Mathew Ingram on The Symbian Unification

Globe & Mail Technology writer Mathew Ingram blogged this morning on Nokia's announcement yesterday that they intend to acquire the outstanding shares of Symbian that they don't already own, and together with a whole host of other mobile providers and vendors, will create an open source, unified and standard Mobile OS. From Nokia's press release:

"Nokia, Sony Ericsson, Motorola and NTT DOCOMO announced today their intent to unite Symbian OS(TM), S60, UIQ and MOAP(S) to create one open mobile software platform. Together with AT&T, LG Electronics, Samsung Electronics, STMicroelectronics, Texas Instruments and Vodafone they plan to establish the Symbian Foundation to extend the appeal of this unified software platform."

Where Mr. Ingram focused on the implications to Google and Apple, I wonder if there isn't something more at play here.

The big deal here is that with all of the talk of Web 2.0 and SaaS, most in the know tend to think of these as relatively closed systems that are for the most part, Web only, with limited inputs and outputs to other devices and network points. This is certainly for good reason: The examples we're often given for successful implementations of SaaS, namely Salesforce.com, Google Apps, and even Amazon's AWS 'computing cloud' are all, at their first glance, Web-based.

Nokia, et al, recognize that if any revolutions are going to happen, they're going to be mobile. And just like the browser wars of the late '90's, there is tremendous reason to think that the battleground will be the mobile handset.

Just as Salesforce.com beat entrenched CRM application providers by using the platform to extend the value of their services with third-party apps and widgets, and Facebook surpassed social networking leaders MySpace and Friendster in part by extending the value of the interaction with mini-applications that plug into people's social networks and enable other forms of non-linear interactions (oh what would the world be without Scrabulous?).

But the iPhone has started to change our concept of Web 2.0 as a web only proposition. This is not because thinking is changing in the technology space, but rather because consumers have awoken to the power of these devices, largely due to the homebrew community that first hacked the iPhone last year. Indeed, once Apple saw the power (and the desire) they needed to open up the platform, and thus the tightly controlling SDK. Now, people realize that mobile phones are powerful input and output devices, and are the Conduit for generating and consuming Content and Commerce anytime, any place. The network provides access to the platform which, in turn provides the appropriate distribution to any device, including IPTV, Web, Digital Signage & Kiosks, and yes, Mobile devices.

Nokia and the rest of the gang are eying the other giants, Apple, Google, RIM, and yes Microsoft with wary eyes, and are firmly aware that the next big thing in mobile won't be the handset, and it won't be the content per se... It's the platform and the network.

Mathew Ingram on the buyout

The Big .Mac Mystery

On the heels of the WWDC next week, comes news of a possible, ever-so-slight shift in strategy on the part of Apple. From the New York Times Bits Blog:

...there is a flurry of speculation about improvements to a minor icon an the Apple Pantheon: the .Mac online service. For six years, .Mac has been a $100 a year bundle of handy Internet services, now including e-mail, online hosting, backup, photo sharing, and tools to synchronize calendars and address books. Industry reports say Apple has between 1 million and 2 million subscribers."

"Now is certainly a great time to expand and rename .Mac. Much of the energy in software development is around online applications, which would be a logical evolution for Apple’s iLife and iWork software. Moreover, the iPhone and iPod Touch are particularly suited to services that blend small local applications with storage and other processing handled on an Internet server.

I find this analysis much more consistent with my own than with Forrester Research's speculation about Apple's shift towards home entertainment services. The gorgeously designed, yet deceptively useful devices that are entering the marketplace courtesy of Jobs et al are all but useless without some hefty services to make them sustainably unique.

As an example, I was aghast to discover that I couldn't directly subscribe to a podcast on my iPhone, with Apple preferring me to sync through iTunes on the desktop. There is a third-party app that will let me download and listen to podcasts over my data or WiFi connection, but Apple does not natively support it... This is due, I believe, to Apple wanting to maintain control over what content enters its media player. A .ME service suite (with a web-service-based iTunes) will take us a long way towards the ubiquity of service that Mr. Hansell is speaking about.

Will Steve Jobs Set Me Free? - NY Times Bits

Facebook | Mass Interpersonal Persuasion, or just a waste of time?

Fast Company is running an interview with Stanford Prof BJ Fogg, author of a new book about the social networking service. There are some interesting ideas, and also some rather outlandish ones. Of the more explorable is this tidbit:

"A lot of our exposure to services and products is now going to be socially mediated. It's going to be very hard to create a centralized broadcasting message about a brand or product... That's where mass interpersonal persuasion comes in. Through the newsfeed and my social network, interesting stuff now comes to me; I don't have to go searching for it."

