Communities Dominate Brands

Are we naked with or without data?

Excerpt from No Straight Lines

Chapter Five: The big P and little p of transformation: once you have stormed the Bastille, you don’t go back to your day job

As the shape of our world evolves, we are also in political transformation, both in terms of the political relationship between the individual and commercial organisations and the large Politics of how we organise and run our societies. What should government look like in a non-linear world? Are we creating and running the right systems in the right way? How does data change/impact the process of democracy and civil organisation? Refined data is the black gold of the 21st Century.

Data, democracy and identity: Where to start on this particular part of the journey through our non-linear world? The first step must address the issue of data; who would have thought even in 2005, that consumer politics and societal politics would revolve around data, who has it, who owns it and how it is used, combined with the legal frameworks that protect us as citizens.

The recent events around Edward Snowden, Prism, Tempora and Boundless Informant, demonstrate what I meant. In a recent interview with Henry Jenkins I wrote in answer to his question on data:

Data is integral to what comes next, thinking from a perspective of openness and aesthetics of design in that only ugly thoughts bring to bear ugly realities. It may not at first seem a clear connection between data, individual sovereignty and democracy. However once we understand that at high level the commercial world seeks to influence and in some cases coerce political institutions then we have to see them as linked. Or indeed that political ideology seeks to direct the course of political outcomes as is the case in Pennsylvania at the moment and elsewhere where Republicans seeks to make it much harder for various sections of the African-American community to vote in the hope they weaken Obama’s chances of re-election.

In Britain there are attempts by the Government of the day to legislate so that they can access and extract comprehensive, fine-grained covert surveillance of entire populations. All our digital activity: voice, text, Google searches, a level of surveillance that is unprecedented and perhaps pernicious.

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(Posted by Tomi T Ahonen on behalf of Alan Moore)

Winners in the 'Guess Windows Phone Market Share in Q4 of 2012' contest from November 2011

Its time to see the winners in our online/Twitter contest. 15 months ago I ran a Twittercontest among my followers. Nokia was just about to launch its first Lumia smartphones to run Windows Phone, but Microsoft's Windows Phone market share by the other handset makers then supporting Windows Phone, was down to 1.0%. There were some pundits promising that by 2012 Windows would have over 13% to 17% market share, one bizarre forecast promised 28% for Windows Phone in 2012. So I started a Twittercontest. Lets go one year into the future, after Nokia has sold Lumia for a year and some weeks, and how strong can Windows Phone be. We set the target timing to be Q4 of 2012, just over one year into the future.

Then I made an unfortunate limitation to the contest, I decided that only one entry per market share number is allowed, on a first-come, first-served basis. This seemed like a sensible idea to me at the time, but I didn't anticipate how big the contest would become, I should have just allowed multiple guesses of the same number, it would have been more indicative of what people really felt. Now obviously for those who entered the race late, they would find their preferred number likely was taken, and they would have to go far smaller, or far higher, in their number to find the first percentage that was not yet taken. I set the accuracy to one tenth of one percent. You can see all entries here Crowdsourcing a Forecast through Twitter for Windows Phone.

We had over 150 entries, most of them (even after no duplicates were allowed) settled between 6% and 14% market share for Windows Phone for Q4, 2012. That was very mightly optimistic there, the reality was far more harsh for the Microsoftians. We have all four analyst houses (Gartner, IDC, Strategy Analytics and Canalys) reporting their total market sizes and three of the four (Canalys, IDC, Gartner) reporting a Windows Phone sales number for Q4. The highest Windows Phone sales number by the three was by Gartner, at 6.2 Million Windows based smartphones sold in Q4. The lowest total market size of the big four was also by Gartner, at only 207.6 Million total smartphones sold globally in Q4 of 2012. So the very ''best case' statistic you can hope to find, says Windows scored 2.99% market share, under half of the lower end of the popular guesses in our contest.

But thats not how we calculated the winner. We took the total market size as the average of the four (Gartner 207.6 million, IDC 219.4 million, Canalys 216.5 million and Strategy Analytics 217.0 million) and their average therefore for Q4 was 215.1 million total smartphones sold. And then as I wrote my final Q4 and end-of-year 2012 smartphone results blog, I took the then-published market share numbers for Windows - by that time it was only 2 of the 4 analyst houses who had given us that number, Canalys said 5.1 million for Windows, and Gartner said 6.2 million. The average of those two is 5.65 million. That in turns is 2.63% of 215.1 million smartphones sold. We have a winning score. Whoever said 2.6% is the winner, and the two nearest to it one above and one below, are the runners-up.

As it happens, we have exactly 2.6 million as an entry, by @simplyanand (sorry for having your handle wrong originally and in the contest entry) - who, get this, actually predicted the score to two decimal points, saying it will be... 2.63% !!!! Wow. I'd like to borrow your crystal ball @simplyanand some day if I may haha.. That is perfection !! And Simplyanand will of course win the grand prize of three of my ebooks of his/her choice.

By this result the two finalists are Jonathan MacDonald @jmacdonald who picked the next number down, at 2.1%, and Eldar Murtazin @eldarmurtazin who picked the next number up, at 2.7%. They both one ebook each.

And I was just about ready to publish this blog, when I saw that IDC was releasing a revised number for their Q4 total market size, AND they were releaseing a number for Windows Phone. Hold the horses...

IDC revised upwards their total number for smartphones sold in Q4 from 219.4 million to 227.8 million. And they gave us a Windows Phone number as well, at 6.0 million. The math is now adjusted just slightly, so that Windows Phone market share now becomes .. 2.655% ie rounded off to 2.7%. By merely one half of one tenth, of one percent, Eldar Murtazin's 2.7% prediction turns out the most accurate and Simplyanand's forecast is off by a tiny fraction.

Of course I have to award Eldar with the win, he was most accurate, now that all houses were in. But IDC issued two numbers. By their first number, and by the time all four houses had reported in, the most accurate was Simplyanand, so I am going to make a jury's decision, to award two winners, both Simplyanand and Eldar Murtazin will be winners in this contest and win the grand prize of three ebooks of their choice from my ebooks. And then still Jonathan MacDonald is a runner-up, and I will also award Steve D ie @starlo777 a runner-up award for picking the next number above Eldar's at 2.9%. The runners-up will get to pick one of my ebooks of their choice.

So congratulations to all the winners. I will contact you all via Twitter and we'll process the ebooks to you. And we have a new Twittercontest running now, guess when Nokia CEO Stephen Elop will be fired or leaves office. The entries to that contest have already closed, but I will have more Twittercontests coming from time to time for my followers so you may want to follow me on Twitter, where I am @tomiahonen.

Android Won. Windows Lost. Now what? The Battle of the Century is Decided. Microsoft relegated to ever smaller PC corner as Google conquers the world

Android Won. Windows Lost. Now what? We have passed the tipping point now, the balance has tipped and can't be flipped. The Platform of the Century will power cameras, credit cards, cellphones, computers, consoles, clocks - and collect consumer insights on our consumption.. Ok. The numbers for Q3 are in, inwhat I anticipated to be the "smartphone bloodbath" three years ago, that would last long into this new decade. That was then, when the battle was joined, and since have called and the battle of the century, the battle for the pocket, the battle for the platform to control the digital destiny of humanity.. that battle, the biggest race of all time - has been won. Already? But we barely got to know you? Yes.

Well, at one level, the platform level definitely, the winner is Google with Android. The future of computing, the future of the internet, the future of music, of gaming, of television, of newsmedia, of banking and credit cards and even cash itself. The platform that will be in our cars, soon in our clothes and eventually embedded within humans - all that will be owned and controlled by Google, as an evolution of what we now know 'only' as the smartphone platform, Android. Wow. So this is my first blog after Google achieved its victory, to examine these thoughts, what does that mean for humanity, for business and tech, for media and marketing and advertising.

THE ENVELOPE, PLEASE

So lets do the math first. What do I mean? Yes, now the margin of victory is beyond any dispute, Google's Android is currently selling so much more, in new digital devices, than any other open or closed platform in the world, that Google is the winner. Far far more than Xbox or Wii gaming consoles. Way more than other smartphone platforms like Blackberry or the iPhone even if you toss in all iPods and iPads into the mix. Even more than all Windows based devices currently sold from desktops to laptops to smartphones to tablets. Even the proprietary Nokia featurephone platfrom, S40, has now been passed by Android in selling more per quarter. Android powers 71% of all new smartphones sold. In Q3 they sold a staggering 121 million new units or 1.3 million new devices every single day, Saturdays and Sundays included. And Android keeps growing. Android grew sales 18% - not in a year, in just one quarter!. For the Christmas Quarter, Q4, expect total Android unit sales (including tablets) to easily pass 50 million - per MONTH. That rate is almost twice what all traditional PCs, desktops and laptops - the domain of Microsoft's past glory, Windows - manages to sell, and Windows does not power all PCs anymore, not even close.

The smartphone wars are the most heavily contested global industry of all time. More global giant Fortune 500 sized companies are in this race than in any other industry, ever. The world's largest consumer electronics company, Sony is in the game. The world's biggest basic cellphone maker, Nokia is in of course. The world's biggest technology company, Samsung is in. The largest computer manufacturer by one count, Lenovo, is in the race as a new entrant. And the world's largest computer manufacturer by the other count, Hewlett Packard was one of the pioneers of smartphones. The world's most profitable company got that way, by selling a smartphone we know and love as the iPhone. Just two short decades ago Apple the then-PC maker was on the brink of bankruptcy. The biggest mobile phone operator/carrier group, Vodafone sells some of its own-branded smartphones in some markets too. The world's largest software company, Microsoft is in the race on the software side, and is approaching the race on the hardware side too, already making its own tablet PC and is rumored to soon launch its own smartphone too. Almost any major tech or consumer electronics brand you can think of is in the smartphone races from Panasonic to Sharp, from Alcatel to LG, from Dell to Fujitsu, from Acer to Toshiba.

And then look at Android. Of the Top 10 largest smartphone manufacturers of the world, Android powers number 9. It powers number 8. And it powers number 6. And number 5, number 4, number 3 and number 1. Of the Top 10 biggest smartphone maker in the world, only three manufacturers do not supply Android based smartphones, and none of those other three use each others' operating systems either. This is sheer dominance. This is like Gulliver and the Lilliputs. Android is the only giant around with the tiny people.

NEXT MILESTONES

The Android world is so new, that their installed base is still 'modest' by mobile phone standards, altough they are already by far the biggest smartphone platform by installed base. At the end of Q3 there are 559 million Android powered smartphones in use, plus several dozen million more in tablets. In round terms, lets call it 600 million Android devices of any kind, in use. That is nearly twice what Apple has in the iOS ecosystem of iPhones, iPads and iPod Touch devices. It is about three times more than Nokia's shrinking Symbian ecosystem and five times bigger than RIM's Blackberry ecosystem of its smartphones and tablets.

But looking at the next milestones now in December 2012, in passing the next digital platform rivals, Android has still a way to go. The next rival is Microsoft's 1.25 Billion Windows devices in use, across personal computers, servers, tablets and smartphones. So yes, Android devices already sell twice the level of all Windows based devices, but Microsoft's installed base was built over three decades, Android has been arnoud barely more than one fifth that. So Android is selling more than Windows - and the gap is growing not shrinking - so when will Android pass Windows in installed base?

