‘Android’ Tags

Calling Canada’s startups: There’s a $200B TV market ripe for the taking

Guest Blogger Calling Canada’s startups: There’s a $200B TV market ripe for the takingBy Jason Flick

We made a very happy discovery this year at Mobile World Congress (MWC) and the Consumer Electronics Show (CES): There’s a $200-billion market out there for the taking. A market in which almost every customer is unhappy with dated products and overall experience, but expected to tolerate regular price increases.

I’m talking about the global TV market (video on demand, cable, satellite, IPTV), which totaled $137 billion in the first half of 2012, according to Infonetics Research.

There is hope for consumers. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, said, “When I sit in front of my TV, I feel like I’m back in the 80s.” We all know that when Apple enters a mature market, its primary focus is to innovate the business model and user experience. As Apple sinks its teeth into the TV industry it will create a tremendous amount of pain for the players in the current ecosystem who are already struggling to keep pace.

We certainly agree with Cook; as a user experience and design company, we began investing in this market over a year ago in anticipation of Apple’s inevitable move.

We took our existing user interface framework along with the Android operating system and set off to build a better TV experience we now call FLIPtv. One of the challenges we sought to solve was incorporation of the tablet to improve how you interact with your TV. The average cable or satellite provider gives you access to 500+ channels. Navigation to this day continues to be based on scrolling up and down through a list of channels, as it was more than 60 years ago! You sit in front of the TV and spend an average of 15 to 20 minutes channel surfing. Nearly 80 per cent of the time, you fall back to the one channel you know has something mildly interesting.

For this underwhelming experience you often pay $100 or more a month for what amounts to a few reliable channels. Compare this to Netflix, with its $10/month option and a simple UI that is far easier to navigate than a cable guide.

We launched our FLIPtv product at CES and publicly unveiled it at MWC with our partners Texas Instruments, Freescale and Marvell to demonstrate FLIPtv to the Sonys, Toshibas, and Samsungs of the world. We built FLIPtv for the smart TV manufacturers and we received strong interest from them, but we were surprised by the huge interest from mobile operators and service providers.

The next Netflix

What we learned is that these companies are even more concerned than the TV industry as they have iTunes (Apple), Netflix, Redbox and other content providers eating into their subscriber revenues. Not only are they open to new technology but they are ready and willing to move quickly. These companies fully understand content delivery networks and the value they have in owning the end user, but they struggle to innovate like Apple and Netflix have.

These multibillion-dollar mobile operators and cable providers need a Netflix killer and new ways to generate revenues based on the far more interactive IPTV market. Their problem, thus our opportunity, will be to enable them to compete and innovate in this evolving market. Even a video on demand solution is complex due to the various content licensing, digital rights management, e-commerce and streaming issues. Our piece is helping providers create a UI that will work across all platforms, from game consoles to smartphones, tablets and set top boxes.

Operators must choose from off-the-shelf, one-size-fits all solutions to get to market quickly or build a best-of-breed solution by selecting the best technologies and establishing partnerships that can create adaptive platforms for telcos and carriers.

It’s rare that such a large and known space with such opportunity isn’t being directly assaulted by the usual suspects (Intel, Microsoft, IBM, etc.) with complete solutions. It seems the market has moved far faster than anyone could have imagined and I think that means there is a window of opportunity for startups. I would like to see Canada, it’s carriers, existing providers and new entrants work together and make us the world leaders in this huge marketplace. There is room for everyone but we need to work together to win.

Jason Flick is co-founder and president of YOUi Labs and Flick Software, a successful serial entrepreneur and product visionary. Jason has founded half a dozen companies in the past 18 years and is advisor and executive to nearly a dozen software companies. He is passionate about the disruption mobility has created and how businesses can lever it.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jason Flick

Posted by: Jason Flick on March 20, 2013

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in: Marketing strategy, Startups, Technology marketing — Leave a comment

Product management: Give the user the best possible mobile experience

mobile 300x207 Product management: Give the user the best possible mobile experience By Peter Hanschke

Welcome to the second post on my journey toward building a mobile app. In my last post, I talked about why I decided to write my own app. In a nutshell, I’ve never had the opportunity to product manage myself through the process of app development, so I thought this would be an interesting exercise. I don’t plan on revealing the nature of my app until the last post, so, until then, I’m charting the process along the way.

