Tag Archive for 'iPhone'

Can Facebook Save Microsoft?

Published
by
Ainsworth Boyle
on July 28, 2008
in Trends & Research
. 0 Comments

Steve Ballmer is in an interesting situation. This past week he’s had to address tough challenges with two of Microsoft’s biggest competitors: Apple and Google. Translation: mobile, search, and advertising.

In his most recent letter to employees, Ballmer specifically addressed Apple, Yahoo!, and Google. As many know, Ballmer has pretty much called it quits on their bid for Yahoo!. In the meantime, Apple has continued to grab chunks of the PC market, and the iPhone is dominating the smartphone world.

Ballmer has announced Microsoft’s intent to spend a lot of money acquiring companies to heal their search engine wounds several times. So far they’ve acted, investing $240 million into Facebook (Oct. 2007), and there are reports that the relationship is becoming even closer. This isn’t a bad move from Microsoft. They can’t seem to buy their way back into the search engine ranks just yet, and they need to find exposure for their ad network.

But I wonder: is Microsoft really getting the most out of their relationship with Facebook? Most of what Ballmer has talked about has been purchasing to compete with Google, instead of researching and redesigning. It reminds me of the Intuit vs. Microsoft story (see: Inside Intuit). Back when Intuit was first designing Quicken, they beat Microsoft by effectively researching the target demographic and designing a product to meet their needs. In contrast, Microsoft approached the issue by designing Microsoft Money the way they felt software should work. In the end, Microsoft’s extremely high marketing budget would fail to get Money to consumers, and Intuit’s better designed product won out. For me, that story has been a big lesson: understand who you are designing your product for.

Apple and Google have succeeded by understanding the needs of their audience. The iPhone OS is more intuitive and stable than Windows Mobile, and Google search actually pulls up legitimate results. Microsoft needs to spend more time looking at their audience and designing their product appropriately. They actually did very well with the XBox; it’s not a surprise this was designed through a separate product development process.

Facebook can be a saving grace for Microsoft, but not in the way they seem to be working right now. Instead, Microsoft needs to take full advantage of its exposure to 70+ million web consumers and allow them to influence their next product. The information age has changed, no longer can Microsoft be the second or third mover and expect to succeed by throwing more money at the problem.

- Ainsworth

MobileMe: Re-Launching the iPhone vs. BlackBerry Debate

Published
by
Ainsworth Boyle
on July 16, 2008
in Industry News
. 1 Comment

When Phil Schiller first introduced MobileMe at WWDC he likened it to “push for the rest of us.” Now that the iPhone supports Exchange, and MobileMe offers a consumer-level solution, the debate of iPhone vs. BlackBerry is back. Many of the complaints I had heard were related to the lackluster e-mail service always loading, and the inability to easily manage junk mail.

MobileMe, the 3G service, and the iPhone 2.0 OS resolves these issues and more. During the first introductory days of the MobileMe service, “Push” was choppy and delayed by several minutes. By the end of the weekend, I was able to erase and re-sync/Push my contacts, calendar, e-mail, and bookmarks. Monday morning, I made a couple of changes using iCal and Address Book and the changes were at my iPhone just a minute later.

But, even before this feature, the largest complaint was not calendar or contact syncing; it was e-mail. If you’re wondering if Apple resolved the junk filter issue, you’ll still be disappointed. They have, however, made a small step by allowing users to easily delete multiple e-mails. The 3G network and Push e-mail have made e-mail faster, with no “loading…” screen, which was an irritating feature of Apple’s “fetch” solution. It’s not perfect yet; I hit a terminal “loading…” screen when I dropped service while opening an e-mail. Compared to iPhone 1.x, it’s night and day.

With Apple on the path to creating a MobileMe service that ousts BlackBerry’s Push service, what more is there left to compare? Keyboard? OS?

With the rumors of BlackBerry’s touch screen Thunder device, it’s even more of a debate of operating systems, and I don’t think BlackBerry is suited for an OS war.