But that moment is coming sooner than you might believe. When will Google's Android power more digital devices in use than all Microsoft Windows gadgets, combined? This time next year! When the data comes in for Q3, 2013, Android will have a larger total ecosystem of devices in use powered by that operating system, than all Windows devices globally in use. Yes, this includes best case for Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8. We have seen the emperor fall. Watch this moment, it is rare for us to witness such a giant fall as what used to be Microsoft in the tech space. Its fall has started, it is now accelerating, and the CEO in charge, Steve Ballmer, is clearly struggling to keep his faculties and is acting ever more erratically, trying to keep the pieces together.

Then. Just one quarter later, by the end of next year, 2013, there will be more simply Android-powered smartphones alone, forget the tablets and other devices, than all Microsoft powered Windows based devices in use, across all Windows versions. Wow. That is fast. No wonder Microsoft is panicking about how their smartphone strategy imploded with Nokia. Yes, the era of Microsoft powering most computing devices is ending - next year. Some of us thought we'd never live to see that day haha.. Windows will be relegated to only being a desktop based obsolescent computing platform, eventually thought of in a similar way as we might think of Cobol, Fortran and Pascal on mainframe computers today. (hey, don't laugh, I learned to program that way in 1983!)

MOST WIDELY USED TECHNOLOGY BRAND OF PLANET


Then by the first quarter of 2014 - only 16 months from now - Google's last historic rival will be overcome, the peak of human adoption of any one digital technology brand - Nokia's peak global adoption level when it was in the pockets of 20% of the planet about a year ago. Yes, by Q1 of 2014 Google will be used by more than one in five humans and their global device installed base will be past 1.5 Billion globally.

And that won't be the end, by this time year 2014, Google's Android will power literally half of all mobile phone handsets sold - when about two out of every three new handsets sold will be a smartphone, and most of those will be Androids. And then by Q4 of 2014, Android will reach another incredible milestone, it will be (mathematically) in the pockets of one out of every four humans alive. Yes, Android's market share of humankind will be 26% by Q4 of 2014. That is a mathematical calculated average, in reality, many of us will have several Android gadgets like two smartphones and a tablet, and thus the real reach of Android won't be one quarter of humanity, but it will be unprecedented nonetheless and enormous.

Android will breach the rarefied Billion user club in just six months from today, by June of 2013. A Billion users? Only a handful of brands have ever reached that lofty level. Facebook, Skype, Windows, Nokia, Coca Cola, Visa and Mastercard. And by 2015 Android will join the truly exclusive club of 2 Billion users, doubling that club's size from 1 to 2, joining Visa, which just this year hit the 2 Billion active Visa credit card level. It took the Visa brand 32 years to hit 2 Billion cards in use. Google will achieve that level with Android in 7 years from launch in 2008. And the frightening part? Google will breach the 3 Billion user level in only .. one further year! Yes by the end of 2016 Android will be in the exclusive altitude of 3 Billion concurrent active devices in use of the technology and the Google brand.

No wonder Visa is already saying the future of payments is mobile money, on mobile phones. They saw this scenario developing. And did Google anticipate it? Google wrote in Harvard Business Review last year that their number two priority is.. mobile money. You know those famous Visa TV ads 'they don't take American Express' - that day may come soon, when Google runs its ads as 'they don't take Visa'. Don't laugh, 40% of the total Kenyan economy already goes through mobile phone payments. Turkey was the first country to set a date for when they end the manufacturing of coins and banknotes - 2025 - to be replaced by mobile money. Coins were invented in the region we think of as Turkey today, 2,600 years ago. Yes, you and I will live to see the end of cash being manufactured as a monetary instrument (no doubt, some commemorative coins will still be made, for collectors). In Norway and Estonia you can submit your whole tax return by SMS text message and Estonia has already run national elections where the citizens were allowed to vote via their mobile phones.

Your mobile phone number is the nearest thing to a global identity number, it is truly unique, where social security numbers and passport numbers are at best, unique to a given country. Very soon your driver's licence, passport and other identity will be on your smartphone.

CENTER OF CONVERGENCE

I've been writing about digital convergence in all of my 12 books. I've gradually expanded the reach of industries which will find most if not all of the given industry migrating to digital, and that the smartphone is at the epicenter of that convergence. We see it today, from our cameras to our wristwatches and alarm clocks to our web browsers, music players, gaming (Angry Birds, anyone?). The mobile is becoming the primary newsmedia channel, the primary entertainment platform and increasingly even retail, commerce, travel, banking, insurance etc are going onto our pockets, or derive a major part of their consumer interaction through our smartphone.

What does it mean, when Carrefour the giant French retailer now drives its retail consumers to the correct aisles in its stores, based on the smartphone app that is the shopping guide? What does it mean, when Finnair counts how many empty seats it has on a given flight, and then sends upgrade offers to its frequent fliers - as they are processed through security onto the airport? What does it mean to Clarion Hotels chain when they already offer for example in Sweden the chance for travellers to use their phone as the key to the hotel room? No plastic hotel keys needed anymore. And what does it mean to Visa in South Korea, when they automatically enable your brand new Visa credit to your phone, but they then ask 'do you want a free plastic Visa card mailed to your home address?' Why would they ask that? Because in South Korea today, nobody uses the old plastic credit cards anymore, every merchant who takes credit cards, has mobile payments already enabled.

Google through Android will be involved in all of our digital activities, in all our lives, as obviously central to it, as Windows had been on our PCs for the past two decades. No matter what else you did, that Windows basic set of tools and apps - remember the annoying paperclip-guy who was Microsoft's virtual 'Help' guy at one point? If you can imagine that world, but expanded ten-fold, no, hundred-fold, in the digital future of this decade, replace Windows in that metaphor with Android, and you see Google will be literally in every one of our lives, and in all our digital activities.

And Google isn't standing still on this. Not like Microsoft, which tended to follow, let others build a future, and then try to bully its way into it - winning some (WordPerfect? Lotus 1-2-3? Novell Netware) but losing others (Chrome and Firefox. Google search. iTunes). Google instead is taking a leading position. Like look at its bold way of pursuing Google Glass and Google Goggles, the Augmented Reality (AR) future for digital. What I now am calling the 8th Mass Media (following Mobile which was the 7th obviously). Google has won the battle for the 6th mass media (internet). It has just now been declared the winner of the 7th mass media (mobile) and Google is trailblazing its way to own also the 8th mass media, which only has a couple of million pioneering media customers in some of the most advanced markets today, like Japan, South Korea, Netherlands and Sweden. But Google is there already. 

THE TRUTH IS IN OUR POCKET

We look at our mobile phone 150 times per day, said T-Mobile USA earlier this year. For smartphone users its already 200 times per day according to UK measurements reported in the Guardian. Like I have been saying for years now, its the first thing we see when we wake up, and the last thing we look at before we fall asleep. Yes, most of us sleep with the phone in bed with us and use it as our alarm clock. The mobile phone is our memory bank, it is our calendar, our address book, our messaging center. A study by Vodafone of its New Zealand customers found that more than a third of New Zealanders had resolved a bet or argument by going to their pocket, by searching the answer via the mobile internet. It is the ultimate truth machine. The truth is in our pocket! And who sits at ground zero of that search? Google of course.

Android will power most cameras. Not all, but by far the biggest part of all cameras in use (as cameraphones, obviously). Android will power most videocameras used by consumers. Android will power most 'watches' and clocks and alarm clocks in use (again, only through the clock face on our smartphone screen). Android will power most web browers and 'computers' used by consumers. Not all, there will be an ever diminshing - but not vanishing - segment of 'professional' computers with keyboards and mouse inputs and full peripherals that professionals use. But consumers will use tablets and smartphones, and while Apple will have a nice healthy slice of that business, and some rivals may hold other pieces, Android will dominate that. Android will power our calendars, our music players, our video players, our gaming consoles, and so forth. Soon Google launches its first Google Goggles, the eyeware with the inbuilt cameras and tiny projection screens viewable by the person wearing the glasses. All that - powered by Android, of course. Think of it as a specialized smartphone form factor, built in the shape of eyeglasses. There already exist wristwatches that are in effect smartphones (not very popular by the way). The smart technology is invading our clothing too.

THE POWER OF THE DATA

We just saw the US election, how the Democratic party used the power of deep voter data and insights to run circles around the Republicans, winning the Presidency, winning several 'hopeless' Senate seats, and even taking several seats in the Congress. A victory 'sweep'. And powered by superior insights of consumer ie voter data. It was as I wrote, Orca vs Narwhal.

What of Amazon? Amazon knows that I love my James Bond and I am into mobile telecoms and Formula 1 racing, based on what I buy. Imagine how much more powerful Amazon's search engine - and its recommendation engine - would be, if Amazon also knew which retail shop I go to, what airline I fly, what credit card(s) I use and what hotel I am staying in right now? Have a guess who knows - or will know soon. The company whose operating system powers the gadget in my pocket. Google will know soon, through Android, just about everything one could ever hope to find out, about anyone.

Alan Moore coined the phrase that social media intelligence is the new black gold of the 21st century. Just like how the Klondike and gold miners were (sometimes) able to strike it rich by disovering gold (or silver). That was mostly in the 19th century. Then in the 20th century, the 'black gold' was that liquid gold they started to discover in Pennsylvania and Texas and Saudi Arabia. Oil. Today most of the biggest companies on the Fortune 500 are oil companies (or companies that build devices that run on oil - cars). Now, Alan argues, for this new 21st century the 'new black gold' is that data we extract from our phones and other digital devices about consumer behavior - and its most lucrative part is the 'social media' part of the insights.

COMMUNITIES DOMINATE..

The recommendations! What do we talk about and with whom - haha, not unlike how the Obama campaign used SMS text messaging on election day, asking registered Obama supporters, would they be willing to make one call to another Obama supporter who had not voted yet, to encourage them to go vote for Obama. And how the Obama campaign used Facebook apps to have Obama Facebook friends spread the Obama message to likely Obama supporters - 600,000 Obama voters did that, the average reach was 8 people, so Obama's reach in Facebook expanded by 5 million beyond what Obama had achieved up to that point. Of those 5 million, 1.1 million turned out to register to vote for Obama.

There was no way through television or robocalls or home mailers or emails or even Twitter and Facebook friends, for Obama to find those 1.1 million new voters. They were found by Obama's friends on Facebook, doing the targeted marketing for Team Obama, to find new supporters. This is what Alan wrote about with social media intelligence - the new black gold. Not just to make us rich - also to help us win our elections or help in whatever causes you have from education to healing the planet.

What power does this give Google? I don't mean anything creepy in spying into what we do. I suggest you read Tony Fish's book My Digital Footprint and follow his guidelines very closely. Certainly yes, that power will also be there to spy on consumers - but just think about Amazon. We often go to Amazon just to search something - to see what else Amazon recommends. We are quite literally accessing Amazon 'just to see ads'. To see Amazon recommendations. And how often have you done this? When Amazon recommends a book or DVD for you, and asks 'would you like to see more recommendations' you click on 'yes'. Of course we do! We love Amazon advertising so much - we do literally ask for more ads.

