You can imagine the scene:

God: Get out—

Adam (maybe Eve, not clear): OK big guy, but how are we going to stay in touch and find our way around?  You try and get an iPhone out there….

For those with a more historical bent – here is what Wikipedia says:

“Pre-historical migration of human populations began with the movement of Homo erectus out of Africa across Eurasia about a million years ago. Homo sapiens appear to have colonized all of Africa about 150 millennia ago, moved out of Africa some 80 millennia ago, and spread across Eurasia and to Australia before 40 millennia ago. Migration to the Americas took place about 20 to 15 millennia ago, and by 1 millennium ago, all the Pacific Islands were colonized. Later population movements notably include the Neolithic revolution and Indo-European expansion, part of which emerges in the earliest historic records.”

And that was only the beginning – there were great migrations in medieval times (despite the common thinking that there wasn’t); there were the Ages of Exploration and Colonialism and, of course, we have seen the modern-day migrations to urban centers and then back out again and then back in again and then back…you get the picture.

We have seen the explosion of populations and commuting through traffic jams and work forces covering distances that were once prohibitive, and the advent of relatively cheap, safe and efficient travel (wishful thinking).

And all of the above suggests a mobility that is in our DNA – core to our being – part of the human experience and critical to what has shaped and will continue to shape the world.

In a paper written in 1997 for the MIT Center for Technology, Policy and Industrial Development and the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change, the following prediction was made:

“Today, world citizens move 23 billion km in total; by 2050 that figure grows to 105 billion.”

INSIGHT – Oh My God – people are mobile…what an opportunity….

Now let’s move on to devices…whatever you call them.

Interestingly, car phones existed in the 1930s and anyone who has ever studied the newspaper and radio drama culture of the United States in the 1930s knows that the famous Police Detective Dick Tracy used a watch phone actually introduced in 1946….

However – where you and I enter the story is on April 3, 1973, when Martin Cooper – considered the “father of the cell phone” – demonstrated the practicality of the device by making the first street call of its type ever outside the Hilton Hotel in Manhattan:

“As I walked down the street while talking on the phone, sophisticated New Yorkers gaped at the sight of someone actually moving around while making a phone call. Remember that in 1973, there weren’t cordless telephones, let alone cellular phones. I made numerous calls, including one where I crossed the street while talking to a New York radio reporter – probably one of the more dangerous things I have ever done in my life.”

It’s a great story and worth reading – and it’s equally interesting to look at the phone and its size – like a brick – and contemplate the issues of battery life. Some things never change….

The digibabble buster is simple – Cooper changed the way we make calls because we now call person to person – and not place to place.  He didn’t just stumble on this by accident – he understood the human need and in an interview with CNN many years later, he said:

“…the personal telephone – something that would represent an individual, so you could assign a number not to a place, not to a desk, not to a home, but to a person. People want to talk to other people – not a house, or an office, or a car. Given a choice, people will demand the freedom to communicate wherever they are, unfettered by the infamous copper wire. It is that freedom we sought to vividly demonstrate in 1973.”

And there you have it – the biggest insight of all – written about today as if it’s new and unique to our times and way too often linked to pronouncements and articles and unveilings of all kinds, most of which I’d argue miss the essential – it’s personal – not as in I have your data and I can send you an ad – but personal as in it’s mine as a person.

Phones got smaller; batteries got better – phones got bigger again; batteries got worse – we added more features, more functionality, more confusion.

We call everything that can move “mobile,” really meaning the phone and forgetting about everything else, but make little distinction between usage – and talk screens, not “person.”

The real mobile innovators, such as the Human Dynamics Lab at MIT, are using phone data to predict human mobility – to help you know when you might get sick and to uncover deep physiological insights into behavior – they get it – and they use the term cell phone – no digibabble….

Listen:

“One should use common words to say uncommon things.” Arthur Schopenhauer

Help me!

What do you think?