- Ainsworth

See Also:
MobileMe on Wikipedia

My Experience at the 3G iPhone Launch

Published
by
Ainsworth Boyle
on July 11, 2008
in Industry News
. 0 Comments

Last year I made it to the initial iPhone launch. I arrived at a small AT&T store, on Linton Blvd, in Boca Raton, FL, six hours early. I was one of the first 20 people in line and just after 7:30PM I walked out of the store with one of the first iPhones.

This week, I’m on vacation in New York City. Late last night I debated making the trip over to the legendary 5th Avenue Store - I was at that store’s grand opening - but I decided a local AT&T store might be the better bet - I should have remembered AT&T stores sold out last year and Apple stores did not.

This years launch was 8:00AM; I strolled up to AT&T 86th and 3rd street store in New York City at ~8:30. I was about 150 people deep, give or take the handful of people that “ran into friends who happened to be standing in line.”

As many of you know, the activation process was now set to be done on sight. That only worked for the first customer as both AT&T and iTunes (Apple) would crash by 8:15.

As I got to the front of the store, the countdown began: “We have no more 16GBs and only 10 8GBs. We are accepting direct fulfillment.”

At this point, I began running the number of line cutters through my head, realizing I was 11 from the front. No more announcements would come, yet I was invited into the store with the chain closing behind me.

5 minutes later my AT&T salesman was handed an iPhone 3G and told, “That’s the last one.” Alas, I was handed my new iPhone 3G and told that the remaining activation process would have to be done at home using iTunes.

Needless to say, the new phone is sexy… however, iTunes is still struggling through the activation process. Once I’m able to get through the set-up process I’ll be sure to add updates on the MobileMe experience; I know there are a few debates about it’s ability to dethrone BlackBerry.

- Ainsworth

The Gateway to Generation-Y

Published
by
Ainsworth Boyle
on June 12, 2008
in Trends & Research
. 0 Comments

I had been spending the past several weeks without an iPhone, and yesterday I felt a bit “out-of-touch.” I thought to myself: no one else was affected by my phone being stolen, and I’ve replaced it with a temporary standard-issue phone, so why the big deal? Then… my 3 year-old phone lit-up with my morning text message from IWantSandy. After painfully navigating through the interface I found my text message and wrote down my to-do list. That’s when I realized my phone wasn’t meant for email or text messaging.
Continue reading ‘The Gateway to Generation-Y’

How to Launch Your iPhone SDK Application

Published
by
Ainsworth Boyle
on June 9, 2008
in Inside 3Ci and Marketing
. 0 Comments

A new wave of the cell phone market has begun: the release of the iPhone SDK. While there has been a small market for mobile based applications, entirely new companies, some supported by KPCB’s $100 million iFund, will be spawned to produce iPhone supported applications. While the actual extent of this marketplace is still unclear, it still hits with the same sincerity that something is happening in the mobile world. I’d bet it’s unlike anything we’ve seen before.

Mobile marketing and mobile content distribution functions at a more powerful level than electronic newsletter subscriptions. Undoubtedly, electronic newsletter subscriptions are key to maintaining close access to former customers, current customers, and future customers. At the touch of a button, businesses can easily deliver news to the e-mail boxes of subscribers. Therefore, users are receiving their content when you need them to, and not when they stumble upon it, many weeks later - if ever.

The truth is, those were valuable, back when users were subscribed to a select few lists and were more open to mass e-mails. Now users are opting out of these newsletters or driving them to their junk box; this brings new value to the RSS feed, allowing users to have yet another method to cleanly manage information they wanted to read while sparing their inboxes. While, the RSS reader is still increasing in value, it does not hit the key point of business marketing: reliably pinging your audience at the crucial moment - the tipping point.

Don’t forget: the iPhone has SMS!
Continue reading ‘How to Launch Your iPhone SDK Application’

Mobile Marketing and Ideal Product Placement

Published
by
Ainsworth Boyle
on June 5, 2008
in Advertising
. 0 Comments

In every retail store… in every marketing medium… marketers pay a premium to hold the ideal spot.