Its the magic that Blyk was able to exploit in its telecoms and media models that we see from Alcatel-Lucent's Optism system to OutThere Media. It is seen in innovative companies now, like Qustodian are doing in Spain and the UK. Making advertising so targeted, personal, useful and beloved - that we do literally ask for more ads! And then imagine all that insight and all that power, and multiply it by infinity (ok, not infinity but as close to it that it won't matter). When Google decides to take full advantage of Android - and Google's other assets from search to YouTube to what will soon be known as something like Google Money - it will make Amazon's recommendation engine seem as advanced as reading the Yellow Pages. If you hate the very idea of seeing ads on your phone and think this future scenario is unbearable, I urge you to read Kim Dushinksi's brilliant Mobile Marketing Handbook (2nd edition) and her Ten Commandments of Mobile Marketing. If companies follow those rules, the advertising on mobile will not be creepy or annoying or interruptive. They will be beloved.

We already rely on Google search to find us anything! That search is only becoming faster and more relevant and more personal and more urgent on mobile, as Peggy Anne Salz has been reporting at M Search Groove and in her books. And we are learning to do that instantly, through our smartphone, rather than waiting to get home to our PC. Now imagine if we program some clever logic into it - imagine Siri a few generations later, when it also handles our money, knows what is on our calendar, knows what we like to do, etc. It will start to make suggestions to us, and again, not in a creepy way of spying on us, but in ways just like Amazon does with our book and DVD purchases. It will for example tell us, that since we usually take the train home at 5 PM, now is the time to go if you want to make it to the train, or the next train is at 5:20, or are you intending to work late and should I order a taxi for 7 so you can make it home in time to watch the live game on TV tonight?

That would seem like the perfect secretary, the perfect assistant, the perfect butler and perfect consierge, all rolled into one. Incidentially, that is what the worlds's most advanced mobile operator/carrier, in the most advanced mobile market, Japan, NTT DoCoMo has found, when it evolved its mobile wallet, Osaifu Keitai, into its latest iteration, called iConsierge. Consumers say its the best service they have ever experienced, and it feels like the mobile phone is reading their minds. They cannot imagine life without it.

Like with most tech, the early iterations will be 'proprietary' models, so we'll find a mobile wallet by a carrier/operator like NTT DoCoMo or another by a handset maker like Nokia Money was in India, or a third by a digital money player like Paypal or a fourth by a traditional bank or a fifth by a credit card company etc. But then the platforms win out and if Google is already working on Google Money and Android sits in the pockets of one out ten humans by the end of this year, one out of six humans by this time next year and one out of four by the end of 2014, of course they will become one of the biggest money platforms - if not the biggest. And then - imagine how much more powerful would Amazon be, if 'Amazon Dollars' were also used at Ebay and Ikea and McDonalds... But soon Google will handle our payments and who knows, we migth see G-dollars some day too, no doubt instantly convertible across all real currencies and also most virtual currencies, much how Google Translate helped us instantly understand any written language today.

ADVOCURRENCY

Google started off doing search better than anyone else without worrying exactly how to 'monetize' it. They eventually discovered a highly lucrative commercial model, by providing advertisements alongside search, and the sponsored search. With that, they became the biggest advertising platform on the newest media - and one which today is bigger than cinema, recordings and radio. Soon internet advertising will be bigger than print and eventually it will be bigger than TV ads. And Google utterly dominates this massive media opportunity. Google's roots are in search and its data, and monetizing through advertising.

Whatever Google may do with Android and maps and videos and money, you can be sure its Google, it will include understanding data, search, consumer user data, and advertising. Which brings me to Jonathan JMac MacDonald's concept of Advocurrency. Jonathan argued that when advertising and money (currency) merge through mobile, there will be a bonus benefit from 'advocacy' hence Adv(ertising) plus (adv) o (cacy) plus currency equals Advocurrency. A kind of evolution of advertising that includes some form of money - not unlike coupons were advertising and money in the past - but which now incorporates social media insights. Is my Twitter recommendation with 11,000 followers the same as someone else's who has 100 followers? And even more, Jonathan argues, that we can influence and manage that value - if I recommend Pepsi this week, then if I try to recommend Coca Cola next week and Red Bull the week thereafter, the value of my recommendation diminishes, regardless of how many followers I have. But if I rarely make recommendations, the value potentially increases, etc.

Now think of it from the side of money. We already have some rudimentary advertising on our currency - usually either ruler worship - the picture of the Queen on the British Pound for exampe - or celebrating history - the pictures of dead presidents on US dollars. Some countries have taken the opportunity to use their currencies as a kind of tourism and travel advertising, showcasing their landmarks and national treasures. Of course the Europeans were so inept at this kind of thinking, they couldn't agree on what European landmarks to use on the Euro banknotes, and decided to create bogus images that are 'representative' of European landmarks without representing anything specifically. How silly is that? Why on earth not use the Eiffel Tower and the Parthenon and the Brandenburg Gate and the Little Mermaid? But I digress. Yes, money has had some advertising for centuries. Now we have the new digital era, when money can have much more.

Digital coupons, digital money, digital recommendations. Group buying. Gamifying our money like becoming the mayor of Starbucks. These all are steps on the road to advocurrency. There are early signs of actual commerce conducted on recommendations as 'currency' and for example Kellogg's opened its first shop in London that lets you have free snacks paid for by sending Tweets via Twitter. That is clearly an early manifestation of advocurrency.

ANDROID OWNS THE FUTURE

Now, think about this. If the future of the internet is indeed mobile. And the future of money is mobile. And the future of advertising will increasingly be on mobile. And the future of social media is, as all major social media brands from Facebook to Twitter already say - on mobile. And mobile enables 'advocurrency' then we will soon see this as a real viable commercial revolution. Then, I can go to Pizza Hut, order a pizza, and pay for it with real dollars, or by having Audi sponsor my meal - through me agreeing to see four Audi ads - not now, but Audi trusts me, and says I need to watch them over the next two weeks - or I can pay for my pizza with my reputation, by doing two Tweets about that Pizza Hut. This will soon be the reality of commerce, in a world of advocurrency.

And someone has to act as the fair arbitrator, on what is the correct 'exchange rate' of one dollar vs one Audi ad to Tomi Ahonen vs one Tomi Ahonen Tweet about Pizza Hut today..That could theoretially be Citibank, banks are good at those exchange rates for example between different currencies. But do you think banks will ever really 'get it' about advocurrency, before its too late? Incidentially, if you can deposit real cash to a bank, and they will pay you interest on it - and then they will lend your money to someone who needs to borrow it, and charge that person interest - will this not also be true of Advocurrency at some point, in some way?

Someone like Visa is more likely to 'get it' but I would rather bet on someone truly gifted at disrupting everyone else's business, like say .. Apple .. or Google. Did I mention, that Google thinks its number 2 global strategic priority is mobile money? And that Android is now the world's most sold digital platform?

Today when we think of the biggest computer platform, that is Windows. If we think of the widest reaching internet advertiser or brand, that is Google. If we think of the bestselling consumer technology, that is now Samsung (was Nokia still at the start of this year). If we think of the biggest credit card, thats Visa. In the near future Google's Android will be far more relevant globally, than any of these. By the end of next year, Google's Android will power half of all new mobile phone handsets sold - not just the smartphone 'segment' but half of all new handsets sold. 

MICROSOFT (BALLMER) THREW IT AWAY

This future belonged to Microsoft. Its Windows platform ruled the desktop and the laptops, the previous era of computing. Microsoft's Bill Gates did see and correctly anticipate the smartphone revolution, partly observing Nokia and Hewlett Packard build it - and Microsoft rushed to join this race a decade ago. They were doing ok, captured one eighth of the market and were clearly the second largest smartphone OS behind Nokia's Symbian

(Hey, hold on. Wanna see irony? Today latest Q3 data and 20 months after Nokia CEO annoucned the premature death of Symbian, in Q3 Symbian sales has collapsed from the 29% market share it had when Elop announced it, to 2% now. Latest data Q3. When Elop announced in February 2011 he would replace Symbian with Windows, Symbian was stil the world's bestselling smartphone OS platform, obviously bigger than Windows. And what did Elop select to replace Symbian? Windows Phone. And still today, after Symbian has shred nearly 11 out of every 12 customers it had, and Symbian is at 2% global market share by latest numbers - Windows Phone market share lags that of Symbian!!!!!!! Elop replaced 'the first ecosystem' with the 'sixth ecosystem' promising the world it would become the 'third ecosystem' haha).

Back to the battle of the century. Bill Gates saw it coming and prepared Microsoft for this next transition to smartphones, yes. But it was his successor, Steve Ballmer who blasted that future away, not just continuing Microsoft's history of bullying its 'partners' and suffocating their business, but by killing migration paths, from Windows Mobile to Windows Phone 6. How did that go, Ballmer? Crashing market share from 12% globally to 4% (both Windows Mobile and Windows Phone combined, peak market share). Smart move, Sherlock.

Then to verify, Ballmer had truly learned his lesson of the wrong way to shift from one platform to the next, with its new partner Nokia having just spent its biggest launch budget ever - three times more than any phone launch of any company in history, globally pushing brand new award-winning Nokia Lumia smartphones on the latest Windows Phone 6.5 OS, what did Ballmer do next, to really screw Nokia, the 'strategic partner'? It announced no migration path to Windows Phone 8. All of Nokia Lumia was instantly Osborned. The Windows total smartphone market share (Windows Phone and what remains of Windows Mobile) was 1.9% in the latest quarter. This is how you destroy a market-dominant position. Textbook. Microsoft had it all, it had all the biggest partners in the game from Hewlett-Packard and Lenovo on PCs (and would have been tablets too) and Nokia and Samsung in smartphones. And Ballmer massacred that by his moronic mismanagement of Microsoft's massive market.


Will Microsoft be a player in the ever-diminshing desktop? For sure. Will it manage to hold on to much of the non-growing laptop market,. probably. Will it become the biggest in tablets, no way. The Surface and Windows 8 tablets will go the way of the Zune. Will Microsoft be able to take third place in smartphones. No way. At some point Ballmer will finally look at the endless money pit that is Windows Phone, and pull the plug like he did with the short-lived Microsoff handset, the Kin. The carriers hate Microsoft Windows Phone, not because it has Skype pre-installed and fully integrated with Microsoft's 1.25 Billion PC world - they don't like that either - but because Skype was a tiny irritant of big damage before Microsoft bought it. Today Skype cannot be killed because Microsoft owns and bankrolls the existential threat to mobile operator/carrier business. Not my words, Nokia's CEO Stephen Elop told Nokia shareholders that carriers don't like Skype 'of course' and many are refusing any sales of Windows Phone handsets because Microsoft owns Skype. Not my words, that is Windows partner Nokia talking to Nokia shareholders via its ex-Microsoft CEO. So for any carrier to support Windows Phone is like deliberately and knowingly drinking poison.

There is no confusion in this matter. Carriers will never, ever, allow Microsoft's Windows Phone to become a significant player in mobile. Never. Ever, ever. Microsoft and Nokia can bribe their ways into a tiny share. They may get 2%, 3% if lucky, even 4% market share. That would be one THIRD better performance than Microsoft the world's largest software maker and Nokia the world's largest handset maker at the time, managed to achieve at the peak of Lumia success, added to by the best that Samsung, HTC and others could do with Windows Phone this year. The peak performance. And I am allowing 33% better performance. And if you have 4% of the global market for smartphones, you are a tiny meaningless shit. Sorry, didn't mean to say that. A tiny meaningless 'niche', you are not 'the third ecosystem' by any stretch of that definition. Sorry, Ballmer, Gates was the brilliant guy who saw this coming. You are the putz who threw the future all away. Gates at least understood that to migrate customers from one platform to another, you build a migration path, as Microsoft did from DOS to Windows nearly 3 decades ago.

