Puny Little Human

The discounted past

Things like the following annoy me:

Neither company has been successful in gaining great smartphone market share, as Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platforms have dominated.

Source

I don’t mean to be a curmudgeon and I can not take away anything from the devastation that Apple and Google have wrought on Nokia’s smartphone market share, but there was a period of time a few years ago when Nokia did in fact dominate the worldwide smartphone market.

When people write about how iOS and Android will dominate and have always dominated the smartphone market sound so ignorant of the past. At one point in time, Symbian was the most widely used operating  in the world. That point was December 2011. 

It seems to me that we tend to discount the past a great deal in tech.

The biggest constraint for location services and local commerce: battery life

Last Friday, I had dinner with Robert Scoble.

Nope, that is not the beginning to some joke. Brian Stuckey (@brianstuckey) and I were in downtown Palo Alto when we got pinged on Highlight that Robert Scoble had just highlighted us. Then, all of a sudden, we were having a conversation with him thru the app. Next thing you know, we were walking down University Ave to have dinner with him and his wife Maryam, who is a great sport for tolerating two random grad students showing up for dinner.

We had a nice little chat over a nice bottle of wine. Robert, IRL, is a really nice and funny guy. Even as I was walking back to my car, I was dumbstruck that it had even happened.

That was a supreme moment of serendipity and really highlights the power of location services.

Then, as I sat there thinking and dreaming about how powerful those kinds of SOLOMO services could be at massive scale… my battery died.

And this, is what is the powerful limiting factor for mobile apps that use location and social data. The GPS chip just sucks down tons and tons of battery life. The location apps that are most useful are the ones that promote discovery: whether it is people around you or points of interest. But to be able to push those discoveries, the app has to passively keep the GPS antenna on constantly. It’s not just proximity social apps like Highlight and Sonar, the new Foursquare Radar feature does this as well.

And it can be an incredible drain on battery life unless you keep a charger with you. When I am in California, I am in the car for 1 to 2 hours every day, so can reliably keep my phone charged. But that is not always reliably the case. I am also worried about how that will affect the long term battery life of my mobile.

Which brings me to my ultimate conclusion. Knowing where you are and who/what is around you will be a tremendous driver of value for mobile devices in the future. One of the partners I work for at NGP likes to say, “Location to mobile is like search is to the PC web.” I totally agree with that.

But the  limiting factor of the GPS drain on battery life.

So a couple of thoughts from this experience:

1. Mobile devices battery capacity are usually quoted in terms of hours of talk time or normal data usage. That’s not going to be good enough join forward. Location apps are absolutely going to proliferate going forward, and taking into account heavy usage of hardware and software location assets which are extremely battery intensive.
2. I don’t think the investment opportunity around this conundrum is going to arise out of battery makers. Battery innovators are already plowing significant amounts of capital into improvements. Most price competitive output have been incremental, rather than step function improvements. Bigger, denser batteries can not be the solution going forward. Our hands are only so big.
3. There’s got to be some approach towards power management on the software side that provides constant passive pinging of proximity data but does it in such a way that is extremely efficient in usage of the local battery. I’d imagine Urban Airship must be working on something of that nature.
4. Manually managing location services on a mobile device sucks. Turning different sensors and antennas on and off to preserve battery life is a pain in the butt, and there’s got to be a way to automatically run that on devices. I know Motorola has been on boarding some of those capabilities into their devices. It has to be ubiquitous across all phones. I know the concept of profiles has not been as popular (remember Nokia’s ringtone profiles?) in recent years, but I think the need for power consumption profiles should make a comeback in a way that gives it premium screen real estate.

The advancement of location based services and under prediction

Image via Wikipedia

When foursquare first came out, I had a thought that this whole location based service thing is all good and nice, but how many apps would I have in my life that would rely on location? I just could not think of any other applications for being contextually aware.

Today, it may be one of the most important aspects of mobility ever. Just a quick perusal through the Location Services menu in my mobile shows an astonishing 41 apps that use location. Some that I use constantly: foursquare, Yelp, Waze, Primospot, Facebook, Groupon. A quick read through shows that context matters a great deal for social, commerce, and transportation.

