Stephen Elop

Nokia (NYSE:NOK) CEO Stephen Elop  last week unveiled the company’s first smartphones running Microsoft’s (NASDAQ:MSFT) Windows Phone platform, the opening gambit in whether Nokia’s bet on the new software will help revive its flagging fortunes. The Lumia 800 and 710 will be available in November in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Spain and the UK, with support from 31 operators and retail partners. By the end of the year, both devices will be available in Hong Kong, India, Russia, Singapore and Taiwan.

For the United States, Nokia did not announce any specific products, but Elop said a portfolio of devices will be coming in early 2012, meaning Nokia will miss the crucial holiday shopping season for the U.S. market. There are lots of unknowns in this gambit: Will Nokia’s Windows Phone devices be differentiated enough from those from HTC, LG and Samsung? Will consumers warm to Nokia’s brand, which has taken a beating in recent years, especially in North America? How will Nokia break through with carriers and retail sales representatives, two crucial constituencies? The pressure is on Elop and Nokia to deliver. If they don’t, Nokia might not last.

As per sources, Hans Vestberg, CEO, Ericsson said that when the joint venture was formed ten years ago, thereby combining Sony’s consumer products knowledge with Ericsson’s telecommunication technology expertise, it was a perfect match to drive the development of feature phones. However, today they take an equally logical step as Sony acquires their stake in Sony Ericsson and makes it a part of its broad range of consumer devices.

Sony President, Chairman, and CEO, Howard Stringer has reportedly said that this acquisition makes sense for Sony and Ericsson, and it will make the difference for consumers, who want to connect with content wherever they are, whenever they want. Further, Ericsson reportedly plans to focus on the global wireless market as a whole as well as how wireless connectivity can benefit people, business and society beyond just phones. The agreement, subject to regulatory approvals, is expected to close in January 2012.  According to reports, the transaction also includes a patent deal enabling Sony to receive the five sets of patents that are essential to making the phones and a licensing agreement on any other intellectual property.

Reports suggest that shares in Ericsson rose by 5.1 percent to $10.7, while Sony’s share price rose 5.4 percent to $21.7 at the time of closing.

There should be no doubt at this point: the world of Android is a turbulent, noisy, and at-times inscrutable tangle of interests. But the basics have stabilized quite a bit over the last year, and the Android community—if it can hang together—has a chance to prove that the platform is maturing by rewarding older customers with newer features.

Michael DeGusta of The Understatement posted an excellent infographic (that is, a truly useful one) this week showing just how poorly the Android community, namely Google (NSDQ: GOOG), phone makers, and carriers, have supported their early adopters with new versions of the software. Click through for the full graphic, but the stats are telling: of Android phones launched prior to June 2010, several of which are still under contract with their respective carriers, “12 of 18 only ran a current version of the OS for a matter of weeks or less” and “10 of 18 were at least two major versions behind well within their two year contract period.”

That’s an unfortunate byproduct of the breakneck pace that Google and the Android community set for themselves in order to try and catch up to Apple’s iOS. But it doesn’t really tell the full story of Android in late 2011, because it stops just short of taking into account the Android boom of late 2010 and into early 2011. That accounts for a huge proportion of the Android phones that are running relatively new operating system versions.

—Current Landscape: According to Google, as of early October 83.4 percent of Android devices in use across the world are running either Froyo, Android version 2.2, or Gingerbread, Android version 2.3. Froyo is a year and a half old, and Gingerbread was announced in late 2010.

When Froyo was announced at Google I/O in 2010, Android had 13 percent of the U.S. smartphone market, as measured by operating system and according to Comscore (NSDQ: SCOR). Today, it has around 44 percent of that market, making it the leading mobile operating system.

DeGusta is right in pointing out how those who sustained Android in those early days have paid the price for taking the plunge, at least when it comes to software updates. But this is a much smaller percentage of the overall Android market than it would appear from his graphic.

One such idea is the “QR code service from Space“, recently launched by Phillips & Company.

Check it out.

The idea is that more and more people are using tools such as Google Maps or Google Earth to look at locations on the ground. For example, Google Earth has reportedly been downloaded over 400 million times!

So why not use this opportunity to connect with these people for marketing purposes.

The concept makes use of the fact that services such as Google get new satellite photos of the earth on a regular basis. So, for any company that has a building which is viewable for example on Google Maps, Phillips will arrange to place a large QR code on top of your building, just when the satellites are coming by to refresh their images of their location.

The result is that when someone looks on Google Maps, the will see the building with a QR code on it (see image below). Consumers can then use the QR code scanner in their mobile phone to learn more about the business. Scanning the QR code will cause them to be directed to any sort of website or information source that the business chooses.

Phillips calls this marketing service “Blue Marble“. Whether or not companies are willing to pay the money to have a QR code appear on their building in Google Maps is not clear, only time will tell. But in any case, this is one of the most innovative ideas for communicating with consumers.

