Mobile TV: It Will Be Successful, It Will Be Important

By Alan Reiter

You can analyze as many focus groups and create as many graphs and charts as you want, but much of the world will be watching mobile television — regardless of whether it’s even called by that name.

Mobile TV is one of the most controversial applications in the wireless world, and there are lots of naysayers castigating the concept and handwringers moaning about the problems.

Well, get over it.

It’s not only going to be successful, but it’s also going to be important to society.

We want it
Why will mobile TV be successful?

Major overarching concept: Human beings like to watch images that move and are accompanied by sound. We watch “moving pictures” to have fun, to learn, and also just to waste time.

But the bottom line is: We want to watch.

Preconceived notions
“But watching TV on my phone is a terrible experience,” you might say.

Were you the same person who said: “Why do I need a cordless phone at home? I have extension phones!”

Perhaps you said: “Why would I ever want a cellular phone? It’s too expensive, too big, and I don’t want to be reached all the time.”

Did you ever say: “Listen to music and wear headphones — in public? Are you crazy?”

It’s not a particularly good idea to bet against telecommunications progress and the ability of humans to change their preconceived notions when technology becomes good enough.

You want a bigger screen? A higher resolution screen? More RAM or a memory card? Faster streaming?

You got it. Phones that provide great — or, certainly, “good enough” — viewing experiences already exist. And more are on the way. And they will get cheaper.

You can bet on it.

Success vs. importance
Television networks and independent producers around the world are rushing to provide mobile TV fare — everything from full-length movies and programs to 30-second video clips.

Mobile TV likely will be successful because hundreds of millions of people will enjoy watching the typical execrable slop that’s available on “regular” cable and broadcast television.

Or, it will be successful because hundreds of millions of people will enjoy watching the typical execrable slop that’s available on YouTube Inc. and similar user-created video content.

And, of course, there are the people who enjoy watching sports. But the less said about that, the better.

But that’s not why it’s important.

So, why?
1) Mobile TV can provide live news of major events. People aren’t always in front of a TV or computer.

2) Mobile TV will help bring information to people around the world who might not have a computer or even a TV, but have a phone capable of viewing videos.

3) Mobile TV will expand to include “citizen broadcasters.” This is not about watching Diet Coke erupt when Mentos are dropped into it or watching a squirrel that water skis — not that these aren’t fun “user-generated content.”

Citizen broadcasters are ordinary people shooting videos of compelling and important events — whether they’re natural disasters or political crackdowns that affect hundreds of thousands of people or local activities that affect only a handful of people.

Worldwide ramifications
We’ve already seen the ramifications of the camera phone videos of Saddam Hussein’s hanging, the racist rant of comedian/actor Michael Richards, and, most recently, the Myanmar demonstrations. This is just the beginning of citizen broadcasting.

Call it mobile TV. Call it mobile video. Make up another name for the phenomenon. But about one billion people can take camera phone photos and a sizable percentage of those phones can shoot videos.

And camera phone video quality is getting significantly better.

Some camera phones can shoot video at 30 frames per second (fps). A few phones offer optical zoom. LG’s new five megapixel camera phone, the Viewty, can shoot videos at an amazing 120 fps.

Global wireless imaging revolution
Mobile TV is part of one of the most revolutionary technologies/applications I’ve seen in my 29 years of wireless analysis. It’s part of “wireless imaging” — the ability of a significant percentage of the human race to be able to document in photos and videos virtually anything that occurs around them and to quickly transmit those images across the street or around the world.

Wireless imaging is an international ecosystem that comprises everything from Fortune 500 (Fortune 5, actually) companies in the multibillion-dollar broadcasting and photography industries to the multibillion-dollar wireless communications industry to a lone individual with a modest camera phone shooting a grainy video that will rock the world.

Regardless of what it’s called, mobile TV will be successful, and it will make a difference in our lives.

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Influential Customers Think User Reviews are Planted

By

According to a new study, some of the most influential consumers believe companies are guilty of manipulating reviews through other means, as well.