And Windows 8 and Windows Phone 8 will not matter one iota in this. The battle for the PC was WON by Microsoft. They now are desperately trying to extend that leadership position to tablets, to truly dismal success, so bad, that Microsoft had to resort to its own Surface tablet. And then a FAR FAR bigger market is the smartphone, where Microsoft was once the second biggest, today they are at 1.9% and falling. Can Windows Phone 8 help Microsoft grow to 2% or even 3%, maybe. That is MEANINGLESS when your software once ruled on 90% of the digital platforms sold on the planet. Windows 8 will help Microsoft extend the PC side of Windows further, it will never become an acceptable platform for smartphones. Mark my words. Never. It will NEVER reach 10% market share in smartphones. NEVER.

Did you notice IDC just announced their latest forecast for Windows Phone to be 11%. Their previous promised 19%. So a massive cut in the IDC forecast in just a six month period - and IDC didn't even bother to tell us why the sudden drop. And what of others. There are many analysts who now say Microsoft and Nokia can only do 3% or even 2% for Windows Phone in 2013. That - my dear readers - is finally in line with my projections haha...

NOKIA (ELOP) THREW IT AWAY

Nokia saw this massive future coming too. Nokia invented the smartphone (with HP) and Nokia dominated the smartphone market utterly. Nokia was the first to claim smartphones as true pocket computers long before Apple's iPhone made that a more widely accepted view. Nokia invented the consumer smartphone and the gaming smartphone, in addition to inventing the corporate/business smartphone years before anyone had seen a Blackberry. Nokia saw the future of advertising on mobile as well as the future of money on mobile - and had major investments on both. Nokia had one of the world's first smartphone app stores for its N-Gage gaming phone and by the time the world was celebrating the iPhone's App Store, Nokia's Ovi quietly grew to become the world's second biggest app store - and the bestselling app store on four of the six inhabited continents including the three with the biggest populations.

Nokia owned the future to smartphones on every front from the hardware to the operating system to the ecosystem, the services and the support systems. Nokia had for example Nokia Money in India, with 12% market share of the rapidly growing mobile money market of the second most populous country - and one where regular banking is not widely used. When Elop announced his new strategy, Nokia dominated the smartphone market more than Toyota or GM has EVER dominated the car market! Nokia was twice as big as Apple in smartphones, four times as big as Samsung when Stephen Elop took over as CEO. Nokia grew MORE than Apple in 2010, so the gap was increasing. Nokia grew unit sale by a world record amount that year, growing revenues, and setting a Nokia record for growing profitability in the firt Quarter Elop was fully in charge. That, my friends, is the definition of utter global world dominance.

The world's most used tech brand was (and still is today) Nokia. Nokia's Symbian powered not just Nokia smarpthones but those of several other manufacturers especially in Japan where the most advanced phones are made. When the big telecoms analyst houses issued their forecasts for smartphone markets in late 2010, into years 2011 and 2012 - they ALL agreed, ALL agreed, (by 'all' I mean EVERY SINGLE ANALYST WHO PUBLISHED A SMARTPHONE FORECAST FOR NOKIA INTO 2012 or beyond. ALL AGREED) that Nokia would continue easily as the biggest smartphone maker till now. Where is Nokia? Stephen Elop came in as CEO, looked at a growing smartphone market, a growing Nokia smartphone sales unit, growing revenues, growing profits and an industry-leading migration rate from dumbphones to smartphones - yes, in 2010 Nokia's migration rate from dumbphones to smartphones was ahead of the industry average - and decided that was not good enough. And he decided to abandon all that, issue his Elop Effect edicts and destroy Nokia in the process.

Today? Nokia has fallen to 10th biggest smartphone maker by Q3 and may fall out of the Top 10 by now, Christmas Quarter ie Q4. Nokia market share in smartphones was 29% when Elop annoucned his mad Microsoft strategy. In Q3 even as we add what remains of Symbian share, Nokia's global market share had fallen in smartphones to 3.7%. It may be at 3% now in Q4. Elop has destroyed the market for 9 out of every 10 customers Nokia had owned in the smartphone space, in a period of six quarters. This is the world record in destruction of any global market leader, and the only reason Ballmer is not the worst villain in this story, is that his buddy Elop did an even worse job over at Nokia. Stephen Elop is the worst CEO of all time, caused the fastest collapse of a market leader among Global 500 sized companies ever, in any industry! He has set the world record for mismanaging a company. Why is the Microsoft Muppet allowed to remain as CEO, I can not understand. And any investigative journalists out there, please consider this story - it is a Pulitzer Prize in the waiting, the story of how Nokia owned the future and the new CEO willfully threw it all away.

If Elop had let Nokia be. If he had let the three MeeGo devices be sold last year, and allowed Symbian to shift and die slowly as it was intended, over several years, shifting to ever lower-cost devices (for Africa, India and the rest of the Emerging World where the big growth in smartphone market is going to be, and where Symbian was holding between 70% and 90% market share) as MeeGo took the top end, Nokia would now sit on - according to EVERY published analyst in the world - on the world's largest share in smartphones, ahead of Samsung, Apple, Blackberry, HTC etc. If we say conservatively that it would be 25%, Nokia would be selling 180 million smartphones now, at revenues of 36 Billion dollars from his smartphone unit alone and adding at least 4 Billion dollars more to Nokia profits. That is not 'my view' - that was the CONSENSUS view of industry analysts just before Elop annoucned his mad Microsoftian misadventure. Now Nokia sells maybe 5 million smartphones this quarter and last quarter, it made a loss of 49% PER SMARTPHONE !!!

So Nokia gets big press for its Augmented Reality 'city lens' on the latest Lumia. Sounds nice, until you go back nearly four years of Google's Android and look at Layar, the worlds' first Augmented Reality browser, which yes, did just that same city lens type of AR solution - on Google Android smartphones - more than three YEARS ago. Like we used to say jokingly, to see what is coming to the next iPhone, look no further than the Nokia smartphone of 3 years ago, now we apparently also know, what Elop will bring to the Lumias. Look at Android smartphones from three years ago.

BTW if you doubt MeeGo, keep an eye on Jolla and Samsung's Tizen in 2013. That is what Nokia 'owned' and Elop threw away. So Nokia could have shared this future with Google, as a fair fight, side-by-side. With Android now the biggest OS with maybe half of the world, with MeeGo/Symbian/Meltemi the second ecosystem and Apple's iOS the third. These three would have controlled nearly 90% of the worlds' smartphones. Stephen Elop sat on the guaranteed rocketship ride to being one of the winners of this decade. He threw that away for Nokia. Now instead, Nokia is on the brink of oblivion.

SAMMY SAMMY SAMMY

And we cannot write about Android without mentioning the biggest hardware contributor to Android's astonishingly fast rise to the top. Early Android bestselling smartphones were made by HTC but then along came Sammy. Samsung today has sold nearly half of all Android devices in use worldwide. The biggest thank-you from the Googleplex needs to go to Seoul to Samsung's HQ. But observe what is happening quietly in the battle for the pocket. Samsung launched its own OS even as it made our highly praised Galaxy series Android devices. The first OS was called bada (which still haha, outsells Windows Phone, talk about adding insult to injury, Samsung is also a Windows Phone manufacturer). And when Nokia bailed out of its partnership with Intel, to develop MeeGo into the next smartphone platform, who stepped in? Samsung of course. They refocused and realigned the partnership, its now the Tizen alliance but yes, Samsung and Intel are the core hardware partners.

This is a bit like IBM vs Microsoft in the 1980s if you are old enough to remember. When Apple introduced the Macintosh, Microsoft would develop its Windows OS as the 'Macintosh envy' that Microsoft had. But IBM had differing views of where the PC market needed to go, plus it wanted to break away from its PC dependency on Microsoft (sound familiar, haha) and thus it built its own 'next generation' operating system for PCs, called OS/2. That ran alongside early Windows and later editions of DOS for quite a many years back then. So in a way, Samsung with bada and Tizen today are a bit like IBM was in the 1980s, taking on Microsoft, except that with Samsung, obviously the primary target is not the miniscule Microsoft Windows Phone in smartphones, its Google's Android. So yes, Samsung, the biggest Android handset maker, is preparing to launch a new smartphone operating system for 2013, called Tizen, to go directly against Google's Android. And fair's fair - Google itself bought Motorola and sells Motorola branded smartphone hardware, running Android, against Samsung's Galaxies. Whats good for the goose, is good for the gander.. The lesson that Samsung seems to have learned very well from the IBM OS/2 fiasco is, that Samsung have hardware partners like Intel, they have committed handset manufacturers and they have most importantly - the carrier support already locked up, with major global carriers supporting Tizen from NTT DoCoMo to SK Telecom to Telefonica to Sprint.

Anyway, Samsung is very good at the hardware from handsets to the big plasma screen TVs to many of the components going into iPhones etc.. They are not as well known for the software and services side, but have competences there as well - many hidden as only on services and apps launched in South Korea to it highly evolved dometistic digital market - and have been expanding that competence now globally with the bada ecosystem, which will likely be merged into the Tizen project in the coming months and years. So in some way, when you look at Samsung smartphones, and especially its Tizen part in the next few years, remember you could remove the Samsung logo and were it not for Elop, that would have been (should have been) a Nokia brand there..

As to Android and the iPhone, Tizen is the real Third Ecosystem. Just with Samsung's own smartphone global dominance, if they shift 20% of their total smartphone production by the end of next year to Tizen, Tizen will automatically be the third ecosystem. That is, before ANY of the many hardware vendors have added their handsets to the Tizen mix. I do expect over time Tizen will grow to pass the iPhone iOS to become the second biggest but Android is so far ahead and well entrenched, I don't see Android being toppled, not during this decade at least.

But if you grew up thinking the tech world was governed by the 'Wintel' alliance of Windows and Intel - the new tech standard is Samgle, or Samsoogle, Samsung and Google (or Googsung). The biggest tech company of the planet (Samsung) and the biggest internet company and biggest advertising company, that owns the biggest-selling software platform (Google). And the biggest loser pairing is Nokisoft, that is ever shrinking to be the Microkia. 

ANDROID RULES

So yes, if you're in advertising you love your Macs, iPads and the iPhone. Of course you believe the Apple cool-aid that the future belongs to the iOS. And you prepare your award-winning iPhone apps and show them on your iGadgets to your friends and colleagues.

But for all others in the tech industry, the digital world now starts with - and often even ends at - Android. Get your competence there. If you do apps, make sure you do Android apps. If you do advertising, check out Google advertising services. If you do search, you know what I mean... Google is now the new epicenter of the digital convergence space. Windows is dead (Nokia also is dead). The King is dead, Long Live the King. Android is the new King of Digital. Congratulations Google. You said the future of the internet was mobile, and only by being able to successfully transition into that future, can you remain relevant into this new decade. You did it. Android is the winner now, unstoppable.

50 million new Android devices sold per month, today. Wow.

