Mark Kolier’s Blog

Posts Tagged ‘iphone’

It is said that revolutions happen one moment at a time. Steve Jobs and Apple Inc. have been consistently gone against the grain and in so doing created a company and I daresay even a movement counterculture based on the Apple platform. In today’s Wall Street Journal ‘Apple wins Ground in Fight Over Flash’ http://bit.ly/c1vyvU , the hissy fight with Adobe and its Flash technology is highlighted.

I am a big believer in breaking the mold and trying to do things a different way. The iMac was a different approach to personal computing. The iPhone is widely considered to be even more ‘revolutionary’ (despite the lousy phone service) when Apple unveiled the device in 2007. And the iPad may well turn out to be the gateway to a future in how people consume content (a very overused term BTW).

Yet I have difficulty in understanding how Mr. Jobs’ seemingly personal war on Flash will help make things better for consumers – and make no bones about it, Mr. Jobs likes to think of himself as the leader of a movement to make things better.

The alternative that Apple is suggesting is HTML5 programming which according to some is several years away from broad adoption. Since 75% of online video uses Flash (which has the ability to secure and track videos) not having flash on the iPhone or iPad is very limiting and from what I have heard very annoying.
The article also notes that analysts estimate that only 5% of Adobe’s revenue is directly tied to Flash. So it’s not as if the (should Steve Jobs has his way) possible crash of Flash would destroy Adobe. It seems to me that Apple is trying to protect its turf. That’s not the way that I (or many people) have perceived Apple as a company and it may be an indication that Apple has gone from an upstart anti-establishment company to being an ‘establishment’ company.

I suspect that people that work for Apple like working there, and like working for Mr. Jobs thinking that at Apple you are not working for ‘the man’. Those same people then will be disappointed when they figure out that they have might have been working for ‘the man’ all along.

Good Apple or Bad Apple? Or both? What say you?

I heard a radio spot yesterday from Barracuda Networks. Their offer is to help companies make their workers more productive by blocking/firewalling them from websites and social networks that (as the ad infers) detract from employee productivity and company profits. Their ‘solution’ is to have companies employ their product as a step on the road to productivity. It’s a blatant scare tactic and the barracuda is a pretty scary looking fish after all.

It’s nearly a certainty that there are some business owners and/or managers that will consider this approach as a salve for some of their business problems. I’m not one of them in any way. Walling off employee access to certain websites and social networking is simply a terrible idea.

The idea of restricting access during the workday in order to ‘get people back to work’ will quite possibly have the opposite effect. Pretty soon companies that take that tack will ask employees to leave their mobile devices at the door when they come to work. After all many people now can adroitly access the web and social networks from their iPhone or other smart phone. Take away the websites and social media check-ins and employees will spend more time trying to find a way around it. So exactly how will that approach make things better?

Companies that restrict internet access are telling their employees – ‘We don’t trust you’. “We don’t respect your ability to make appropriate choices on how you spend your time during the work day.” And what kind of bright young minds would be interested in joining a company that approaches its business in that manner?

I’m not so naïve that I think employees always act in the most productive manner every minute of the work day. But is that really the goal of an employer? No I don’t wish that members of our team spend 3 hours a day on Facebook, LinkedIn or looking for a job on Monster or Career Builder, (apparently we had one that did that while here). But I ask those companies that think restricted access is a good idea – do your employees receive and respond to emails before and after the workday? On weekends? For many companies including ours the answer is an unequivocal yes. Granted our company is a smaller one with less than 25 people. But even if we were the size of, oh say Microsoft or Wal-mart, would the restriction of access to the web create a better and more productive working environment?

My take is if you cannot count on having smart, motivated people on your team who know the difference between what is appropriate and what is not, then you have the wrong team in place. It can sometimes be the job of managers to teach employees the difference if they don’t know it already. But forbidding access and censoring sites sounds a bit China like to me.

I wouldn’t want to be a part of a company like that – would you?

Palm shares plunged this past Friday March 19^th to their lowest level in more than a year.  The Palm Pre Smartphone was to be the ‘killer app’ forecast to bring Palm back to relevancy.  In fact Palm noted in a article last week that the Pre Isn’t an Anything’ Killer.  I think many of us knew that.  Now the talk on the street is that Palm is positioned to be acquired.  What happened? 

When the Palm Pre was released in June of 2009 the buzz was almost universally positive and the subsequent reviews nearly as positive.  The removable battery was a distinct advantage over the iPhone and the interface seemingly easy to use and stable.   The phone was rated more than adequate and email and web access also was notably strong.  The lack of applications for it (as opposed to the iPhone) was and is a drawback but no device can hold a candle to the iPhone when it comes to apps.  Sprint was the exclusive carrier at first but Palm has opened itself up to other carriers like Verizon. 

There were other problems – touch screen and battery life to name two.  Sachin Agarwal commented on his experience in the Silicon Valley Insider last month – http://www.businessinsider.com/why-i-dumped-my-palm-pre-plus-after-a-month-2010-2. 

While I recognize the problems with Palm Pre, it still is a pretty cool device to use and this was what I heard from a new friend this past Saturday night.  He raved about the performance and ease of operation.  It’s small, slim and the pull-out keyboard is a definitive asset (compared to my BB Storm which seems gigantic next to it). 

