Smartphone Sales: Blackberry #1, Palm #2
Filed under: Market Research Statistics, Mobile Phones
I still like Blackberry best, but if they completely walk away from their traditional keyboard, the exact one I have been using since 1999, I may be tempted to follow a lot of my colleagues and try out a Treo. I won’t switch to any new smart phone or PDA unless I can type 50+ words per minute on it. I’ve tried the newer Blackberry keyboards and they are miserable.
Maybe I’ll use my Blackberry 7290 for the next 10 years the way one of my friends still uses his HP Jornada with DOS from about 1992 for searching the scriptures. He says there has never been anything better…
Palm has made significant strides in the smart phone market, capturing 29 percent of U.S. sales, which is second only to BlackBerry, with 51 percent, according to IDC. Sales, though, have slowed in recent months, prompting Palm officials to lower its revenue forecast.
Of course, my father used an analog computer in 1959 for machine tool selection. It had 19 dials. You changed all the settings to get output. He said no modern all-purpose computer with machine selection software has ever been better for this function than the dedicated computer he used back then.
US Market Mobile Content Will More Than Triple by 2010
Filed under: Business Models, Market Research Statistics, Mobile Phones, Provo Labs Companies
If you run a business with an internet strategy, hopefully you’ve started thinking about a mobile strategy as well. You need to skate where the puck is going and not where it has been.
IDC estimates that 24 million US mobile phone users will pay for some kind of TV/Video content or services by 2010, up from 7 million this year. That is a sizeable market share. And it will only get bigger.
Provo Labs has two investments in the mobile space: one is Commerce Fly (pre-beta), a mobile SMS alert system for consumer product pricing alerts. If you are interested in stocking up on sugar from your local grocer when it hits a 52-week low price, Commerce Fly will enable that. We are looking at applications in potentially dozens of vertical markets. Grow Utah Ventures is our partner on this startup. I am especially looking at using mobile alerts in the real estate space, to give home buyers and real estate agents an edge.
The other is a recent investment we made in an ebook publishing company, with thousands of ebook titles (including a popular Bible Study suite) that can be downloaded from various mobile content websites, such as Handango.
We also have 10Speed Media with its innovative online video distribution strategy where corporate video content and advertising can be downloaded to video iPods and other mobile devices.
Now the strategy will be to use CommerceFly and Packard Technologies to enable other Provo Labs portfolio companies to implement mobile content and mobile alert strategies, when it makes sense for each of them.
The question for you is, what is your mobile content and mobile software strategy?
One of the biggest challenges with mobile is that the carriers control so much of what happens on phones. I have a Google Alert for “off deck” and one for “off portal” because those are the keywords that describe how content and software companies are able to go around the mobile carriers and find ways to sell directly to mobile customers. At CES in January there were lots of discussions in the mobile phone panels about off deck revenue growth both in the U.S. and Europe.
Let me know what your thoughts are about how to develop a mobile strategy, and who the best partners are for web companies trying to extend their reach.
Steve Jobs Was Right; I Was Wrong — I Wanna Own My Music
Filed under: Audio, Business Models, Internet Subscription Models, Market Research Statistics, Mobile Phones
Because I was highly involved in the online content subscription business of Ancestry.com in the late 90s and early 00s, I thought I was pretty smart. When Apple jumped into the music industry with its iPod and iTunes service, I thought they were pretty smart, but I also thought that everyone else ganging up on Apple would cause a big dent in its music business, and that eventually the iPod would go the way of the Mac, and end up with a relatively small market share. I especially thought Steve Jobs was wrong when he said customers wanted to own their own music and not rent it. How could a pay-per-download model ever compete with an all-you-can-eat subscription model that would give me everything I ever wanted for a low monthly fee?
I had a Rio mp3 player back in 1999 or 2000, so I had a little experience with mobile music. But I had a lot of experience with online genealogy where basically every customer wanted unlimited access to everything. The subscription model worked great with genealogy. Every day we added new data. Every day customers had more content to search through to find their ancestors. I believed all-you-could-eat subscriptions were the way to go. I assumed this would be true in the music industry as well.
So I bought my first iPod, a 20GB version about 3 years ago, and I had lots of trouble with it. The battery went bad pretty soon. I had trouble with synchronization. And many of the audio books I bought on Audible were downloaded in a format that didn’t seem Apple friendly. I was pretty unhappy.