ONE PLUG

What is your strategy in mobile? How will Android play in that strategy? Are you going to be partnering with Google on that path, or competing against it? How can you capitalize on the biggest economic opportunity in our lifetimes? Did you notice that the most profitable company - and the most valuable company - on the planet, is a former 'computer' company which now calls itself a 'mobile' company? Apple. And the wealthiest man on the planet no longer comes from the computer industry, Bill Gates has been supplanted on the top by Carlos Slim, a mobile industry tycoon. This is your life and your career whether you wanted it or not. And if Google's Android will shortly be in one out of every four pockets on the planet, you will not be able to avoid Android on your career path.

So what does that future look like? What is the digital landscape in 2014 or 2015? Check out the TomiAhonen Mobile Forecat 2012-2015 to see the future through the eyes of the most accurate forecaster in the mobile industry.

The Future of Print is Digital - but no, I don't mean iPads or smartphones, I mean traditional printed pages made digital through AR

Lets talk print today. The print media has been under quite heavy assault for many years now from the internet and mobile. Some take cover in doing their print titles on new digital platforms like custom editions for the iPad for example, or a smartphone version etc. Other print titles have resorted to far simpler versions from SMS news alerts and mobile web versions to having custom Twitter feeds etc. Yeah, all that is good, in terms of exploring the digital world. But that is not the future of print.

Don't misunderstand me, there is huge growth to be had in doing news online or on mobile and/or on tablet PCs wherever you categorize those devices. I mean print, print as in 1st mass media print. Books, newspapers, magazines and billboards, catalogs, brochures. Paper. Print. And I don't mean some kind of Sci Fi paper with some electronic threads or paper-like thin displays. I mean pulp, from a tree, via a sawmill. Paper. Print. A printing press. I want to talk about the future of the 1st mass media today.

Oh, for new visitors, just one refresher course if you haven't caught up with the latest writing. The 8 mass media are in chronological order:

1st Mass Medium: Print from the 1500s
2nd Mass Mediun: Recordings from late 1800s
3rd Mass Medium: Cinema from about 1900
4th Mass Medium: Radio from the 1920s
5th Mass Medium: Television from the 1950s
6th Mass Medium: Internet form the 1990s
7th Mass Medium: Mobile from the 2000s
8th Mass Medium: Augmented Reality from the 2010s

PRINT IS NOT GONNA DIE, GET OVER IT

There is always panic with old media when a new media channel comes along. When radio appeared, there were huge fights with the recording industry about who was stealing whose content and many experts thought that free music on radio would kill the recordings industry. Well? We are now 90 years into that experiment, I think its safe to say that Lady Gaga and 50 Cent can sleep safely that their recording industry is still alive. Yes, its had its ups and downs but its not going away.

There were lots of media experts who suggested that when those darnfangeled television sets would come to every home, it would surely kill the cinema industry. That hypothesis has now had 60 years and as far as I can see, there is a new James Bond adventure coming with 007 Skyfall and I will surely stand in line for the ticket. No city I know of has closed all its multiplex screens yet. 

The lesson we get from cinema and TV, is that TV did use all cinema content ever made, but that was not enough. TV needed more, and created its own content and formats that will not even work on cinema - consider music videos like on MTV or gameshows and reality TV. Those work excellently on TV but are not viable in the movies. What cinema also found, was that some formats were not competitive against television. Newsreels. Did you know that in the 1930s and 1940s it was very normal to go to the movies and see short news films from around the world about major events. Remember nobody had TVs at home, this was like watching the TV news. The sporting results from the Olympics or a royal wedding or the news from the second world war. Those 'newsreels' became obsolete when television news would reach the majority of homes in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

Radio the 4th mass medium did not kill Recordings the 2nd mass medium. Television the 5th mass medium did not kill Cinema the 3rd mass medium. And no, the Internet 6th mass medium nor Mobile the 7th mass medium will not kill Print the 1st mass medium. But just like how Cinema had to adjust to TV, so too will Print have to adjust to the Internet and Mobile (and Augmented Reality).

THE DEADWOOD FORMATS

Some formats of print are totally obsolete and deserved to die. When there was no other way, the Yellow Pages and White Pages phone books were a valid way to let people know who had telephones, what were their telephone numbers, etc. The Yellow Pages were a 'better than nothing' way to find out who was a locksmith or dentist or attorney. Today Google does all that for us. An Encyclopedia was often a sign of an enlightened, learned, civilized family. It was the first place you went to seek information. Today we go to Google or Wikipedia for that info. These were large heavy print titles, formats, that served a need when there was no better way to deliver the information. They are long gone by now - and good riddance! How many trees died needlessly in the last decade in never-opened editions of published Yellow Pages and White Pages and various Encyclopedia and Dictionaries and Thesauruses etc. 

This is like Newsreels were in Cinema. They served a purpose once, but were not the best use of that medium, and certainly were inferior in delivering their intended content to their audience. Like listening to live sports on Radio. If we do have live TV coverage, that is what we prefer, even as some radio announcers were brilliant radio personalities haha.. But then Radio would adjust and invent new formats like say Drive Time radio which you can't do on TV. Or in the case of Cinema, they stopped most low-budget 'Serials' movies and shifted upstream to higher budget features with superstar actors like your George Clooneys and Angelina Jolies etc. TV can do great drama like in Mad Men but its no James Bond epic haha..

SO HOW IS PRINT DOING DIGITAL THEN?

So this is not 'repurposing' your content to other media - like showing a rerun of James Bond on a Saturday on TV. I am not talking about taking your magazine or newspaper and creating a digital edition of the page to the iPod or internet or mobile. No. I mean lets turn the traditional printed page into a fully digital, interactive mass media experience. Lets help the First Mass Medium with the some digital love by the Eighth Mass Medium - yes, Augmented Reality.

And how do we do this? You know the QR code obviously (2D Barcode). It lets any printed page like a printed advertisement or the label on a can of Pepsi or a business card or airline boarding pass, to be able to be read by cameraphones and then various actions can be programmed into the QR code. It can include a web link for example. 

Now take that one step further. The QR code is a standardized and usually relatively small, about postage-stamp sized square of black and white dots. Now what if you had the intellect to detect a more advanced image? Like a specific page of a magazine (one with a couple of pictures for example). The intelligence would be smart enough not to be triggered just by seeing one of those pictures, they have to be in the correct layout, in the correct relative sizes, and there needs to be the right pattern of text on that page too. The detail and unique abilities to personalize the page is nearly infinite, far far more than what is ever possible in traditional QR codes.

This is not science fiction. This existed in the laboratory for a few years and has been turned commercial earlier this year, led by our friends Layar of the Netherlands, the AR people. They now have in their commercially launched products, the technology to allow any printed page with illustrations (so not just text) including diagrams, pictures, graphics - and that can be tagged as the identifier for digital content. After that, we get magic. Consider this (this is not done by Layar's solution, this is an earlier technology as a one-off for this magazine advertisement), one of my fave examples of some teenager-boy aged marketing from the UK by the deodorant brand Axe/Lynx. The printed page does not show the girl fully, but take out your phone, and you can see her:




This is just one very early and simple version of what we can do with AR on a print magazine. The paper in this magazine is nothing special, just a normal printed magazine. In this case the Lynx/Axe app needs to be installed to a suitable smartphone and then look at the picture..

Beyond this, we can do just about anything digital. We can add voices and sounds. We can add videos and animation. We can show before and after images. We can show work in progress. In the Netherlands there is for example a comic book which is AR enabled. One of the features is that fans of the comic can see the same exact comic book page in draft form, how it was before the artist finished the frames. Perhaps the person was looking in another direction in the earlier draft, etc..

What do you need to read it? A smartphone with the Layar app. Layar launched 2 years ago out of the Netherlands and has reached 19 million installs and has 3 million active users worldwide. I estimated last month, that their Netherlands user base is about 1.5 million which is about 8% of the total population of that country. If we take it as a percentage of Dutch smartphone owners, its past 15%. That is not a niche market, my dear reader. That is the start of the Mass Market. Yes, AR is a Mass Media now, not just a tech nerdy niche geeky thingy.

LET ME TELL YOU ABOUT MAGALOGUE.

So yeah. I was in Amsterdam last month and visited with the Layar offices and saw some of the cool stuff they are doing. I also met with the digital people over at vtwonen, the biggest interior decoration magazine of the Netherlands. So this is your typical magazine about interior decoration ideas, your lamps, curtains, kitchens, furniture, etc..They showed their first ever Magalogue that was an insert to their regularly published vtwonen print issue this March. What is a magalogue? Magazine + Catalogue = Magalogue.

A magazine tells stories, usually with plenty of pictures. A catalogue is very different. Think Ikea, or Sears. A catalogue is intended to sell. So the catalogue has to give pertinent information to help you decide about buying. In the case of furniture, for example, it has to tell you not only how much it costs, but its dimensions. Does that bookcase fit in your living room? And it has to tell you about colors and fabrics and materials used. Often with various furnishings there are variations or options etc. A sofa may be in four-seater and 3-seater and 2-seater. Plus easy-chair, sleeper-chair and ottoman. Etc. To cram that type of info in a catalog takes a lot of text and 'wastes' paper. The catalogue becomes heavy. And then it gets also cumbersome. The similar items need to be near each other. We don't look for our bed choices from several pictures of bedrooms. We want to see the beds only, next to each other, all in a series of pages with only beds. This is not good for telling stories. Its the 'phone book' version of a spy thriller book haha.. You either have one (a magazine with stories, but not room to do the catalogue selling) or the other. But not both.

Until now. Enter the Magalogue. vtwonen used their editorial staff to create real interior-decorating type stories and tips, but using specific items that were all for sale (by multiple providers). This is like what if the Ikea catalogue was mixed on 'random play' on an iPod haha, none of the book cases were on the same pages, but rather, each book case was set into a suitable story about an actual room, and an actual interior decoration need. Its like no catalogue I've ever seen. Every page has an actual story, with pictures of a realistic mixture of products for sale. The products are obviously carefully selected in the right colors and shades so they fit together as if selected by an interior design architect (as the writers invariably would be). But the pages are not cluttered with endless columns of tiny text describing every item in detail. Yes, there is a single description of every item (only its name and its price) but all other info is now hidden in the AR app.

If you like the towels on page 18 but wonder if it comes in the shade of blue you prefer over that green in the picture, you take out your phone, look at that page and you'll have the link to that item. Here are the colors, here are the sizes, here are the prices... and here is the link to your shopping basket if you want to buy.

Now we can have tons tons TONS more. We can have experts giving advice on that item. We can have video on how that picture was made and what other items were considered. We can have variations of that same set up with alternate colors, etc etc etc etc etc.

And this is NOT a catalogue! There is not that heavy weight of all those pages of most unncessary pages in the back with all the detail about every item, their shipping weights, sizes, etc. No. We don't need that. Its all in the AR app. The 'catalogue' is removed form the 'logue' and the Magazine is added. Now we have a very nice fresh magazine that happens to be selling every item in the pictures, and you can get more info than ever was possible in any printed catalogue. Magazine + Catalogue = Magalogue. Brilliant idea!