Elevation Partners (led by U2’s Bono) is a primary investor in Palm – that likely falls under the umbrella of it seemed like a good idea at the time – but interesting that they had the same optimism as did I, (and many others) before the release.  There was a LOT of buzz prior to the release. And then very little noise, at least from the standpoint of marketing and advertising messages.   In fact the pre-launch campaign from Modernista was slammed, (the comment that they thought that Pre was a new brand of feminine deodorant speaks volumes) – http://www.engadget.com/2009/06/04/video-latest-palm-pre-ad-makes-poppies-seem-brutish/.  

Since then I cannot recall a Palm Pre offer being mailed, emailed, or promoted on Facebook or anywhere else for that matter.   Verizon ran a few television ads http://bit.ly/c9g6bP touting the simplicity of the operating system while at the same time alienating women by implying mom is too dumb to use a smart phone.  This would suggest that having the carrier distribute Palm’s advertising message might not have been the best idea ever either. 

It is important to keep in mind that Palm Inc. had fallen so far from public perception that an entire re-brand of Palm (much less the Pre itself) was necessary.  All of their problems can hardly be attributed to recent Palm Pre advertising campaigns.  What surprises me most is how an exciting and positive pre-launch buzz has unraveled into what appears to be an unmitigated disaster on all fronts. 

Does anybody out there love or hate their Palm Pre?  Anyone?   Hello?

A small article in today’s (December 10) NY Times – AT&T to Urge Customers to Use Less Wireless Data had me shaking my head.   Here is a link to the article – http://bit.ly/8IgbCg.    For those that do not know AT & T is the primary carrier for the Apple iPhone.    With nearly 100,000 iPhone apps and with a substantial number of all-inclusive data plans it’s no wonder that the network is fast becoming overloaded.  

They told us years ago that these days would come.   When we first installed cable modem service a number of years ago the fear was that as more people adopted cable modem service to access the internet the ‘stream’ would become exceedingly clogged thereby slowing down overall communication.    While I have not experienced more than one or two occasional slow-downs (apparently in our area we have some of the fastest service around), I fully expect that things could get worse before they get better. 

What I found to be the most interesting statistic in the article was that 3% of Apple iPhone data traffic accounts for 40% of AT & T’s wireless data transmissions.   So AT & T wireless is considering a pricing scheme that would ‘address the usage’.    So I interpret that as what iPhone users that are on unlimited data plans are getting now will soon have to pay more.    That strategy has been attempted (unsuccessfully) by frequent flyer programs and I suspect the same will be true of data plans.  The horse is out of the barn folks and people are accustomed to getting it for a low flat price.   Good luck with that. 

An AT & T spokesman emphasized that the company would first focus on educating consumers about their data consumption in the hope that doing so would encourage them to cut back, even though they are paying for unlimited data use.

“We’re going to try to focus on making sure we give incentives to those small percentages to either reduce or modify their usage, so they don’t crowd out the customers on those same cell sites,” he said.

How do you think that will go?    Companies are encouraging people to use their Smartphones to a greater extent but the provider is hoping people will use them less.   

So at this moment I am happy to be a Blackberry Storm customer since the Verizon network is notably superior to AT& T, (ask any iPhone user about the frustrations of making phone calls on their iPhone) and there are so few apps for the Storm (a feature I don’t like but I guess is some sort of weird benefit).   

Like Charlie Brown would say – ‘I can’t stand it’.   Or understand it.

In a report, titled “Mobile Devices Market Sizing and Share,” market research firm ABI says that more than 171 million smart phones were shipped in 2008 compared to 116 million shipped in 2007. The report says that smart phones accounted for 14 percent of all cell phones shipped in 2008. ABI noted that the sales are expected to grow 18% to 203 million 2009 as operators seek to sell lure users with aggressive strategies. Strategy Analytics estimates that smart phone shipments will total 177.2 million in 2009. Juniper Research forecasts that annual sales of smart phones will rise by some 95 percent to more than 300 million between now and 2013. The report says that by 2013 at least 23 percent of all new mobile phones will actually be smart phones.

OK so we all get it – smart phones are the future – and actually the present. But how many times have you tried to access a site on your smart phone and waited, and waited and waited for the pages to load? This is because the site you are accessing is not optimized for viewing on a mobile device.

100% of .mobi sites must be optimized for viewing on a mobile phone, the main advantage of .mobi, from the users’ perspective, is that they are theoretically guaranteed a site optimized for usage on the go. This means the website can be optimized for hard factors such as smaller screens, device form/size, device input/output options, existence of embedded sensors (acceleration, location, touch, etc.), as well as soft factors such as expectations of immediacy of results, context awareness under a shortened attention span (compared to home use of the Internet). Although a .com or any other extension can technically employ the same optimizations for mobile phones as .mobi sites, in practice, only a fraction of them are, thus necessitating content adaptation solutions.

3G transmission speeds are pretty fast, but nowhere near what people have become accustomed to when we use super fast 100MPS+ connections via cable or fiber optic networks. Personally when I have to wait more than, oh let’s say 2 seconds for a page to load I begin to get impatient and even a bit annoyed. (I bet I am far from alone here). .Mobi sites address this far better than any increase in transmission speed can – at this point. It won’t be long before smart phone transmission speed rivals that of cable and fiber optic wired connections –of course for me that day cannot come soon enough.

People will have to become more familiar with going to the .mobi sites but many sites when accessed on a smart phone give the option to go to a mobile version that is optimized. The experience and interfaces are so much better – check it out for yourself and let me know what you think.