PR firm Burson-Marsteller surveyed 1,000 influential consumers and found that an increasing number of them believe fake reviews and positive comments left by corporations are prevalent and problematic. The study revealed that 30 percent of consumers are concerned, up from 20 percent in 2001. Fifty-seven percent said they’d be less likely to buy a product if they suspected the company paid someone to leave a positive review.

Marketers depend on “e-fluentials” — people who influence their social network’s purchasing habits and decisions — to interest others in their product. But most of these people aren’t on board with the whole compensation-for-recommendation idea. That doesn’t mean they don’t want to use their influence; they just have other motivations — such as an honest interest in offering helpful information.

Ame Wadler, chief strategic officer at Burson, says companies can feel free to leave reviews, so long as they do so honestly:

“There’s no rocket science here: transparency matters. Those entities that are the most transparent and say, ‘It’s us and we’re proud of what we’re saying,’ do far better than those organizations that don’t reveal themselves.”

Even With Web 2.0, Businesses Are Stuck at Enterprise 1.5

By David Weinberger

As you’ve probably heard, the Web progressed to version 2.0 a couple of years ago. It’s about time, too, especially since for many of us, our maintenance contracts with the Web were about to run out, and we didn’t want to have to pay for the upgrade to the new version. Fortunately, the new release of the Web went smoothly. We downloaded the new software, followed the upgrade instructions (did you remember to download the new drivers first?), and were up and running with our brand new Web version within days.

The only problem is that, while the Web may have progressed to 2.0, businesses are stuck at 1.5, at best. As they try to grab hold of the bubble, businesses are finding they’re weighted down. Not by extraneous baggage they could jettison, but by core principles of organization and operation.

Take an easy part of Web 2.0: User participation via blogging. For now, we’ll ignore that the Web has been about user participation from its very beginning. There’s no question that blogging has made it easier than ever for people to join the global conversation. There’s obviously no technical reason why a corporation couldn’t start up its own blogs, and many have. But so often corporate blogs are the worst sort of marketing: marketing pretending that it isn’t marketing.

If you wanted to build an environment in which blogging would be tempted to betray its values, you’d build a modern corporation. Marketing has trained companies to speak in safe platitudes. Legal has warned companies not to let anyone speak without permission. Executives have let themselves believe that they got where they are because they’re oh so fascinating. It’s a miracle there are any good corporate blogs at all.

Or take mashups, the poster children of Web 2.0. Sure, companies may use other people’s data to enhance their own, and if a page isn’t busily rebuilding itself through the magic of AJAX, then it definitely hasn’t drunk the Web 2.0 juice. The real question is whether a company will let others use its data. We’ve told companies for a generation now that information is their second most important asset. But, in the 2.0 world, information is free to roam, mate, and produce unexpected offspring. Most companies aren’t ready to go that far, so they point to how they’ve mashed up their store locations with Google Maps, and declare Web 2.0 victory.

It’s not easy. I know a company that is about to do some deals to aggregate a particular class of information. I’m not allowed to give away details, so let’s pretend it’s information about auto repairs. (It’s not.) There are several coalitions proposing standards in this area, all aiming at openness. This company doesn’t want to play. They have an opportunity to become the dominate source for auto repair info, and they don’t want to give up their control over the standard they may be in a position to establish as the de facto winner.

I think it’s short-sighted of them for good business reasons. Because an open standard would encourage innovation and competition, the market will eventually (probably) push for it and thus push away from this company’s proprietary standard. I’ve lost this argument, though, because the company looks at the shorter-term future and sees lots of advantages. Immediate gain in the 1.5 world weighs quite heavily against long-term benefit in the 2.0 world.

The fact that companies are stalled at Enterprise 1.5 isn’t due to a simple failing, as if they’re just not as smart as the Web 2.0 hackers. Web 2.0 sharpens the challenge Web 1.0 posed to our traditional ways of doing business. The change is deep and real. We should expect business to lag, and some businesses to be left behind entirely.