This is from mobiadnews.com

Tablet type devices – whether iPads, Galaxies, or Kindles – are becoming an accepted form factor for mobile connected device, and are developing a large installed base of users.

As publishers and advertisers increasingly target these consumers, they will need to understand more about the demographics of this group.

Nielsen’s latest US quarterly survey of mobile connected device owners reveals that these demographics are in fact changing rapidly.

Nielsen’s survey found two major shifts are occurring – a larger percentage of users are older than previously, and the percentage of women in the user group is growing rapidly.

The survey found that the percent of Tablet owners under the age of 34 dropped from 62% in Q3 2010 to only 46% in Q2 2011. For e-reader owners, the percentages dropped from 46% to 35%.

What is interesting is that a lot of the change is taking place in the age group that is over 55. For Tablets this segment almost doubled, growing from 10% in Q3 2010 to 19% in Q2 2011.

When it came to gender differences, there is an across the board increase in the percentage of women using tablets, e-readers, and even smartphones.

eReaders show very popularity with women, with 61% of all eReader owners are now female compared to 46% just 9 months ago in Q3 2010.

In the tablet market men still dominate with 57% market share, but this has dropped from 61% over the same period.

There more than five million apps, songs, books, games and videos that can be accessed using a number of devices like smartphones, tablets, PCs as well as eBook readers, harbored in the Appitalism library. Under the umbrella of the deal, Huawei will have access, in addition to the distribution rights to the Appitalism library.

According to Simon Buckingham, CEO of Mobile Streams, they are optimistic about Huawei’s partnering them in ensuring that their app catalogue is in the hands of Asia’s top mobile operator, poised for widespread distribution in the Middle East – a region which was not previously part of Mobile Streams’ network.

This is from wirelessfederation.com

There’s 10s of telco programs targeting developers. But they all lack commercial traction. Isn’t it about time for telcos to question their approach? Guest author Jose Valles argues for a ‘polarity change’ in the telco business model and discusses the need to rethink the telcos’ relationship with developers.

In life, we tend to take many things for granted; the Sun will rise and set every day and a compass will always point North. But we mustn’t forget that things do not, and in some cases should not, remain constant. The Earth’s magnetic poles are known to reverse their polarity every few hundred thousand years and then, the compass no longer points North, but South.

In business, we also need to question assumptions and remember that things do change. In the mobile industry, telcos (mobile network operators) have been around for over 20 years – many many generations in telco speak – but their relationship with developers has always been lukewarm at best ; telco APIs haven’t seen any significant take-up by developers.

What telcos need to do is to fundamentally question their assumptions about the software world and change their business model towards developers – in other words change the ‘polarity’ of their business model. Here’s why:

Some historical context

It is widely accepted that telcos desperately need developers; in today’s app economy, developers are a key source of innovation. If telcos want to capture value and innovation, they need to capture developer mindshare.

In the past 5 years, we have seen 10s of telco developer programs launch with different end-goals and flavours but with the same result: lack of commercial traction. Why have so many telco investments failed to see significant developer adoption? Failure is not such a bad thing, provided we can understand what went wrong and how we should fix it.
I would argue that most telco API programs have lacked two key ingredients; the lack of web mentality and a developer-centric business model.

The Web mentality

If you go to www.programmableweb.com, you can find thousands of APIs that allow developers to enhance their software and mobile apps with functionality coming from third party businesses. Functionality ranging from Google maps and eBay purchases to Tesco grocery lists, New York Times articles and pizza ordering can be accessed through cloud APIs. For a developer, this is an unprecedented source of content for their apps.
How do businesses like eBay, Tesco or NYT make it appealing to developers to use their APIs? How does the web world attract developers?
It’s the business model; in the web world APIs are often free (or freemium) so that developers don’t need to worry about upfront costs. It’s about ease-of-use; they’re also plug-and-play so that developers can experiment with functionality and see how it works. It’s also about adaptability; web businesses also adapt and change their APIs based on how developers use them.
That sounds easy. But what about telcos?

The telco mentality: the developer pays

If you go to any of the telco API programs that are out there and check their SMS API specifications, the first thing you will come across is the PRICE LIST.

Well, that may work if you have a strong developer brand or if the attractiveness of your APIs are top-notch but, honestly, that’s not the case with telcos. Developers dislike telcos – and I can say that working for a telco.
We telcos don’t have a good reputation in the developer space. And what do we telcos do? We charge developers!
That’s not a developer proposition; it’s a wholesale mentality. And how do telcos think we are going to be able to compete in this space when much more agile voice application platforms like Twilio, Teleku, Jaduka or Vivox get fremium pricing and technology right?

