Motorola speculation

Interesting article at Engadget - Motorola may exit handset business. Is this a case of great minds think alike or fools never differ?

Friends Reunited: yesterday's news

I caught a headline in the Marketing trade journal this week - it was not that hard as it was the main splash on the front page: "ITV prepares rebrand of Friends Reunited portal". My immediate thought was "who cares?", in yoof vernacular isn't Friends Reunited "so over".

What a great pity. Here was a business that was thriving on internet buzz and word of mouth and had found a niche in the social networking space. Now, even myspace is yesterday's news though strong enough to generate another wave, with Facebook currently the channel of choice.

The owners sold out at the right time. Perhaps they had run out of steam creatively but whatever the reason, the ITV acquisition killed it stone dead as a viral success.

For Friends Reunited to succeed it does need a re-birth and clearly to their credit, ITV are on the case but I have strong doubts that such a large corporate organisation can make this succeed even before considering the particular merits of ITV itself.

It is surprising what you can do on your phone

So, you might not be able to blog successfully from your mobile (see last post) but the list of things that you can do from your phone just grows and grows. See this news reported widely on the news wires over the past week:

An Egyptian woman is seeking clarification from a court on whether her husband's declaration of divorce by text message is legally valid, a state-run newpsaper reported on Thursday. The AFP reports.

"After missing a call from her husband on her mobile phone, Iqbal Abul Nasr received a text message from him saying "I divorce you because you didn't answer your husband," Al-Akhbar said.

It was the third time Abul Nasr, an engineer from Cairo, received a divorce text message from her husband, prompting her to seek a legal decision from the a family court on the status of her marriage.

If the court declares the couple divorced, it would be the first reported case of divorce by SMS in Egypt."

I found this incredible but then I caught the final line:

"The subject of divorce by SMS has been highly debated across the Muslim world and some Islamic countries like Malaysia have banned the practice."

It has already been widely debated and even banned. I am definitely behind the times. Is this amusing or appalling?

Mobile Blogging

Dan Appelquist has beaten me to the punch on looking at the paucity of mobile blogging tools out there at the moment. It struck me that with the increasing sophistication of phones and the increasing propensity of people to blog and share through any number of networks that mobile blogging would be a no-brainer service to offer. Yet: Blogger, Typepad, Vox and Wordpress are all nowhere. The reality is that it only makes sense for the existing blogging platforms to offer this feature and being both US and web centric means that mobile is not yet high on the radar. A pity. It is one of those things which would increase both quantity and quality of blog posts in a large number of cases.

Rotten apple

I caught this over Christmas in an article from John Naughton in the Observer - "Apple and Think Secret have settled their lawsuit, reaching an agreement that results in a positive solution for both sides [....] as part of a confidential settlement, Think Secret will no longer be published. Nick Ciarelli, ThinkSecret's publisher said, I'm pleased to have reached this amicable settlement and will now be able to move forward with my college studies and broader journalistic pursuits".

So, an independent blogger, in addition to AppleInsider and O'Grady's PowerPage, has had a significant shot fired across the bows by large corporate for daring to guess and review forthcoming product. The bigger issue for Apple has been in stopping its own employees leaking to these sites but it has gone after the publishers using its financial weight and legal clout to stop these guys publishing. There is something dreadfully wrong with that picture - doesn't it contravene or at least abuse constitutional rights in the US?

Apple is setting a lousy example here and adds further grist to the mill which exposes that it is not a "people's champion" as the branding guru's would have us believe. No problem with that but just don't seek to represent that it is the case. As the original article outlined, Apple might appear to wear velvet gloves but they are lined with lead.

Tis the season......

.... for predictions.

So here are mine

1. One major manufacturer will hit the wall BenQ-style and decide to forgo manufacturing devices (this might be in 2009 but we'll go for the bleeding edge prediction first)

2. Operators will continue to stimmy and stifle the mobile internet; some will flex their muscles and try to use their position as the access point to ensure a significant share of revenue and will continue to breed resentment amongst third parties and users; most will try to catch up with third party requirements and make a genuine attempt to deliver something third parties can reasonably use; one will break the mould and strike out on a more visionary strategy which looks to a more conciliatory model and take the result hit on marginal profit on the basis there will be more of it in total. I continue to be a pessimist as regards the operators opening up despite the current trend to pay lip service to the concept.

3. Android will prove far more complicated to organise than Google thought, there will be inevitable delays but there will be shipments but we need to wait another year to realise the true potential of the scheme.

4. Mobile advertising will still struggle for prime time but trends keep moving in the right direction with more campaigns now including mobile in the planning stages and mobile service providers becoming a little more sophisticated in how they supply ads.

5. Location based services will continue to be hyped but no-one shall succeed until they solve the underlying fundamental issues with the business model (even excluding any cost of location APIs).

6. Mobile Internet will still struggle in 2008 to reach that free wheeling stage where
sensible innovation will be rewarded with scale. The internet brands will continue their creep into this space and more will come to realise that the mobile internet is just the internet. There will be a handful of mobile specialists that are sought and bought by the giants.

7. Roaming backlash - no, I don't believe it either but I continue to hope.

8. Operators and OEMs shall seek to show their environmental credentials in above the line advertising.

Will 8 do?

Bourne Yesterday

I was on a long haul flight yesterday and happened to catch the Bourne Ultimatum again - a trilogy which I have really enjoyed. So much of these movies depends on the believability of the plot and being able to suspend disbelief at some of the events that take place. I remember long debates on talk shows and in the press for example about whether the use of cameras in Waterloo could be used in such a way to trace suspects and the fact that there was such a debate was a triumph for the movie because the believability added to its suspense.

Now, I noticed something yesterday which I had not before (I do not know why it is usually one of the first things I see): namely that all of the 'assets' (the assasins used by the Government) receive their instructions through their Motorola V3's.

Come on! You can only stretch the truth so far and if I were an 'asset' deep undercover relying on successful mobile communication to function, there is no way I'd entrust my life to a device which has almost single handedly sent mobile data back by a year or more in the US.

More Bourne Yesterday than Bourne Ultimatum