Wait - I forgot the best part - its not static! If you want to make changes to your content, that can be altered at your end (you the publisher). So there is a price change. So there is a new color. Now there is a TV show that mentions that item and some celebrity said its cool. You want that video also in your page. You can make changes to the digital links of a print page already published !!!! It allows you to keep your printed page 'alive' and relevant for much longer, with updated content elements!!!

NEXT GO SEE AJIT BLOG ARTICLE

You like this? You are interested in how the future of print can be done with AR? Layar has just released some videos and news about their solution. Our dear friend Ajit Jaokar wrote a great blog about it with links to their videos etc. If you are in print, or work with print, you owe it to yourself to go read Ajit's article now at Open Gardens blog.

MEANWHILE BACK IN 8TH MASS MEDIA

And coming back from the 1st Mass Media to the 8th. I mentioned that I did my first TED talk at TEDx Mongkok two weeks ago, on the theme of Augmented Reality (and mentioned print media uses too). You may want to see this video, its only 20 minutes but the early reviews are that I got the angle pretty much dead-on about why Augmented Reality is the 8th Mass Media channel, and why it is relevant now in 2012. See Tomi at TEDx Mongkok talking about Augmented Reality as 8th Mass Media.

Communities Dominate.. SMS Communities Too! Check out SMS All from Pakistan

I saw an awesome presentation when I was in Sri Lanka giving a keynote to their annual big telecoms event. (Sri Lanka is the country on the island of Ceylon, just off the South-Eastern tip of India). One of the speakers was Idrees Butt the COO of a company called SMS All, Pakistan's largest social network with a twist - it runs on SMS text messaging.

Boy why didn't I see this coming? I mean, Twitter was built so, that each Tweet of 140 characters fits inside an SMS text message that runs 160 chracters. But yes, what is the SMS All then? They do very basic communities-oriented social network management running on SMS. Anyone can join, you don't need a PC (the service also works on PCs but PC penetration in Pakistan is very low). You don't need a smartphone (again, the vast majority of handsets in use in Pakistan are basic or featurephones, not smartphones). And all runs on SMS. You create your own account, set up your own little communities around what you like, be it your school mates or a fan club aroudn your favorite cricket team or the upcoming James Bond movie Skyfall, etc. Whatever. And then invite your friends to join and you can have a micro-blogging experience similar to Twitter, and updates and sharing like Facebook, but all built to run on basic SMS.

It works on all networks in Pakistan. Each message costs a very tiny bit and if you manage communities, there is a limit to how many messages you can send in mass-mailing type of broadcasts, where if you send a lot (or receive a lot) you are then asked to pay a little bit more. The have 4 million active users already, and 400,000 communities already set up within SMS All. They are the biggest SMS based social network in Pakistan (probably in the world) and are now starting to expand abroad. Very VERY clever simple service that brings 'communities dominate' social networking experiences to those who are not yet owning a PC or tablet or smarpthone and can't use the 'traditional' big social networks like Facebook. They have all the usual suspects from user-generated content to citizen journalism to various political parties using it - they will have the actual political party internal elections even run on SMS All for one of the parties that is very active in social media. There is advertising and sponsoring and a free version on a limited scale where you can have the basic services totally free. Brilliant!

Brilliant, brilliant service - congratulations to the team that set it up, and if you want to spread a story of good will from the Emerging World markets, here is one fabulous success story from Pakistan. SMS All. And I hope this spreads soon to all major parts of the Emerging World, lets not keep it only a Pakistani secret, eh? See more at their website SMS All.

Understanding OTT - Why Carriers dislike BBM, hate iMessage and fear Skype (updated)

I was just speaking in the Netherlands doing a keynote at the Mobile Convention. As I was in town, the news broke that the local incumbent fixed and mobile operator, KPN, was laying off 5,000 employees in an austerity measure, and simultaneously, Carlos Slim's America Movil was making an offer to buy about a quarter of the company. KPN has significant telecoms presence in several European countries like Germany and Belgium. America Movil is the giant telecoms giant out of Mexico, and Carlos Slim is obviously the richest man on the planet. Why would this be relevant to OTT, Over The Top business? Because KPN was the first major telecoms operator to report a significant decline in its core SMS text messaging business, that drives more than half of the profits for most European mobile operators. KPN made that announcement a year ago. Since then they have had disappointing market news quarterly, and their share price had fallen so much, that clearly Carlos Slim felt they were a good value in terms of a step into the European telecoms market.

GET DOWN WITH OTT

With that, rather clumsy intro, lets look at OTT. What am I talking about. I'm talking about BBM, Blackberry Messenger. I'm talking about iMessage and Facetime on the iPhone. I'm talking Google Talk, MXit, Whatsapp. And of course I'm talking about Skype. Over The Top providers will offer bypass services, typically for the most profitable parts of the telecoms business, via apps loaded to smartphones. If you want to save money from your SMS messaging costs and you have a Blackberry, then use BBM. If you have an iPhone, then its the iMessage. In those cases, your friends will also need to have the same service that exists only on that same platform. Or if you have friends with different smartphones, you can install Whatsapp, and send and receive mobile messages free, shared with any friends who also have Whatsapp. 

Skype we all know, we can do free phone calls via the internet, in addition to the messages, and we can also do videocalls over the internet. All free.

Consumers love OTT services, obviously. And businesses like those savings too. But the telecoms operators hate them. And then the hatered comes in flavors, depending on who it is and what they do.

OPERATOR ECONOMICS 101

So lets look at the very basics of telecoms operator business. In 2011 the mobile industry earned 1.3 Trillion dollars. Most of that was not the costs of our handsets or other 'hardware' such as the telecoms networking infrastructure. Most of the business - 77% of it actually - was on the services side. Most of that 1.0 Trillion dollar service revenue pie, went to the telecoms operators. And of their income, 65% came from voice calls, and 19% came from messaging. So out of the total mobile telecoms revenue pie, 84% came from voice and messaging. That a large share for essentially just two services.

But more important than revenues is profits. Roughly speaking 50% of global mobile operator profits came from voice calls, and 45% came from mobile messaging. So voice and messaging generted 84% of revenues, and 95% of profits for the mobile industry's biggest players. Now you see? These are truly the 'cash cows' that keep the industry alive. A dramatic threat to either one of these two services would be a catastrophic menace to the very survival of the mobile operator involved. If anything were to actually jeopardize both voice and revenues - that would be the existential threat to the very industry.

UPDATE - May 12 - AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson was interviewed at NY Times. He says he stays awake at night because of OTT services like iMessage. (So I'm not just making this stuff up, it really is an existential threat here we are discussing. OTT services are the biggest headache for mobile operators/carriers worldwide)

Now the rapid rise of iMessage or Whatsapp takes a brand new meaning. It is nice for us consumers to make calls on Skype but the revenue and profit drain is enormous. Lets now look a bit at recent stats reported about the OTT business.

WAY, WAY OVER THE TOP

The UK is a highly competitive telecoms market with many similar-sized real network operators, and also many viable and sizeable virtual operators (MVNOs) and a market where voice call tariffs and SMS messaging tariffs tend to be among the lowest in Europe. The bundles to get big buckets of free voice minutes or messages are plentyful on all networks. Roughly speaking half of the market is with prepaid customers and half postpaid accounts. There are both subsidised handsets and unsubsidised handsets. There is no dominant domestic player and unsually for most markets, the past national monopoly service, British Telecom, sold its mobile asset, so there is no dominant major legacy player with both a fixed and mobile network to run. The UK has been near the lead in most of the major technical and user-adoption issues for mobile, an early indicator market for Europe and considered one of the more advanced mobile markets also globally. The UK is a very good test case for many mobile matters. A test laboratory, if you will.

We just heard from a survey by MyVoucherCodes of the UK's OTT market. 81% of British mobile phone users have installed an app for at least one OTT service. Four in ten UK mobile phone owners with an OTT service, have also shifted away messaging traffic from traditional SMS, either partially or completely. That means 33% of the total mobile phone user base in Britain.

One third of British mobile phone owners has not only installed an OTT app, and uses it, but likes it so much, they have already shifted part or all of their messaging traffic away from SMS. That is massive. Remember, 19% of mobile operator revenues and 45% of profits globally come from SMS. And in Britain already today, a third of the user base is shifting or has shifted away from this vital piece of the mobile operator business, sapping revenues and profits.

The even more damaging part of this evolution is, that the shift is most rapid and most complete, with the heaviest users. The youth. The heavily travelling. The expat foreigners. Those who used to generate a disproportionately large volume of the total messaging traffic (and revenues, and profits).

How big is the damage overall globally? Ovum measured for 2011 globally and found OTT cannibalization of lost revenues to mobile operators out of text messaging at 14 Billion dollars. When the remaining real SMS market was worth 126 Billion dollars, the theoretical revenue pie would have been 140 Billion. And messaging OTT provider have thus cannibalized about 10% of the total global revenues of SMS text messaging. How rapidly did this threat emerge and materialize? I count the start of mass-market OTT service in mobile from the year 2005, when Blackberry Messenger started to be adopted in many markets by the youth. So in the next 6 years the cannibalization of SMS revenues and profits has gone from zero to 10%. And if we project a standard S-curve to this number and the past 6 year growth pattern, we get the cannibalization level at about 20% by the end of this year 2012.

BAD BADDER BADDEST

Yes, I know thats bad English. I just like the Badness of it all. This is a blog, I can be a bit more casual with the language, get over it. But yes, lets look at a few of the OTT providers. The UK survey by MyVoucherCodes revealed that the biggest OTT provider in Britain is iMessage which is used by half of all who use OTT services. Blackberry Messenger came in second, used by four out of every ten people. Whatsapp had 37% and Skype 33% of UK messaging users who use OTT services. Kik was ranked 5th at over a quarter of all OTT users.

UPDATE May 11 - I have just spotted US stats to help further understand the market

A day after this blog went up, I found a US survey by Acision, which says that of US messaging oriented OTT services installed specifically on smarpthones (remembering that OTT apps also often are available on mid-range featurephones) Acision measured the US adoption rates among smatphone users as follows: Facebook 37%, Skype 17%, Twitter 17%, iMessage 11%, BBM 10% and Whatsapp 5%. And similar to the UK finding, most who use SMS have not stopped doing so even with OTT services. In the USA, even among smarpthone users, 91% send SMS regularly and 45% of smartphone-owning SMS users, (and many in this group even while having access to OTT provider solutions) say they would be lost without SMS. I should point out, that the survey was commissioned by a mobile messaging provider (Acision) but the survey size was significant at 1,000 US mobile phone owners. There is tons more data and findings about US messaging users both SMS and OTT in the survey, which was reported at Mobile Enterprise 

BIG REGIONAL DIFFERENCES

The OTT market is still quite fragmented and there are many regional or local players. The domestic market use of OS brand-specific OTT providers, iMessage and BBM specifically, depends very strongly on domestic penetration rates of that platform (iPhone, Blackberry) in that country (and specifically among consumer users when we consider Blackberries). iMessage is big in France but nearly invisible in India. BBM is nowhere in China but huge in Venezuela. And so forth.

So if we want to consider the level of fear and loathing from the side of operators/carriers, then there are roughly four levels of threat.

First there are the small players and regional players. These are certainly a threat, and in some markets - take MXit in South Africa for example, they can be a huge disruptive player. But globally, a carrier group would rate them still as the least dangerous threat.