Source: Information week

Social Site Rankings (September, 2007)

Did you know that Imeem is the fastest-growing social site in the U.S (up 1,590 percent in monthly uniques). And that AIM Pages is growing slightly faster than Digg (345 percent growth versus 323 percent)? Well, at least according to comScore.

comScore has done a ranking of social sites in the States and in the U.S. and then Erick Schonfeld of TechCrunch has reordered the list by growth rate. Here it is:

MySpace is still growing at a healthy 23 percent, despite its size. But Facebook is coming on fast, with 129 percent growth. Notice also the strong showing by Bebo (growing 83 percent) versus the lackluster U.S. growth of Hi5 (3 percent) and the decline of Xanga (negative 55 percent).

In blogging platforms, Blogger is beating Six Apart on both absolute numbers (32 million visitors versus 13 million) and growth (55 percent versus 44 percent). In the doldrums territory, you’ve got Windows Live Spaces (with a one percent decline) and Yahoo Groups (four percent decline). And in the you-ought-to-seriously-think-of-shutting-this-down territory, there is Lycos Tripod (23 percent decline), MSN Groups (36 percent decline), and Yahoo 360.

Here is a more comprehensive list of social sites ranked by total number of visitors. It includes sites where comScore could not calculate a growth rate because it did not have enough data for September, 2006. Some sites that stand out on this list, having come out of nowhere in the past year, include WordPress.com (with 11.9 million monthly visitors), Freewebs (with 6.6 million), BuzzNet (with 4.4 million),and Kaboodle (with 2.5 million). (Update: Also, you will notice that Google’s social networking site Orkut isn’t even on the list. That is because while it had 24.6 million visitors worldwide in September, 2007, Orkut only attracted 503,000 visitors in the U.S.).

Source:

Peer Networks Like Sermo Point Ways to Profit from Knowledge

We can categorize social networks into two extremes: monoliths like Facebook that seek to be everything to everybody, contrasted with networks built by companies like Dow Chemical Co. and KPMG that interest mostly their current (and possibly former) employees.

Even as Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg continues to imply that Facebook is worth every bit of its $15 billion valuation, he offers few guideposts for its long-term business plans, reports the Times Online from the recent Web 2.o Conference in San Francisco. After Facebook creates a model of what he calls “the social graph,” Zuckerberg says, “… then we can expose those people to a set of applications which will enable them to share their information more effectively.”

Fair enough. We have little doubt that Facebook will do some very interesting things in the future. But we were intrigued by the emergence of a network for physicians called Sermo.

Some 30,000 doctors use the network to discuss diagnoses and treatments with their peers. Sermo and similar networks such as INmobile.org, which serves executives of wireless companies, appear to stake out a patch of middle ground between Facebook and specialized corporate networks. They are broader than company networks yet far narrower in scope than Facebook (or even LinkedIn), with their ready-made “social graphs” for folks who share professional interests.

Not only that, but they offer more readily apparent business models than Facebook and MySpace. As detailed in a Wall Street Journal article, while membership in INMobile.org is free, members must pay to list their promotions and ads in a “marketplace” section.

Sermo is even more interesting. While its members don’t pay, outsiders like hedge funds — which are interested in tracking doctors’ feedback on topics like new drugs or other treatments — do. It just announced a partnership with pharmaceutical giant Pfizer which is designed to facilitate online collaboration between Pfizer and its members. (While financial details aren’t discussed in a press release, we assume Pfizer pays something for this access.)

While this puts Sermo in the somewhat uneasy position of protecting the interests of both its members and of corporate partners like Pfizer, it is creating a new model in which, says Carr, a network operator can sell “not the eyeballs of its members but their ideas, observations, and conversations.”

Obviously key to this model is avoiding the kind of incidents that have dogged Wikipedia, whose contributors sometimes lie about their credentials. But this is the beauty of a not entirely “open” network, especially one in which members can wreck their careers by not being truthful.

Assuming professional networks can find a reliable and unobtrusive way of vetting their members, we expect to see more of them. If nothing else, we’ll expect many trade associations to beef up their online collaborative capabilities.