On the retail shelves at your local Apple store, third-party companies pay top dollar to be at eye-level. On the big-demo iPods plastered across the Apple store walls, artists paid even more to have their album listed on the static iPod screen. And on the box of that lovely music device that will fill the stockings of the rampant content generation… yep… someone paid to be there too.

The plethora of on-pack marketing agreements don’t sit with just the big companies with retail space or pretty boxes designed in California. In fact, the heart of Business 2.0 revolves around target marketing. Catch the eyes and ears of your market and provide them with offers your database knows they want.

It’s no different than the billboards on the highway, or the sponsored Google Ads. Behind all these product placement strategies are studies that show: being in the line of sight of your target market will increase your sales. Of course, these studies were merely supporting the gut-instinct of an innovator years before.

Companies have scrambled to bid on the box of one of the 110 million iPods sold since its release - a box that barely makes it through the first 24 hours of unwrapping. This is all because that lovely album art complete with the artist’s name and current hit single will be in the direct line of sight when that box first enters the recipient’s hands.

Product placement… despite being about the right place at the right time… for a few seconds at best… is a proven science. Imagine having the control to dictate the right place and the right time.

No more analysis for the right street corner… in the right city… at the right time… with the right distributer.  Enter… right here… right now… on a device that no one can ignore: their cell phone.

Could there be a better place than in your consumers pocket… and a better time than right when you want it?

So while some companies are still pushing the same research dollars into the same variable-filled marketing channels, the new-age companies are experiencing viral growth like never before, because there is no better place than everywhere 250 million subscribers are, right when you need them.

The next medium of product placement has arrived… in your future consumers’ pockets.

- Ainsworth

7 Reasons WAP is Flawed

Published
by
Ainsworth Boyle
on April 25, 2008
in Trends & Research
. 6 Comments

I’ve had this sitting on a burner for a rainy day and Victor’s post on Mobile Marketing Watch was enough to bring it to the surface:

The prognosis on WAP (Wireless Application Protocol) hasn’t changed since the turn of the century. WAP technology had a premature introduction to the mobile phone as it came before the infrastructure and consumer interest supported it. The early complaints of WAP were closely related to those of the early internet, which left hope for WAP developers but, unlike the internet, WAP had to compete with a more complete sibling: the internet. In my mind, 7 key things pile in the barrel of WAP’s struggle:

7. Not Supported by All Major Carriers
WAP’s initial lax in the content delivery space was relieved by the WAP push. A WAP push allows content providers to deliver content to a mobile device using a WAP browser connection. In addition, the WAP push is a favorable alternative to MMS, a technology that is/was suffering from a lack of universal standards across the major carriers. But the major carriers have their own business to protect, so off-deck content delivery through WAP is not supported by all of the major carriers. This alone eliminates at least 30% of the mobile market. Imagine having a billboard that 1/3 of the motorists couldn’t read.

6. MMS is Next
Because MMS (Multimedia Messaging Service) is not a ubiquitous mobile offering, mobile ASPs have relied heavily on WAP to deliver their content. Since the carriers have agreed to MMS interoperability, that is going to change. MMS allows sending and receiving of graphics, video, and audio clips - most of the information sent through a WAP push. There is very little that needs to be changed for WAP interoperability, instead it is limited by the carriers’ business decisions to block off-deck WAP delivery. MMS interoperability is a step up from the limits of WAP, by allowing users to be billed directly through SMS without the additional pain of a WAP download. There is potential for one bill, one technology, interoperable delivery.

5. Billed by Data Usage
Consumers are already wary of the premium paid for direct mobile content such as ringtones. Most of the paid ringtone services are charging a minimum of $0.99 p/ ringtone, which is the price of a full mp3 from iTunes. Consumers are still downloading ringtones despite the premium charge, however, many consumers are shocked to see WAP data charges on top of their premium sms charge. This will leave many consumers frustrated until unlimited data plans become more of the norm. People dislike being billed twice for the same content.
Continue reading ‘7 Reasons WAP is Flawed’