Technical challenges

My first challenging decision was to figure out for which device I’d write my app. I know the stats — the entire Android community is outselling Apple’s iOS and behind them is RIM’s BlackBerry OS. The problem is, from a development perspective, each platform is different. If you write for one platform, you have to essentially re-write it for the other platforms.

One option is to use a tool like Phonegap, which allows you to write in one “language” and then deploy to the various devices. This seems like an easy choice — pick a technology that allows you to write once and deploy everywhere. Well, I’ve heard this before and nothing is as easy as it sounds. Another option is to write your app in HTML5 and deploy it to all devices that support HTML5. But not all mobile browsers support all of HTML5′s features, so you’re putting yourself and your project at risk.

Give the user the best possible experience

But enough of this technology analysis; the only thing that really matters is providing your users with the best experience possible.

In today’s app world, user experience is everything. It truly sets apps apart from one another. Any app that does not provide an awesome experience is not going to get good reviews or get picked up. In my last post I mentioned the new star-gazing app that I bought. The first app I bought did the job, but the user experience was not very good. However, my experience with the new app is awesome. I use it now exclusively. People are attracted to an app that provides a great experience and will share it with their friends.

My app has to have an amazing user experience.

The issue of loyalty

Users are loyal to their devices. Not only do they invest in a device, they also invest in a platform. Each platform has its own distinct look and feel. The buttons, symbols and navigation methods define the device. Just look at Android, iOS and BlackBerry OS — each has its unique style. As a user, it takes a while to learn this style. This learning is the soft investment a user makes in their device. They get familiar with the way apps on a platform behave. The way they navigate around the app becomes second nature and they intuitively understand what the button symbols mean. Apps with a different look and feel require an additional investment in learning by the user.

My app must have a native look and feel so the user feels right at home.

The decision

So what did I decide? I decided to write a native iOS app. My app is going to be available for iPhones. As with all iOS apps, it will also run on iPad, but where users will use my app is not conducive for iPad usage.

Why did I decide on iOS and not Android or BlackBerry?

I ruled out BlackBerry rather quickly — my app is a consumer, entertainment kind of app, and BlackBerry does not excel in this space. What swayed me slightly away from Android is the vast number of different Android desserts (froyo, ice cream sandwich, honeycomb, eclair, etc.) that I would have to support. Lastly is the cachet factor — iPhone has it, the others do not. (Note: The newer Android devices have it, but the majority do not.) My target user believes in having devices that are cool. They like to be seen with their cool devices. They like to dress nice (and dance cheesy?). Hence my decision to pick the iPhone platform. Once my app is available, I will monitor any requests to support other platforms and may at some point decide to make it available on another platform.

Now that I decided on iOS, I had to come up with a name for my app that:

  1. Did not conflict with any other name in the iTunes App Store.
  2. Is related to the functionality and value of my app.
  3. Had a domain name available.

That’s a tall order with all the apps in the App Store. Luckily, I managed to find a name that I believe fits those three criteria. The first thing I did was reserve the domain name. That way, I’m guaranteed to have a website for my app.The name you choose should contain a keyword that’s related to your product. It doesn’t have to, but I found that this helps your search ranking. If you are waffling between two or three names, reserve the domain names for all of your choices and decide later which you will go with.

So the pressure is on to build the app to a point where I can deploy it to the App Store, before the name or a close derivative is taken. Apple has a 120-day limit for name squatting, so if you believe that you can build your app to the point where it’s usable for users to try within 120 days, then reserve your name. Otherwise, you have to wait. In my case, I am going to wait.

My next post will cover the triumvirate — product requirements, user experience, and implementation — which I’ll balance with the process of building the Minimum Viable Product (MVP) — a real product management dilemma.

Peter Hanschke is an Ottawa-based product management specialist.

Image: TECHi

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Peter Hanschke

Posted by: Peter Hanschke on November 27, 2012

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in: Startups, Technology marketing — Leave a comment

Why RIM could and should bounce back: Mobile needs to innovate

By Jesse Rodgers

RIM Why RIM could and should bounce back: Mobile needs to innovateRIM has had a hard time since Apple’s iPhone came out. Apple did more than bring the world a touch screen and the app store. It took apart the carrier/phone model on which RIM was an absolute genius at building a strong company. Most people focus on feature for feature device comparison but in reality it is what happened behind the scenes that I think hurt RIM the most.