Posted by David on 03/18 at 04:55 PM
Monday, February 27th, 2012

The World Was Coming To An End

The world was coming to an end!!!!

But what world?

So asked Ray Bradbury in his early 1950s short story “The Highway,” through the voice of a poor rural farmer watching city folk frantically drive by his home as they sought to escape the doom. He in turn calmly plowed his fields, wondering what they were going on about.

I read the story as a teen – feeling it was very subversive – and forgot about it until the first time I came to China in the mid 1980s.

In those days – China was just beginning to open and your “guide,” usually with a Western name like Michael Jackson and actually a security service person, would watch you like a hawk and never let you alone for a moment.

There were few cars on the road – everything was drab and old – and the sense of oppression lingered wherever you went.

Yet, even pre-boom – I had an experience on that trip that was like a religious revelation – it changed my thinking and gave me an awareness and appreciation that I continue to hold to this day.

The driver stopped for me to admire a view and take some pictures. It was a pastoral scene – as far as the eye could see there was nothing but rice paddies – no power lines, no buildings, no skylines – nothing – nada – zero.

However, there was one more thing – there were peasant farmers walking through the paddies, back and forth, with their conical hats and water buffalo.

And there it was – “The Highway” made real.  The world had changed – was changing and would change even more – yet those people had been walking back and forth like that for thousands of years – What wars? What advances? What nuclear threat?

I realized then the power of China – eternal – rooted in the past – with no fear of the future.

I write this from Beijing – toward the end of a week spent in China.

What a change – now there are not only cars, but BMWs, Mercedes, you name it, and massive traffic jams.

Every major luxury retailer is here in force, and as I walked to the Forbidden City, Tiananmen Square and the National Museum – I was struck by the fashion diversity of the crowds – they could have been from anywhere – and the open and friendly manner of all – not to mention the aggressive entrepreneurship of the many young artists and would-be tourist guides. And no one was watching us – in fact, we were the only Westerners in the museum.

What a place – they have their own Facebook called Renren (formerly known as the Xiaonei Network), their own Google called Baidu, and even though it’s not perfect – 80/20 is good enough for now and they know how to move on.

Do you want to feel humble? As awed as we are in the West with Facebook and its big numbers – there are more smartphone subscribers in China than Facebook has members globally.  Makes you think – no? And none of them use Facebook….

It’s a place that is eager to learn.  I recently read that Panda Express, the largest Chinese-restaurant chain in the U.S., is considering expanding into China and that entrepreneurs in Beijing are trying to market American “Chinese” food to the local Chinese. Get that. They are bringing back to China what other cultures have tried and adapted as their own, curious to see how the locals will react to the American taste of their cuisine.

What about the other way around?  Will the next thing we see be the export of a Chinese burger place to the U.S.?

The energy – the power – the positive can-do attitude – the optimism – makes you realize just how closed off people in the West are – or can be.  And best of all – no hatred or jealousy of the West – to the contrary, it’s a place to catch back up with – and then surpass. And remember, civilization here was far advanced in the late BCs and early ADs – often way beyond the West.

Which leads me to my POV – being in the museum reminded me – listen:

“Study the past if you would define the future.”
Confucius

It’s that simple. The world needs to take a lesson. The region is booming because they get it. When others speak of doom and gloom – they ask where? And get on with it – not quarter by quarter, but with a long-term view.

Let’s be clear – this is far from Utopia – but what isn’t?

I contrast this with events in the Middle East where a look back is as glorious in terms of accomplishment as it is here in China. Science, poetry, exploration and even the rich melding of varied points of view and populations. However, that look backward is not defining the future – far from it…

But here’s the thing – around the world, many continue to reject what was – as if the future just happens, as if it’s a random set of occurrences – we see it in the GMOOT philosophy that many follow:  Give Me One Of Those – as if nothing else ever existed – nothing to learn from or build on.  Wake up – learn from the experts….

What do you think?

 

Posted by David on 02/27 at 06:58 PM