Later, I bought a Creative Zen, a 30GB, I think, and decided to try Yahoo Music, an unlimited music subscription service that launched with a great introductory offer of $6.95 per month. I was sure that a non-Apple player combined with an all-you-can-eat non-Apple music service would be much better than the Apple approach.
But the Yahoo Music service was not compatible with my Zen. I think I paid Yahoo for 3-4 months before getting around to cancelling the service. So then I turned to Buy.com, with its BuyMusic.com web site, and I started buying tunes there. But a lot of songs I wanted I couldn’t find there. And I had some difficulties getting the music onto my Zen. The music management software I was using was actually not that great.
Finally, a month or so ago, I decided it was time to try an iPod again, and this time it would be a video iPod. I needed to get some of the 10Speed Media video productions on a video iPod so I could show the work to potential customers. I also wanted to get tons of LDSAudio.com and mp3books.com content onto an iPod and start demonstrating the power of LDS audio and video clips to employees and customers of our LDS Media company.
So I bought a 60GB video iPod. I started using iTunes, which now has excellent synchronization, a way bigger supply of music than anyone else, a great podcast directory, and it’s easy to get videos onto my iPod as well.
More than anything, I have come to believe that Steve Jobs was absolutely right. People want to own their music. They don’t want to rent it. There are probably only a few hundred songs that I’ll ever want on my iPod. I have my running music, my easy listening music, and I want to listen to tons of podcasts and audio books. But music? Just my favorites. And I’d love to own them, thank you very much.
I have decided that the concept of an all-you-can-eat music subscription is really not that great of an idea for most people. We have the songs we love and we might occasionally start liking a new one. But paying $14.95 per month to try out lots of new songs? No thanks. I just want my favorite music, mainly songs from the 80s. I like to listen to the same stuff over and over and over again. Give me Earth, Wind and Fire’s “In the Stone” and Gloria Estefan’s “Turn the Beat Around” every time I run. I need those songs. I don’t want to sample new music when I exercise.
But with other types of content, like audio books and video, anything educational, I want variety. I almost never want to see the same movie twice. So I would want an all-you-can-eat subscription model there. With audio, I want to hear lectures from new conferences or from universities every month–different ones every time. So I want an unlimited subscription there, with new content being added regularly.
But Steve Jobs was absolutely right about the music. I do want to own it.
And now he owns me.
I am now an Apple iPod and iTunes fanatic. Apple has nailed it. From the awesome out of the box experience in opening the iPod to the feel of it in your hand, to the amazing video display, and the simple earphones that don’t have ear buds that keep falling off, to the incredible iTunes selection for music, podcasts, and video — the whole experience is phenomenal.
So it’s no wonder that consumer surveys show that Jobs was right and that consumers want to own their music..
Here are some interesting stats: 20% of Americans now own an mp3 player, up from 15% last year. 54% of teens do. But only 25% of mp3 users buy songs from a download service. Mostly they rip tunes from their own CD collection (since they already bought the music once.)
So Jobs wins round one handily in the digital music wars. But he still has challengers on all sides, and the biggest potential challenges (based on all the hype and investment and TV ads) might be the mobile phone companies. A few months back I read that more than 950 million devices capable of playing mp3 music would be shipped in 2009 alone, and that most of those devices would be cell phones.
So how will Apple handle the challenge from mobile phones? Many people are speculating that an Apple iPhone is in the works.
Wikipedia has an amazingly comprehensive article on iPod (compare it to Britannica’s content on iPod in case you are skeptical of Wikipedia. Okay, to be fair, we can’t access Britannica’s premium content, but can you imagine them having a better article on iPod than Wikipedia? No way. Wikipedia gets updated regularly, whenever Apple makes a new announcement or has new sales figures or new models. Wikipedia rocks.)
The Future of Cell Phones: Point, Click, Learn
Filed under: Gadget Watch, Location Based Services, Mobile Phones, Social Networking Watch, Web 2.0
Here’s a great NY Times article about how Japanese cell phone users are able to point their specialized phones at buildings and monuments and get information about the location. More than 700,000 locations have information or advertisements associated with them already. or A San Francisco-based company called GeoVector is involved. This is exactly the kind of advance I have been hoping for, so that worldhistory.com, with its growing database of geocoded data, can find a way to deliver it to cell phone users. I’m looking forward to more advances in the U.S., but according to one of GeoVector’s founders, Peter Ellenby, they may be slow in coming here. (Release 1.0 interviewed him late last year.)