The business model polarity change

If telcos are to grab developer attention, we need to see developers not as wholesalers – that is not a source of revenue but as the missing link between customers and telco services. When developers drive traffic or service usage we need not charge them, we need to thank them. And we need to charge not developers but end customers. We need to let developers focus on finding new ways to innovate with apps using telco capacities, not to worry about whether they have enough cash flow.

In other words, we telcos need to change our business model polarity; rather than using a “developer-pays” model, we need to move to a “customer-pays” model. If developers create apps that use telco APIs, they drive traffic or usage which benefit both the user and the telco. It’s not the developer that needs to pay – it’s the user.

Consider this; a developer builds an SMS-to-Twitter service; the user sends a new tweet by as a text to a shortcode. The reply, an SMS back to the user, is then paid by the developer. The developer is penalised for generating traffic to the network. This is the “developer pays” model and it doesn’t work.

In the “consumer pays” model, a single API allows the user to pay for both outgoing and return SMSes in one shot and the developer gets to use the API for free. The developer can focus on building a viral service and won’t have to worry about success costs.

This is a fundamental polarity change; instead of the developer paying for access to network resources, the consumer pays, and the network benefits from increased messaging revenues.
APIs like SMS or voice can also be exposed under both polarities. In this case, the developer can choose if they want to use SMS or voice APIs in a developer-pays or customer-pays polarity, depending on the nature of their app or service.
Winning with developers

We telcos need to experiment with business models. We need to learn from how developers adopt and use APIs and pivot our business model until we get to a proposition that’s truly win-win for both developers and telcos.
As the Earth’s magnetic poles shift naturally, telcos also need to question assumptions. We need to reverse the business model polarity for telco APIs in tune with the web and look for new ways to attract developer talent and new ways to satisfy customer needs. We need to fundamentally change the developer perception towards telcos if we are to succeed in helping telcos capture a share of the innovation out there.

Jose Valles (Head of BlueVia)

More App Store Economics

I have been exploring the reality of smartphone apps as a business. There is no question that we consumers love to download apps, in particular free apps. But is there business in it. I did the first major study of the economics of smartphone apps on this blog, which focused on the futility of the paid apps, as soon as we had enough data to be able to deo it. That blog has been widely referenced as a landmark study to expose some myths in smartphone apps.

However, we did not have the data yet on the advertising side. Perhaps there is real money in the advertising in smartphone apps. I am on the look-out for metrics and stats. And I can report now on a particular case study of an early super-hit of the smartphone free apps space in gaming. In fact the game that earned Apple’s awars for the best free iPhone game of 2009. This is the case study of advertising on Smartphone Apps: How much ad money out of 10 Million game downloads?

This is the busy time in consulting and speaking and I rapidly collect a vast library of new lessons learned and interesting stories to share. This was something quite extraordinary we learned when I was presenting in Helsinki at the excellent Mobile Developer Camp a few weeks ago, in late February. I want to share with you a stunning case study of the effectiveness and the revenues of in-game advertising on smartphone apps.

10 MILLION DOWNLOADS

10 Million Downloads

Finnish game developer Elias Pietila is the founder of Qvik and he developed the incredibly successful “Wooden Labyrinth 3D” game for which he won the game design award from Apple’s iPhone App Store in 2009. The game is now on all other major platforms as well, like Android and Ovi, and has achieved over 10 million total downloads. The game is free and is highly rated and popular.

Elias spoke at the Mobile Developer Camp and gave very candid numbers and facts, about how they were able to monetize the game, through advertising. I think this speaks volumes about the overall opportunity of advertising in smartphone apps – or the lack thereof.

So Qvik had that rare beast, a chart-topping game on the Apple iPhone App Store. They were achieving millions of downloads. But the game was free. So how to monetize that? Advertising sounded like a good idea. So for 2010 Qvik launched in-game advertising. Now we have the numbers. How did it go?

108 MILLION ADS SERVED

Well, for ads served, out of the total user base of 10 million Wooden Labyrinth 3D game users, they served a total of 108 million ads. Almost 11 ads served per game player on average. Looks good so far.

What of the gamers, did they like the ads? Did they click on the ads? Here is where in-game advertising gets tricky – it is intrusive to the gaming experience. But yes, Elias shared with us the total number of clicks. 1.1 Million. Yes. 1 percent click-through rate! Only. Only one percent. For all that interruption of the gaming experience it would mean 99 ignored ads, for every one actually clicked upon. And Qvik was only paid for those ads that had click-through.

So right from the start – while in-game advertising is fresh and new and ‘novel’ – and may have novelty value – the performance is so poor it is nearly as bad as internet web banner ads. Worse than search word ads. I think we already have learned a very valuable lesson here. If all those millions of game developers enable in-game advertising, we will see monsterous amounts of ads ‘served’ while extremely few are actually achieving anything we could possibly consider ‘interactivity’ or ‘engagement’ or anything meaningful in terms of digital advertising platform success. As this is a case study, we have to monitor these facts and see, but this kind of bombardment of audiences can explain why the numbers of mobile ads exploded last year by all the major ad networks like Admob etc.