That just goes to show the limitations of my own imagination about how wide ranging the applications for location can be. Nokia, whose venture group I work for, has even created a dedicated business unit around Location and Commerce to exploit this opportunity.

And I think the ultimate point of this experience is: that it can be dangerous to be certain that we can predict the level of change in the future. It is easy to be overconfident about how little things can change, especially in the easily disrupted world of Internet and mobile.

This is discouraging and encouraging. It is discouraging because it shows the limits of our ability to predict and plan for the future. It is encouraging because it shows that we can and should be daring and courageous in our visions for the future and how things could be. That we shouldn’t be thinking about technology based on the how things are today. The computing power and connectivity that we have today are a pale shadow of how things may be in 10 to 15 years.

Is there a viable venture investment thesis in feature phones or what?

Image via Wikipedia

Smartphones are blazing hot, all the way from the apps layer down to the hardware. Even telco equipment startups are hot once again (look up Affirmed Networks raising over $10 million last year and they are still in stealth mode).

But these investment trends are being driven by the smartphone boom. PCs are moving from your desktop to your pants pocket. But I have been thinking a lot about feature phones for the last few months, mainly because of this chart:

Most people see in this the last gasps of Symbian and the rise of Windows Phone in the Nokia ecosystem. And you would be right. That is going to be the final blow to an ecosystem that has been dying since 2007.

But one thing that is really interesting is the increase in R&D in the Mobile Phones segment. This is very interesting. For those not familiar with the way that Nokia is structured, and who can blame you since there are re-orgs every year or so, Mobile Phones refers to Nokia’s feature phone segment. While many of us in the US have not seen a Nokia smartphone in years, we certainly fondly remember the games of Snake we used to play on our old Nokia 6110.

Turns out that feature phones are a massive category! Way more people in the world own low end phones than smartphones. And yet, feature phones oftentimes lack the connectivity and rich user experience offered by what is essentially a computer with a phone attached.

So why aren’t investors also mining investments in this segment? One proof point that popped up in my radar was when Facebook acquired Snaptu a developer of apps for feature phones. It was a relatively small sized transaction (~$60 million), but still noteworthy.

I posed this question on Quora a few weeks back and got some very interesting and diametrically opposing viewpoints, many by highly qualified professionals in the mobility space.

Click thru to take a look at some of the answers.

Related articles

• Nokia has its Sanjay Jha moment (zdanielshi.com)
• Nokia Confident About First Windows Phone Arriving in Q4 (pcworld.com)
• Facebook acquires Snaptu for $70 million (allaboutsymbian.com)

Nokia has its Sanjay Jha moment: to phase out Symbian & MeeGo, but what about Series 40?

Image via CrunchBase

So it looks like Nokia is going thru its own Sanjay Jha moment.

• An outside executive (from Redmond vs. San Diego) comes in to shake up the company.
• A Linux based platform bows out. In Motorola’s case, it was the end of its Linux Java platform, and for Nokia, it will be the end of its investments into MeeGo. Will it be the end of MeeGo? Not sure, as Intel will likely continue to invest and sell it into their tablet, netbook, and UMPC OEM partners.
• A new promising smartphone operating system (now it’s Redmond vs. Mountain View) is ascendant.
• And Symbian bows out…

But as I was looking thru the news on Nokia’s plans, one slide really stood out for me:

source: Engadget posted from the Nokia Capital Markets event

Symbian is out, Meego is out, Windows Phone is in, but wait a minute, what is going on in “Mobile Phones platforms?”

While Nokia has always been known in the news as the House of Symbian, people don’t really realize just how dominant it has been in the lower end feature phone segment. That’s what the “Mobile Phones platform” segment is.

I think it is interesting that, in the midst of the huge reorg, that there is going to be increased investment into Series 40.

I actually personally think this is great. Nokia’s S40 devices are not often acknowledged in the press, but definitely a core strength of Nokia.

Related articles

• Nokia: MeeGo not dead, still shipping this year (engadget.com)
• Elop Reorganizes Nokia, Fires The Guy Who Ran Their Android-Killer (businessinsider.com)
• Microsoft Is Paying Nokia “Hundreds Of Millions Of Dollars” To Go With Windows (MSFT) (businessinsider.com)