… as important as the iPhone has been to the fortunes of Apple and AT&T, its real impact is on the structure of the $11 billion-a-year US mobile phone industry. For decades, wireless carriers have treated manufacturers like serfs, using access to their networks as leverage to dictate what phones will get made, how much they will cost, and what features will be available on them. Handsets were viewed largely as cheap, disposable lures, massively subsidized to snare subscribers and lock them into using the carriers’ proprietary services. But the iPhone upsets that balance of power. Carriers are learning that the right phone — even a pricey one — can win customers and bring in revenue. Now, in the pursuit of an Apple-like contract, every manufacturer is racing to create a phone that consumers will love, instead of one that the carriers approve of. “The iPhone is already changing the way carriers and manufacturers behave,” says Michael Olson, a securities analyst at Piper Jaffray. - Wired, 2008

RIM was slow to adapt to this shift (not as tragically slow as Nokia was) but if it can hold on, it could learn from what has happened so far in mobile. Instead of playing catch up it can lead the next phase.

I am bored with the iPhone and not impressed at all with Android — carriers have used its OS to try and claw back control of the device OS version which has resulted in a crazy amount of fragmentation. I do like Windows 8 because Microsoft thinks far more about how people use mobile and have at least tried a new way of using apps. Windows might gain some life on Nokia devices, but the user experience might not be how people want to use the device.

Where is mobile going? Here is my “top things that will drive evolution of mobile” list:

  • Mobile needs to integrate better with how humans function. Nokia is right in that mobile devices demand too much of our attention. The Toronto Police are concerned about this and are “clamping down” on distracted pedestrians. The user experience needs to change so it demands less attention.
  • Your device is your mobile computing platform  for both personal and professional use. The demand for Pebble demonstrates that people really want other things to work with their phone. BYOD is an IT office coup in terms of keeping costs down but it opens up a big can of worms when it comes to managing the devices. And who the heck wants to carry a wallet with swipe cards around anymore? This also includes home entertainment as it has to work easily with anything that would share your data.
  • Cameras are an essential tool on mobile — if you don’t have a great sensor and lens that doesn’t scratch then people simply won’t buy the phone. Cameras are essential because humans prefer to communicate with images and people with kids like to take pictures all the time.

Enter RIM’s opportunity. It is a company that got “cloud” on mobile before people called it “cloud.” It also built the best email/msg/input device, period, which is also light on data. As much as we like the real web on mobile, when there are a lot people in one place or you are in a concrete building or underground or some place in between towers or without decent 3G, it would be nice to at least be able to message people. RIM can do that better than anyone. An iPhone 4S on Edge is painful and I would imagine so is Android and maybe Windows.

If RIM can build a high-quality device that can reduce the attention it takes to use it, have a clear divide between business and personal, and have some kick-ass integration while not losing the things it does well, I would be excited to use the device. I realize that isn’t all that easy to figure out because features alone won’t cut it. The device has to be experimental in how it works and will take some big crazy vision to discover it on both the device level and the how-to-deliver-it-to-customers level.

I am hopeful that RIM can deliver me from my Apple dependency – Android certainly can’t.

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jesse Rodgers

Posted by: Jesse Rodgers on June 4, 2012

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in: Marketing strategy, Product marketing, Technology marketing — 5 Comments

Making waves in radio and television

This is the third article in a continuing monthly series chronicling the growth path of Screenreach Interactive, a startup based in Newcastle upon Tyne in England’s North East. Screenreach’s flagship product, Screach, is an interactive digital media platform that allows users to create real-time, two-way interactive experiences between a smart device (through the Screach app) and any content, on any screen or just within the mobile device itself. We invite your feedback.

FM startup banner head ART 300x145 Making waves in radio and televisionBy Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette

In our last post, we caught up with Screenreach Interactive founder and CEO Paul Rawlings on his way out the door to attend the Digital Signage Investor Conference in New York. We explored how the company has developed its target markets, including the digital signage, or “out of home advertising,” market.

It has been a busy month for the company since then as it continues to build market share in the digital signage, television and radio industries.

David Weinfeld, Screenreach’s chief strategy officer, is based in New York. He and Rawlings hit the tradeshow floor together to speak with experts in the digital signage industry to deepen their understanding of how best to serve this growing global market.

“The conference really gave us a chance to get into the shoes of the clients we wish to serve,” Weinfeld said. “As a result, we are making some exciting changes to the product that we think will make a significant difference in how useful and appealing it is to advertisers and digital signage operators.”