Fast Company then (rightly) asks if this will flow into the Long Tail philosophies that are popular right now. Fogg's response is fundamentally correct, although perhaps not how he means it:

"As a brand, you can worry about all these micro niches and micro markets and the long tail, but I think at the end of the day you're not going to have enough resources to do that. You have to focus on creating a spectacular product or service, and your market will find you."

Whoa, wait a second... did I just read that in the future (according to Fogg), marketers are going to be out of a job? That if you build it (really, really well) they will come? Fortunately, not exactly:

"You don't have to pre-define your market right out of the gate. As long as you watch what's going on, you can adjust and go with what's working."

Phew. For a minute there, I saw long lines of well-manicured homeless folks trying to explain why the street is now REALLY where it's at.

The really interesting piece to Fogg's argument is that Facebook, or rather social networking in a broader sense, is going to democratize marketing. Thing is, I know a lot of young people for whom Facebook is yesterday's news, and they are looking for a place that they can call their own (the early appeal of Facebook). Facebook has responded with "lists," or the ability to create mini virtual Facebooks so you can keep your friends separate from uh, your parents. It's too soon to tell if this is going to play out, but I suspect it won't.

Here's the thing. People (the necessary component to the social networking eco-sphere), don't change that fast. Fogg is describing a wholesale shift from push to pull marketing. Anybody else remember Pointcast? How about lesser-known Backweb & Marimba (check out this 1999 Forbes article for some good irony).

At the end of the day, Google ads get closer to what Fogg is describing... While I agree that SaaS (Software as a Service) and grid computing are changing the landscape, and that products are, by their nature becoming iterative (think iPod, salesforce.com, and the still-in-beta GMail), I think that's a far cry from the marketing paradigm shifting so dramatically. Besides, the concept of engagement is just catching on...

Why Facebook Is Even Bigger than You Think | Fast Company

Photoshop Express public beta adds Flickr support - Yahoo! News

From the Sorta Kinda Notable But Really Pretty Much Expected Dept.:

"...enhancements to Photoshop Express include the ability to access photos through the popular Flickr service. You can download photos from a Flickr account into Photoshop Express, edit and add effects to them, then send them back to Flickr.

Adobe has also added a new Save As feature that lets you save multiple versions of an image. There's also an embeddable player you can use to post slideshows to Facebook, MySpace, and other social networking Web sites."

Link to Macworld/Yahoo! article

So I've been wondering...

...What is Apple's strategy with Safari, exactly?

Really... I mean with Firefox, Opera, IE, and others, what's the reason that Apple is aggressively entering the Browser wars? Marc Andreesen can tell you that IE is a monster to compete with, and Firefox is whomping butt in the space.

The other day, it struck me: Apple's pattern has thus far been to take open-ish standards, re-brand them and then build services around them. The examples are many: iTunes/iPod (mp3), iMovie/Quicktime (MOV/MPEG-4), iDVD (DVD), Airport(802.11x) - the list goes on.

Why a browser? Because a browser is, and this is important, just another kind of media player. If Apple wants to create an end-to-end new media publishing platform (and they seem to want to), they don't want to depend upon other platforms to support the technologies and engineering they want to apply in displaying their services.

OK, so Web2.0 is the 'platformization' of the Web. Services are delivered as web applications that deliver value through the 'cloud' in other channels. Those other channels include IPTV (AppleTV, XBOX, Wii) Mobile (iPhone, Blackberry, etc.), desktop apps (Adobe AIR, iPhoto), and so on. Consider YouTube: I can upload a video to YouTube, and it will almost instantly appear (formatted correctly) for each of these mediums!

Safari is Apple's play at creating a walled garden for their own (and their partners') web applications.

Then I saw this; an Apple patent for improving the online shopping experience by delivering more in-store-like eCommerce applications.

This would allow you to see what products people are looking at, and by clicking on one of the other visitor icons, customers could even ask questions to users about why they'd left one product or gone to another product. This visual representation can be used to help with live real-time changes in interest:

It looks like (and it really looks like) Apple is going to use Safari as a primary point of introduction to deliver Web2.0 services to their other devices. .Mac is already doing it! You can edit and organize photos in iPhoto that are then uploaded to .Mac (in addition to Facebook, Flickr, and others); you can edit and polish a video in iMovie and upload it to .Mac; you can create a Website and blog in iWeb to upload to .Mac; you can even create a compelling and moderately interactive video in Keynote and export it to Flash for inclusion in a .Mac Website!

All of this points to a circling of the Wagons around the big Long Tail brass ring: Democratized tools for producing and distributing user-generated media in the same platform and locus of the hit-driven stuff. The question remains to be seen: Will this play, and will users see the value. Moreover, will this lead to greater Mac, iPod, and iPhone sales, or will people demand that Apple 'open up?'