Secondly come the OS specific platforms, specifically currently Blackberry Messenger and iMessage. Blackberry has some 75 Million users worldwide, so it is less of a threat than iMessage, which reaches about 150 million users of iOS devices, not just iPhones but also iPads and iPod Touch devices.

Third are the global cross-platform messaging companies, specifically currently Whatsapp. While the user number is still less than BBM or iMessage, Whatsapp has the threat to be on all smartphone platforms breaking past the barrier of one OS family. The global installed base of smartphones is over 900 million today (plus you can double that easily, if you add Java/Brew capable 'featurephones'). But still, Whatsapp has a long way to go to approach anything near that large a number of active users.

Fourth, and on the top with Over The Top, is one and only one: Skype. Skype has over 900 million users today, so just by virtue of being the biggest, it is the biggest threat. But where most OTT providers are single-service plays (mostly on messaging), Skype is a triple threat, doing voice calls, messaging and videocalls.

 

METCALFE'S LAW

 

And now we gotta come do some math. Don't worry this is not going to hurt. But telecoms operator staff tend to be engineers and they love their math. And they all know Metcalfe's Law. Metcalfe's Law is a law about communication networks. The law says that the utilty of any network increases in the square of the increase in its users. When you double the network use number, you increase the network utility to all users, not by double, but by quadruple (2 times 2, or in math terms, '2 squared' or 2 to the power of 2). So if your network user number grows by 3, the utility to all users grows by 3 x 3 = 9. This now gets interesting.

According to pure user numbers, iMessage is roughly twice (when measured by number of current iOS device owners, not necessarily active iMessage users) as big as BBM. But according to Metcalfe's Law, iMessage is four times as dangerous to carriers simply as a network to transmit messages.

What about Skype? It is 6 times bigger than iMessage (ie 36 times more dangerous) and it is 12 times bigger than BBM (ie 144 times more dangerous).

You notice how this gets frightening really fast. If carriers/operators 'disliked' BBM and tried to stiffle its growth, they honestly fear iMessage and are doing all they can to prevent its growth. How then would they react to Skype? Pure terror might be an appropriate term for their spontaneous unprompted reaction, I would say. 

And hey, that is Skype today, before Microsoft gets into bed with them. Now Microsoft is promising to integrate Skype into all their platforms, starting with Windows 8. Soon it will be on Xbox360 and on Windows Phone etc. Take you 900 million current active users, and add in 1 Billion Windows desktops. Yes, there is bound to be significant overlap, but even if we say the resulting Skype plus Microsoft juggernaut comes out at 1.5 Billion, that is 10 times bigger than iMessage - yes, not 36 times more threatening as Skype is today, but yes, 100 times more a threat when powered by Microsoft.

Thats just messaging. Messaging which delivers 19% of operator revenues and 45% of operator profits. Skype also kills voice calls where 65% of revenues and 50% of profits are today. And finally, Skype also destroys the future, because it cannibalizes consumer videocalls, something operators/carriers wanted to be a future revenue and profit stream in the 3G and LTE networks, using smartphones with the second, forward-facing cameras.

For whatever dislike, mistrust, fear and hatered any mobile operators have for BBM or Whatsapp or iMessage, that is simply exponentially more towards Skype. And I have not even started about the role of international calls and international call roaming to the profits of the mobile operators. Skype is like a guided missile, aiming for any place where a mobile operator has its best profitability.

THE EMPIRE STRIKES BACK

So how is the carrier community reacting. Any operator can react to low cost or cheap or free voice or messaging provider, by the obvious marketing tool - cutting its own prices. The operators tend to not lower their main public price for the voice minute or SMS text message, for example, but rather they use other methods by which they can focus the damage, for any price cut means directly a cut in profits too. So they give big (or ever bigger) bundles of free calls and messages at some price plan or point.

Then the operators try to set up something similar. For Skype VOIP calls and various Skype clones like Vonage, the operators have already been deploying VOIP based discount call services, such as those used for international calls. Typically you would need to dial some special prefixes on that operator's network, to access those cheaper VOIP technology based international calls. And on the messaging side, some operators have been starting to roll out clones of OTT messaging services like Whatsapp. In the USA, T-Mobile launched Bobsled, while in Spain, Telefonica has launched Tu Me.

And of course the operators also try to limit, cripple, shut down or charge extra for uses of those services, just like TeliaSonera in Sweden is now doing for Skype. Their (new) contract terms say their unlimited data plan explicitly excludes access to Skype and if Skype is used, those data charges will be above the standard all-you-can-eat package.

LEAST THREATENING OPTION

Now we are approaching the point where operators are making those hard choices. The actual decisions depend very much on what is in their home market, what kind of smartphone platfroms are popular etc. But consider for example BBM and iMessage. Clearly both are undesirable for the operator. But consumers want smartphones. Which one to support in marketing terms (from in-store promotions to handset subsidies)? So first, iPhone is already bigger by reach than Blackberry. But when you add the global iOS family of product to the iPhone side, and the few sold Blackberry tablets to the BBM side, you get a very lopsided picture, the reach of iMessage is far bigger. Then lets add data loads. A Blackberry often has a smaller screen, it is less optimal for web surfing, they are very well suited for messaging which has a trivilal data load footprint compared to modern web content like YouTube videos. Then compare to iPhones. They have excellent data consumption elements, a large screen, great intuitive browser and typical Apple goodies. And for messaging, an iPhone with its touch screen is never gonna beat a Blackberry QWERTY keyboard. Remember the UK stats, for most users who have installed OTT messaging services, they don't quit using SMS. So having a good messaging phone will increase the traditional messaging traffic versus a bad messaging phone. 

So an iPhone causes heavy data loads and is not causing increased messaging to the same degree as a Blackberry. Meanwhile a Blackberry has on average less web traffic but has far higher uses of messaging, both on BBM and on SMS. Then add the data compression which on the Blackberry solution is far better than any other smartphone. Finally add BBM and other Blackberry data plans, with most Blackberries, there is a revenue opportunity for the operator already built-in on BBM, which Apple of course does not give to the operator. On all these things, while yes, operators hate BBM too, the overall Blackberry package is far far less harmful for the operator total business, than an equivalent iPhone.

The same goes for Whatsapp, and yes, for Skype. Whatever option is out there, Skype is literally the most dangerous, the most harmful and most threatening. That is why carriers hate Skype above all others. That is why when Microsoft bought Skype, they were faced with an instant, global sales boycott of all Windows Mobile and Windows Phone smartphones - even as these did not come with Skype pre-installed. The carriers know that VOIP and OTT messaging are inevitable. But Skype is not inevitable. They will fight Skype till the last minute and message and videocall. And mark my words, the operators win in this game. We've seen this movie before. Nokia tried to bypass carrier services and make revenues for itself with something called N-Gage. The carriers said no you don't. Nokia's market share had a severe drop globally from 40% of all mobile phones to 24% and Nokia went back to the operators, apologized, and immediately ended the N-Gage app store with its side-loaded games and operator-bypassing software sales. Why could Apple then do it successfully? Its the Blackberry vs iPhone problem of today. When Apple launched the iPhone App Store in 2008, they were tiny in smartphones, only 10% of all smartphones and 2% of all phones sold. They were not a threat (then, they are now). Unfortunately it seems that Nokia's Stephen Elop has managed to fire or scare away all the senior management talent who knew the N-Gage story, as Elop clearly has not learned this lesson. As Churchill said, those who fail to learn from history are doomed to repeat it.

And if you think the carriers don't have this kind of clout anymore, ask Apple last year. Apple thought the iPhone loyalty and fan support is strong enough, that Apple could deploy a virtual SIM card to the 2011 new version of the iPhone (what later became the iPhone 4S). The carriers said no. Apple lost four months of sales, had to rush a redesign of the iPhone 4S with a real SIM slot and the carriers won. They won against Apple. Who wins against Apple?

And if you are a Microsoft fanboy, what of Microsoft then? The carriers promised to launch the Kin youth phones, Microsoft's first phones ever (two years ago). Then they didn't like Microsoft's arrogant bullying tactics, and after they took the marketing launch campaigns, and the phones hit the stores, they stopped supporting them. Microsoft pulled the Kin phone from the market - in six weeks. The shortest life of any phone ever created. Yes, the carriers have this power. They used it against Nokia when it was biggest in handsets, they used it against Apple when it was biggest in smartphones, and they have used it against Microsoft specifically, even before Microsoft angered them totally, with the purchase of Skype. Now the matters keep getting worse for Microsoft (and Nokia Lumia) as we just learned yesterday, that Nokia CEO had been telling the Nokia shareholders how dramatic world domination plans the Axis of Evil (Skype + Microsoft + Nokia) now have. But read that blog to hear the Nokia story, this blog is not about Nokia, this is about OTT platforms and why carriers dislike BBM, hate iMessage and fear Skype.

For those readers who might want to know more explicitly about the danger Skype poses to mobile operators, I wrote a blog about that last year. This is far more detailed and specific, and obviously only about Skype. Read: Why Do Carriers Hate Skype: Let Me Count The Ways.

OUR PREFERENCE IS NOT THE ISSUE

Please note, I am here to explain how carrier business works. Obviously for us, normal people, consumers, the OTT services are excellent and help drive innovation and lower costs. Those are all good things. I am not in any way suggesting OTT is not coming or will not take over for messages and calls. I do want my readers to understand why there is such a big difference among the OTT providers, and why the carriers are so nervous about this matter. As I mentioned, MY PROJECTION says 20% of all messaging revenues is going through OTT within a year, doubling from what it is today. I am not in any way suggesting we try to go back to a previous decade haha.. I am not saying what we want. I am saying what the operators/carriers think, and they decide which handsets are in the stores and which are sold to their customers. Thus the carriers control this situation. And if Microsoft were, for example, to put a premium price Skype on Windows 8, where the calls are not free, then nobody would use that, they'd go to free alternatives, obviously. So the purpose of this blog was to answer the question from many on this blog and on Twitter, who asked me to explain this part of the telecoms economy and competitive landscape. I am not here to defend carriers or suggest OTT should or even could be eliminated. What I AM saying, is that the carriers have power to pick one over another, and in that contest, Skype is already doomed.. 

WHO IS THIS GUY?

Oh, and those who ponder who is this silly Ahonen with his weird views? I'm the most published author in the mobile industry with 12 books out already and explicitly, I wrote the industry's first business book, how to make money with mobile (M-Profits a multiple bestseller, translated etc). In that book I discussed this opportunity and threat - literally 10 years ago - so I didn't discover the OTT issue with iMessage last year or BBM a few years ago, haha. Before I worked at Nokia, I was employed at Elisa Corporation (Finnish carrier/operator) in the 1990s. and as the head of our international products I oversaw our trial of an early VOIP service in 1997. I've been personally actively involved in the BUSINESS of this opportunity for 15 years, literally, and written 'the book' about the mobile carrier/operator business. If you think Tomi is a weirdo, think again: I am referenced in over 120 published books already, by my peers. If you think my thoughts here are weird, the real experts of this industry - the ones who write the books - they trust me. You might consider re-reading this blog with that in mind.. And I'll be here in the comments to chat with you too. Just remember my rules of comments on this blog - don't be rude to my readers, stick to this topic of this blog article (you must illustrate in your comment that you read the full article else I remove your comment as a waste of the time of my readers) and don't use profanity. I also remove spam and some obvious troll comments but you don't have to agree with me, I keep very hostile comments here on this blog critical of me and calling me mad etc. Thats all fine, I will be here ten years later after another 10 books and those comments will be very petty by then haha..