Gadget of choice

After New York, Rawlings headed to Radio Festival, Europe’s top radio industry event, where Screenreach was a sponsor. As we explored in the last post, radio is a growing market for Screenreach and it already counts among its customers in the space Bauer Media, which operates 42 radio stations across the U.K.

“Radio Festival was a very interesting experience for us,” Rawlings said. “It gave us the chance to hear some of the challenges facing the industry. One thing we hadn’t realized was just how important research is to the business of radio. Screach offers deep consumer profiling and we have perhaps been underselling this feature.”

Popular U.K. television program The Gadget Show also held a session within the festival which demonstrated up and coming technologies set to change the radio industry. Screach was used by the audience to allow them to vote on their favourite technology from each round and was also voted the winning gadget in the final round.

Making current affairs interactive

Screenreach has also been working with U.K. television network Channel 4 to provide an app for its long-running current affairs program, Dispatches.

The opportunity to work on the show arose through Tom Gutteridge, a member of Screenreach’s board who worked previously as the CEO of Freemantle Media in the U.S. He made the initial contact with Channel 4 through his production company, Standing Stone.

“This is exciting for us as it will be the first time we’ve seen Screach used in this context,” Rawlings said. “So far, many Screach adopters have used the technology for games and quizzes and our trial on Dispatches will really show how versatile the product is.”

Channel 4 will use Screach to give viewers more control over their news consumption. It will provide additional content and information related to the Dispatches program in real time, provide integration with Facebook and Twitter to encourage viewers to chat with each other during the program via their mobile devices, and provide them with a live polling feature.

“With the polls feature, an example would be if the program was featuring a story that refers to trains, we can ask viewers questions such as ‘how many times have you had to stand on a train journey in the last few months?’ for which they will then see an instant poll,” Channel 4’s Vicky Taylor said in a recent interview.

Playing nice with iOS and Android

Back in the office, Screenreach’s development team has been busy working on the Android platform. It’s now possible for a user to install the Screach app on a tablet device, running either iOS or Android, and engage in a multiplayer experience with other users.

Previously, the only way a user’s smartphone could interact with a tablet was through Wi-Fi synching, AirPlay (synchronization between iOS devices), or through devices with matching operating systems, such as an iPhone and iPad.

With the latest development, an Android tablet can be used as a travelling game board, and people can interact with it through Screach using either an iPhone or an Android device.

Taking stock

For Rawlings and his team, the past month has provided valuable lessons about the importance of refining the current product messaging depending on the needs of specific market verticals.

“This is very exciting for us,” he said. “It means that our continued development opens windows of opportunity that we previously had not foreseen. If we think back to a year ago, so much has changed. One of the favourite sayings in the office is ‘do you want to see something cool’ which is followed by a group gathering around someone’s desk to see something we couldn’t even have imagined the week before. This makes it a very exciting product to work on.”

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by: Francis Moran and Leo Valiquette on November 18, 2011

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in: A Startup Story, Marketing strategy, Startups — Leave a comment

The media tablet ecosystem race

This is the first contribution to this blog by Associate Phil Newman, a London-based marketing and commercialization strategist for technology companies.

tablet pc 300x216 The media tablet ecosystem raceBy Phil Newman

When the iPad was finally revealed in 2010, it took time for the market to know how to categorize the device; everyone settled on simply creating a new category. One year on, the lead that Apple has is a replay of its iPod-iPhone momentum, but Google’s Android caught up quickly. This year will be a truly fascinating one of winners and losers. Not interested? You should be. Media tablets have re-written the rules.

iPad. You can do everything you want on one really. If you’re a high-end originator of Photoshop masterpieces or an individual with particularly fat fingers, you might not be so convinced, but if you try one for a reasonable period of time you’ll start to get frustrated with the boot-up time of your old laptop, the lack of software apps to enhance your entertainment or productivity and the whole battery-cable-charger-airport-connectivity thing.

Give the human race 20 years and the laptops we all lug around will seem as ancient as the clay tablets the Assyrians used to record cuneiform lists of goats, gold and slaves. We’re witnessing the next evolution of computing and something on par with the mouse and graphical user interface computing milestones of the 1970s.

Tablets are more in tune with the way we all consume and interact with data. Are you a reviewer or an originator? If you think about how you shuffle emails and comments up and down the food chain from the comfort of your queue at Starbucks, you’ll recognize that we have become much more accepting of the cloud and computing convenience. Remember when people used to print out and file emails for their records?

