Open Mobile Summit
November 4-5 2009
Open Mobile Summit, an intimate mobile industry gathering that covers the tectonic convergence of Internet with mobile communications held its second
Inklings of Future from Inter-Planetary Protocols to Multiple Screen Laptops
Vint Cerf, Google’s Chief Internet Evangelist, talked about his decade-long work at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on extending Internet to work across the planets. His team first considered using the TCP/IP protocols but soon realized they would not work properly. For example, the distance between Earth and Mars would translate to at least a seven-minute round trip packet delay when they are closest to each other and up to a forty-minute round trip packet delay when they are farthest apart. TCP/IP protocols would not be able to handle that much of a delay. Instead, the team developed the Delay Tolerant Networking (DTN) protocol. DTN uses Store and Forward to handle high latency networks. Cerf believes that DTN protocol can be useful for terrestrial mobile communications as well, since they also involve highly stressed situations. Cerf also noted that TCP/IP is a very brittle system.
Cerf envisions future mobile devices as not simply part of one network but also connecting to alternate ad-hoc networks, as needed. A future mobile device will be aware of other devices nearby, and will be able to act as part of an ad-hoc network that comes together to solve a specific problem for its user.
Dadi Perlmutter, EVP and GM of Intel Architecture Group, stated that the PC platform is not dead and is fertile ground for innovations. He demonstrated
Open-ness Debate Rages on
You would indeed expect there to be a lot of talk about “open’ at Open Mobile Summit. Michael Abbott, Senior VP at Palm, said open is about offering choice and enabling options for users and developers. In particular, he mentioned Synergy at webOS that pulls together a user’s calendar from various sources through open API’s. Adobe’s CTO, Kevin Lynch, said open-ness has changed over the last few years. Currently it means wireless networks opening to new devices. It is not a free for all but it should include any reasonable combination of devices, applications, and networks. Vint Cerf of Google said Open does not have to be open source. There is a spectrum of open-ness. AT&T’s CTO, John Donovan, said customers care more about their experience than about being open. Customers also care about their privacy and security. So, as Donovan sees it, open has to be managed within those boundaries. Cerf rushed in to interject that respecting privacy and security does not mean creating monolithic models. During Donovan’s keynote address, he provided some provoking thoughts: why should open only apply to north-bound API’s of layer 2 protocol? Why shouldn’t Google open up their web directory?
Mobile Platform Innovators: Which Ones Will Survive?
There is plenty of exciting innovation on smartphone platforms. iPhone continues to be the king of the hill. There is much debate on how open iPhone platform actually is. Of course, Apple does not attend non-Apple conferences to elaborate on what they are up to. Regardless, iPhone platform is still the gold standard for smartphones both in terms of hardware and software platforms.
Google’s Android, and open-source Linux-based platform, is a strong emerging contender. It has launched devices with three of the four tier-1
LiMo, also an open-source Linux-based platform, is getting both tail winds and head winds from Android. On one hand, Android’s success is helping mobile Linux get a new life. On the other hand, Android may squash LiMo by strength of its global brand and massive resources. Meanwhile, LiMo was demonstrating the Vodafone 360 user interface built on top of LiMo’s Release 2 running on Samsung’s H1 model phone. It was an impressive visually-rich user interface. Besides being open, LiMo considers its governance structure (transparent and commercially viable) a key differentiator for its platform.
Symbian is holding on tight to its glory days of the past and trying to stay relevant in the new age of super smartphones. Symbian warned that we shouldn’t rely on just one OS platform, similar to what happened to desktop platforms.
Palm’s webOS is truly an innovative platform, powering one launched device (Palm Pre) and one upcoming device (Pixi) with Sprint. At the conference, Palm demonstrated its new, entirely web-based development environment, called Ares. A simple Flickr search application was developed in five minutes, with no downloads. Palm claims it wants to lower the entry barriers for the developers and make it extremely easy to develop applications for webOS. Ares will be available by the end of this year.
Blackberry OS and Windows Phone certainly have some fierce competition to face.
Be Wary If Your Wishes Come True
We see an interesting dilemma facing the mobile carriers. They want to push more smartphones, because that will attract higher-end customers with higher Average Revenue Per User (ARPU), and lower churn. At first blush, that all sounds great. However, smartphone users gobble up data, lots of data. And, that puts a big strain on mobile carrier’s networks, and their business model. We are not talking about smartphones circa 2006; we are talking about iPhone-class smartphones with great displays and modern browsers.
Here are some sobering data points. AT&T said wireless data growth at AT&T was almost 5000% over the last 12 quarters. T-Mobile said the Android user’s data consumption is fifty times the average.
Explosive growth of mobile data consumption does not match the consumer’s willingness to pay for the bits. Fourth-generation (4G) technologies, like LTE and WiMAX, will not be sufficient to handle the increasing demand. As a result, mobile operators are looking for alternate ways to ease the pressure on their networks including use of WiFi and investments in Femto cells. Mobile backhaul will also be an issue of concern.
App Stores: A Year After & Evolving
A year and few months after the iconic launch of the iPhone app store, there are many flavors of mobile app stores from various vendors. iPhone app store has over 100,000 applications, Android Market has about 12,000 applications, Blackberry World has a few thousand, and Palm App Catalog has a few hundred.
With these rising number of applications, discoverability becomes more challenging. Mobile carriers are dealing with this phenomenon in different ways. Verizon believes since it has run successful carrier application decks, it knows what their customers want and can bring some order to the app store. Verizon is also interested in replacing Android Market with its own VCast store on some Andorid phones. Sprint, on the other hand, does not believe operators are best at figuring out what customers want. As a result, they are not creating Sprint app stores on webOS devices nor on Android devices. T-Mobile will create a T-Mobile channel within Android Market.
Nokia believes it is important to make sure the app store developer’s business model is aligned with the operator’s business model. Ericsson suggested that mobile operators should consider operator-based application stores enabled by Ericsson versus the current device-oriented app stores. Get Jar, a small start-up, offers an independent mobile app store that features applications for various mobile platforms.
Open Makes Strange Bed Fellows
A year ago, Verizon and Google were on the opposite side of several open-ness issues. According to Ryan Hughes Verizon’s VP, even 6 months ago, they couldn’t have even thought about including a turn by turn navigation tool from Google on their phones. But Verizon recognizes that Open is here to stay and is forming a unique partnership with Google to deliver Android-powered handsets.
Amazon originally partnered with Sprint to be the network provider for its Kindle eReader. For the latest models of Kindle, Amazon has decided to make an international move and have dropped Sprint and replaced it with AT&T. That is open relationships for you.
And One More Thing …
Julius Knapp, Chief of Office of Engineering and Technology at FCC got an earful from AT&T and academic panelists on why wireless industry is already sufficiently competitive and does not need additional rule making designed to increase competition.
Arvani Group: is an international mobile consulting firm, retained by companies and investors who seek to transform their mobile and wireless businesses. Contact us at info @ arvanigroup dot com or +1-310-260-8558.