Video of my Keynote in New Zealand on Future of Telecoms

This is a video of me in Auckland New Zealand two weeks ago, where I delivered the keynote to the Telecomnz confernce called Tel.Con. 




The presentation looks at how will money be made in the future of telecoms. I discuss such critical topics to telecoms as 'Peak SMS' how long can text messaging revenues and profits sustain mobile, smartphone migration rate, how long will it take and can all phones become smarthpones, and my latest view to the Grand Convergence we will see this decade. I talk about the astonishing developments in mobile money, the 9 Unique Abilities of Mobile, and what happens when money and advertising merge - ie Advocurrency. The presentation runs 50 minutes and the video is very well produced. Oh, and even if you don't want to see the full video, check out the video at about 47:30 what happened on stage haha, this is a memorable event for me for that reason (was first time for me haha)

The Virtual Tupac via 2D/3D holographic projection, the dead rapper returns

This is so amazing. While this is the quarterly reporting season and thus there are many stories here on the Communities Dominate blog about smartphones, there is life in the world beyond smartphones too. And this is a truly amazing story. Plus its about a rapper and me being one of the world's oldest white dude European fans of rap music haha - of course I have to celebrate the return of Tupac.

Tupac Shakur was a chart-topping rapper who was killed very early in his career. There are some recordings of his performances and some music videos etc. But now, a company called AV Concepts has worked with the record label and helped create a virtual avatar version of Tupac. So this is not using his films and videos to create something out of past recordings like they did for example with Michael Jackson's death. No, this is an actual human-sized and very realistic robotic avatar, created with programming not just to look like Tupac but to move like him with his mannerisms etc, and of course to sound like him. And that virtual Tupac just made his stage debut in California with Dr Dre and Snoop Doggy Dog.

Now, this is not a real holograph like say the Princess Leia character in Star Wars. This is using a magician's stage trick with a projection on a glass pane, but to the audience he looks perfectly real and the two other rappers were able to choreograph their moves and rhymes to work with Virtual Tupac. It is the modern digital virtual electronic version of a animatronic puppet like you might see in Disneyland but this is far more realistic, and it being only software, they can easily make this new Virtual Tupac to change his dance moves, sing different lyrics, say hello to the audience etc. It is VERY cool technology. Take a look at the AV Concepts site for a video. And here is MTV news covering the story. 

Ok, Am Willing to Call It: AR is the 8th Mass Medium (Augmented Reality)

I'm the guy credited with the term '7th mass medium' which explains why mobile is unique and distinct mass media from say comparing to the internet or TV or print. Since my book came out (Mobile as 7th of the Mass Media) in 2008 (a global tech bestseller, thank you all who bought it) - many keep asking me what is the 8th mass media. And up to now, I have said I don't know.

Last year a friend and colleague of mine, Raimo van der Klein (a long-time MoMoista - Mobile Monday - from the Amsterdam MoMo chapter) now the CEO of Layar, the Augmented Reality (AR) browser company, suggested that AR is the 8th mass medium. I thought about it then, and as the only commercially practical uses of AR in 'mass market' uses (for consumer media, not for example military goggles for fighter pilots) were on smartphones, I felt AR was only a media format for mobile. I did immediately accept that AR was at least the 8th unique ability of mobile haha, for which obviously Raimo gets the credit. And I told him I'd keep my mind open about it and consider what evidence we might have of the future of AR.

Now I read a Tweet from another very dear friend of mine, Antti Ohrling, known in the past for co-creating Blyk and earlier for his award-winning digital ad agency of Finland, Contra. Antti is one of those superduper bright people that whenever you meet, you feel like you want more time, and just hope you could take a tin-can opener, open up their brain, and just eat it all.. Like you know, our Alan Moore, or Dan Applequist or Jouko Ahvenainen or Richard Ting or Jonathan MacDonald or Lars Cosh-Ishii or Russell Buckley or Matti Makkonen or Mike Smith or Rory Sutherland. People who really REALLY get mobile - and get digital - and have lived this industry for decades and have enormous insights. So Antti retweeted something about those cool Google glasses we heard of last week. He did not even make the statement that shook me, it was an article written at Tech Crunch by Josh Constine, entitled 'Apple and Facebook should be Terrified of Google-Tinted Glasses'. Now, the headline is somewhat typical 'hype' headline as most modern tech articles seem to be (just look at my overhyped blog article titles often haha). But for Antti to bother to retweet that, I sensed Antti agreed with the sentiment of that headline..

And I would trust Antti's judgement 100% (I am tempted to say 101% but I am too much the stats-nut to know its not possible to give more than 100% haha) and it didn't take me long into that article for a massive thought to emerge. Yes, AR is cool on smartphones. But that is 'part time' use of AR. What if AR was the first unavoidable mass media channel? The first pervasively consumed mass media? Mobile phones as we know from the 7th Mass Media theory, have unique abilites such as being always connected and being permanently carried. So too will be AR (on glasses) but we don't consume media on our phones in uninterrupted way. The media consumption is in our pocket but we also put it into our pocket, away. These AR glasses by Google will change all that. We are seeing the birth of the first pervasive mass media (that might not be the best term, I have to think about it). So yes, am ready to call it. Augmented Reality is the 8th Mass Medium. And thank you Raimo van der Klein for discovering it, and for first postulating that might be so. I am your first convert haha. Here is the new list in order of their introduction:

1st mass media PRINT - from 1400s (books, pamphlets, newspapers, magazines, billboards)
2nd mass media RECORDINGS - from 1890s (records, tapes, cartridges, videocassettes, CDs, DVDs)
3rd mass media CINEMA - from 1900s
4th mass media RADIO - from 1920s
5th mass media TELEVISION - from 1940s
6th mass media INTERNET - from 1992
7th mass media MOBLE - from 1998
8th mass media AUGMENTED REALITY - from 2010

Note also how instrumential Google has been in this development. The first Layar AR mass market solutions were on Android smartphones. And now again its Google goggles that helped jumpstart this fledgling media industry. Wow. Google is 'creating' a massive digital media environment for itself to thrive in. If anyone learned the lesson of 'creating new market space' haha as Alan Moore and I argued in the signature book to this blog, Communities Dominate Brands, where we used Apple's iPod and iTunes as the perfect case example - haha, Google learned that lesson and then put the Google massive scale spin to it indeed. This is a new mass medium and it will be massive. MASSIVE. I would suggest immediately that it will be far bigger than the 5th media TV and 6th media internet, and I am willing to suggest, it may become bigger than mobile the 7th media itself. Awesome!

I will return with much more on this but for now, wanted to post it and celebrate. Now we know what came after mobile as a mass media channel, it is AR. Feel free to share the info, the updated list, and links to this blog. Am looking forward to comments!

Largest Mobile Social Networks Today by Size of User Base

Facebook has just bought Instagram for a cool 1 Billion dollars. Congratulations to both. But the news seems to be suggesting Instagram is the biggest mobile social network. It is far from that. It may be the biggest social network purely for mobile - in the USA - but that is hardly the biggest in the world. I became curious to find a convenient list of the biggest social networks on mobile, thinking surely such a list exists somewhere - this being the hottest focal point and future direction of the hottest industry right now. I was surprised such a list doesn't exist (or at least I was unable to find one easily). I think a good page should be set up at Wikipedia but while we await that, lets collect my best understanding of the biggest social networks as measured by their mobile users. This includes both 'pure' mobile social networks and the most recent counts of the largest online social networks by their mobile user base. No surprise who shows up on top, either..

LARGEST SOCIAL NETWORKS ON MOBILE, END OF 2011

Social Network (Owner) . . Users . . . Home Base

Facebook mobile . . . . . . . 425 M . . . USA
Mobile QQ (Tencent)  . . . . 200 M . . . China
Sina (Weibo) . . . . . . . . . . 150 M . . . China
RenRen  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 61 M . . . China
iMessenger (Apple)  . . . . . . 58 M . . . USA
Mig33 . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 55 M . . . Singapore
Twitter mobile . . . . . . . . . . 55 M . . . USA
Blackberry Messenger . . . . 50 M . . . Canada
Mxit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 M . . . South Africa
Nimbuzz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 50 M . . . Netherlands
Skype Mobile (Microsoft) . . 40 M . . . USA
Gree . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 35 M . . . Japan
Instagram . . . . . . . . . . . . . 30 M . . . USA
Mobile Cyworld (SK)  . . . . . 25 M . . . South Korea
Mobage Town (DeNA)  . . . . 25 M . . . Japan
Mocospace . . . . . . . . . . . . 22 M . . . USA
Whatsapp . . . . . . . . . . . . . 20 M . . . USA
FourSquare . . . . . . . . . . . . 15 M . . . USA
Mixi . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  15 M . . . Japan
MyGamma (Buzz City)  . . . .  5 M . . . Singapore
Flirtomatic  . . . . . . . . . . . . .  4 M . . . UK
Itsmy  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 M . . . Germany
Funbook (XL)  . . . . . . . . . . .  2 M . . . Indonesia
Frenclub . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  1 M . . . Malaysia

Source: TomiAhonen Consulting Estimates April 2012
The above information may be freely shared

Please note, that this is a preliminary and incomplete listing. Secondly, before you complain that Facebook has over 800 million users etc, remember, I am counting the MOBILE users.

Thirdly, I would welcome any and all corrections and revisions, especially any mobile social networking services that are missing from the above listing. There are many national and regional social networks that are almost impossible for me to discover and find, especially when their native language is other than English.. So please accept the above list as 'preliminary and incomplete' as of 10 April, I hope to be able to add a lot more to it, as I post this blog and also request assistance from my Twitter followers and the Forum Oxford community.

A few special mentions. I could not find any official number for Skype Mobile users. I did find Android and iOS Skype app download numbers. From the iOS number I arbitrarily assigned Apple's iPhone percentage ie 58% as in the strict definition of 'mobile' the iPod Touch is a portable/pocketable device, not a 'mobile' device, and the iPad is an ultraportable PC but not a 'mobile' device, only true cellular permanently connected pocketable devices (ie those that 'ring in the pocket') fit the definition of a mobile device. Hence I only count iPhones not iPads or iPod Touch's and used that iPhone percentage of all iOS devices. And I assumed that of all Skype apps ever downloaded, still 90% are in use on smartphones (total wild guess, I have no better data). Same with the iMessenger number as 58% from total Apple official iMessenger users, except obviously am counting 100% of the iPhone iMessenger users being active as its a relatively new service vs Skype thats been around much longer.

But yes, as a service to all who are intersted in social networking, or mobile, or mobile social networking haha, please accept the above as a listing of the biggest social networks today, by the count of their mobile phone based users.

And one shameless plug, as it is directly relevant to this blog posting. For those who want to read more about the fastest-growing part of the digital space, where the biggest money is being made right now, you may want to read the first book that focused only on the mobile side of social networking, Tomi Ahonen Pearls Vol 2: Mobile Social Networking. The ebook runs 173 pages and costs only 9.99 Euros. Take a look at the book description here, the only place where the ebook is sold: Tomi Ahonen Pearls Vol 2: Mobile Social Networking.