30,000 DOLLARS IN TOTAL AD REVENUE

But what of Qvik and its revenues? Now the painful part. Out of 108 million ads served, Qvik earned a total massive income of… 24,000 Euros (about 30,000 US dollars). So in terms of ads served, Qvik’s income was zero point zero two cents per ad. 0.02 cents. Not 0.02 Euros, 0.0002 Euros per ad served! Over 100 million ads sent, 30,000 US dollars earned. That is an awefully lot of pain, for an awefully little amount of gain. Yes, for a game developer who had a free game, it is ‘better than nothing’ but only barely so. Remember this income arrives years after the game is developed and launched, only if it achieves the millions-of-downloads level of exceptional game success..

If we calculate it across the total number of Wooden Labyrinth 3D games downloaded, Qvik has earned a “massive” 0.24 Euro cents (0.3 US cents) per game download. One quarter of one Euro cent, or almost one third of one US cent, per downloaded game. Thats your business case right there.

So lets take a lesson out of this. Last year Supercollider blog did the analysis of ‘average’ and ‘median’ for app downloads including free apps. This math is skewed very heavily by the few hits like Angry Birds, Bewelled 2 and Wooden Labyrinth 3D who score in the millions. So while the average downloads is 25,000 that is not the median. In fact, Supercollider reported that 54% of all apps receive less than 1,000 downloads.

WHAT OF REAL WORLD IF YOUR APP IS NOT HIT

If you are lucky to be better than half, and you achieve 1,000 total downloads of your cool free game – you are ahead of the curve! You are a ‘success’ while modest one. You are better than the half-point. And now, if you achieve 30 US cents per download through your in-game advertising, the ad revenue you can hope to achieve is If your game reaches modest levels of ‘success’ and you monetize that, and if you are as successful at it, as the highly popular game Wooden Labyrinth 3D was back in 2010, then you would be lucky to earn… 3 US dollars out of in-game advertising.

Remember – half of all apps created get less downloads than that. And if advertising is your model, you could earn 3 dollars per year. If your game was developed at the very bottom range of what is reported (top end being about 50,000 US dollars, typical costs reported in the 25,000-35,000 dollar range, the very bottom at 12,000 dollars per smartphone app) – so if you developed the game very cheaply, it cost you only 12,000 dollars, and you made no updates to it during its lifespan, and you achieved the 54th percentile downloads (1,000 downloads) and you monetized that through in-game ads, you would break even in… 4,000 years. I think we need some developments in human life-spans to be able to enjoy the fruits of our labor, if this is the method..

EARLY METRICS

So the metrics out of this early case study. In-game advertising for exceptionally successful multi-million download free game in smartphone apps – for all in-game ads served, you might get 1% click-through rates. For all ads served, you might get 0.02 cents – 0.0002 Euros/Dollars – per ad. And if measured by game downloads, you might earn a massive 0.3 US cents per game downloaded – or to put it in another way, you need 300 game downloads to earn one dollar. For advertisers, this is a horribly bad ‘copy’ of the failing banner ad concept from the internet. For the free app developers, the reality of advertising is exposing yet another aspect of this as a myth. There is no magical eldorado (currently) in smartphone apps. Not by paid apps, not by advertising either. It may become a relevant market opportunity in the future; it is not so today.

Thank you Elias for excellent insights out of your great success as a game developer, and modest success as a smartphone app game entrepreneour.

Further reading. If you are involved in the smartphone apps space, and have not read it, please take the time to read the analysis of smarpthone app economics. The blog is from last year and I will eventually do a total rewrite and update of it, but the logic is 100% sound and no new facts have emerged to discredit any major conclusion of that landmark blog. And if you are from the advertising side, please consider this blog article about mobile marketing (beyond smarpthone apps) and where response rates of 25%-45% are the norm, if done the ‘right way’ using the most advanced methods today. Yes, you can have great mobile advertising but today, that is not via free smartphone apps.

And if you want to read a real book on the mobile industry including a chapter on the smartphone apps space, my 10th book is the only one of my 11 books that is totally free, you can download it now from Lulu. It is called the Insider’s Guide to Mobile and runs 350 pages. It even has a foreword by the CEO of today’s hottest topic and company in mobile, Raimo van der Klein who runs Layar the Augmented Reality company. Download the unrestricted pdf file at this link from Lulu: Tomi Ahonen Insider’s Guide to Mobile.

This article is from Communities-dominate.blogs.com

FotoTranslate is available in multiple language packages which can be purchased independently.

The application requires Symbian OS S60 3rd Edition, 5th Edition.

You may contact us to get Free Serial Numbers to check the trial version.

For more information : http://www.abbyy.com/fototranslate/