According to the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Media Tablet and eReader Tracker, vendors shipped 4.8 million units globally in the third quarter of 2010, compared to 3.3 million units in the second quarter. Apple’s iPad represented nearly 90 percent of the media tablets shipped worldwide in 3Q10.

“The media tablet market’s rapid evolution will continue to accelerate … with new product and service introductions, channel expansion, price competition and experimentation with new use cases among consumers and enterprises,” said IDC’s Susan Kevorkian, research director, mobile connected devices.

So what about your eReader Kindle: Does it factor in to this multi-million-user revolution? Well, no. According to IDC, media tablets are tablet-form-factor devices with color displays larger than five inches and smaller than 14 inches running lightweight operating systems (such as Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android OS) and based on either x86 or ARM processors.

By contrast, tablet PCs (think full Windows) run full PC operating systems and are based on x86 processors. Media tablets support multiple connectivity technologies and a broad range of applications, which differentiates them from single purpose-focused devices such as eReaders. That’s where your Kindle comes in (if you still have one).

So, keeping a focus on the media tablet market, the train has well and truly left the station and there are many vendors looking to stoke up to catch the next train. Google’s Android operating system for smartphones when deployed on a tablet was a pretty desperate grab at the handrail of the last carriage on the Apple express. Samsung’s initial Galaxy Tab was pulled from U.K. market after a high level of returns, while Toshiba’s Folio device was withdrawn completely. Neither offering was as intuitive and popular as Apple’s iOS.

Google’s new Android operating system for tablets, codenamed Honeycomb, is the next wave of development. Motorola is expected to release a media tablet running on Honeycomb called the Xoom, while Research in Motion (RIM) will start marketing is its BlackBerry PlayBook slate. Hewlett-Packard will concentrate its efforts on a device that runs its own WebOS operating system. Good luck with that one, HP.

Apple has more than 350,000 apps for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, while 60,000 apps are specifically designed for the iPad. Android has approximately 130,000 apps, most of them having been designed for smartphones, great for Android’s Nokia-killing handset manufacturers, not so good for media tablets. Google will have to encourage developers to create apps for the new Honeycomb OS, as will RIM.

RIM announced that it plans to introduce in-app purchases, which is smart; this gives developers the ability to up-sell enhancements and smaller upgrades between major version releases, which helps to sustain churn revenues. “It will be a smaller ecosystem of players led by Android and Apple in the near term,” Allen Nogee, mobile analyst at In-Stat, commented recently in the Financial Times. RIM’s Blackberry is currently the U.K.’s most popular smartphone for business users, so they know what they’re doing.

An interesting development of these market shifts is the channel. Apple sells direct and has direct relationships with customers via its online and high-street stores. Other players will have to navigate the support and manage the challenges of working with third parties – resellers, retailers and developers. Yet again, Apple appears to have got it right. It has never cracked the corporate market, however, although with its ownership of its own chipset, hardware, software, OS and digital content, this could be the company’s chance to really take its share of the corporate marketplace from the old guard of laptop manufacturers such as Lenovo, Toshiba and HP.

Looking forward, IDC forecasts 44.6 million media tablets will ship in 2011, with the U.S. representing nearly 40 percent of the total. In 2012, IDC forecasts worldwide shipments of 70.8 million units. Growth in 2011 and beyond will be driven by device vendors introducing media tablets based on Android and other operating systems, as well as price and feature competition and strong demand in both the consumer and commercial segments.

For the e-reader market, IDC anticipates 2010 to close at 10.8 million units shipped worldwide, with the U.S. representing 72.4 percent of global shipments. IDC forecasts 14.7 million units to ship in 2011 and 16.6 million in 2012.

What does this mean for us all? It means that computing has changed in the space of a year – the desktop, the laptop and the smartphone have become integrated. This is a great time to build new applications and revenue. It’s also time for corporations to start planning IT strategies around mobile devices for the whole shooting match – security, AV, application version control, licensing, HR, surf control, proprietary app conversion and so forth.

The market will change before our eyes this year and next. Ignoring these developments is not a great idea.

Image: www.nicomovil.com

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Phil Newman

Posted by: Phil Newman on February 28, 2011

Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted in: Marketing strategy, Product marketing, Technology marketing — Leave a comment