While I’m at it, I ought to mention two other interesting location-based services. One is Plazes.com, a German web 2.0 startup with funding, 5 employees, some traffic growth and an API. The other is Socialight, run by New York-based Kamida. It allows people to create StickyShadows, or geotagged notes, which can be viewed by others when they visit the same location later.
My favorite book about society and mobile phones is Smart Mobs. Can anyone recommend any other books about where mobile phones and location based services are heading?
Help Wanted: Mobile Content
At CES this year I attended several sessions on mobile content, and learned a great deal. One of the main things that I learned is that I am relatively ignorant about this space. I was embarrassed to not know what a MVNO was, and “off portal” and “off deck” were not in my vocabulary.
But since billions of people will have cell phones in the coming years and my driving interest is to provide wholesome, healthy, educational, historical, genealogical, family and religious content to people everywhere using any device, I need to dive into this space with vigor.
One VC post from last June explains the “off portal” concept quite well.
So here are a few questions I’m going to ask you to help me with.
Question: If you have rights to thousands of songs already, what is the best and fastest way to provide ringtones to mobile phone users? Would you work with an aggregator, or can you write software that cell phone users can download in order to start purchasing directly from you? How exactly does this work?
Second question: Provo Labs needs to hire a world class mobile content and commerce guru. We will have literally millions of pages of content (text, images) and tons of audio and video that we will want to deliver to people on their mobile devices.
What companies in Utah and outside of Utah should we be talking to?
Qpass seems to handle most of the mobile transactions. But I saw a report from Infospace’s recent earnings call that they reported a huge increase in mobile content transactions as well. Could they be a partner as well?
Does anyone want to join us and help us deliver our valuable and uplifting content to mobile phone users worldwide? Or help us get moving in the right direction?
2 Billion Cell Phones in Use
Check out this article from Reuters: Cell phone makers aim to get production costs to $20 per handset by 2007 and to $15 by 2008. Approximately 810 million mobile phones will be sold this year up from 680 million last year. 3.5 billion people live in areas with coverage who cannot afford their own handset, so lower prices means more market penetration.
From 1990-1997 I rode the CD ROM wave (Infobases); from 1996-2004 the internet wave (Ancestry.com, MyFamily.com, 10x Marketing); for the last 2 years I’ve been on the mp3 audio wave (LDSAudio.com, mp3books.com); and I’m determined to find a way to be involved in mobile phones (through content, community, search, audio, video, GPS and maybe even gaming) so that I don’t miss out on what is the biggest worldwide consumer technology wave so far.
A Billion Audio Players in 2009!
Filed under: Gadget Watch, Market Research Statistics, Mobile Phones, Telecommunications
Sometimes you see market forecasts that blow your mind. I remember
attending Jupiter conferences starting in 1995 where forecasts were
made showing hundreds of millions of internet users worldwide in the
coming years, and it was mind-boggling then. Now, estimates say we’re
over a billion internet users worldwide.
Any time I see a billion of anything, I’m pretty impressed. So I was
suprised and impressed today to see analysts forecasting that nearly 1 billion mp3 players (including audio-enabled cell phones and audio playing portable gaming devices) will ship in 2009–just four years from now.
I always love seeing forecasts that reinforce business decisions that I have previously made.
In 2003, seeing the uptake in mp3 players (mainly iPods), I co-founded a niche digital audio company (LDSAudio.com) which is growing every month and is now moving into the mass audio book market with mp3books.com (great site redesign coming soon!).
It makes me wonder what other megatrends exist that might reach “a
billion” someday. Will there ever be a billion bloggers, for example,
or even a billion people reading blogs? Or a billion GPS-enabled
devices? Or a billion digital wallets?
I’ve seen the forecast for 3 billion cell phones by 2010, but are there
any other consumer electronics devices on the horizon that will see
rapid worldwide adoption and ever reach “a billion?”
Steve Jobs has denied for months that iPods would be video-enabled, but
yesterday’s video iPod announcement was really no surprise. And now it’s just a
matter of time before everyone else jumps into the portable video game,
following Apple’s lead, and there are a billion portable video devices
on earth. Maybe by 2012 or 2013.
I’m guessing a billion digital cameras (mostly on phones) is not too
far away. Maybe Tivo and other DVRs (or is it PVRs) are on track as
well. And I bet Skype, Google Talk and other free voip apps will collectively reach a billion users within a few more years.
What do you think? Please share your comments.
Mobile User Demographics by Carrier
A fascinating report by M:Metrics on what kinds of cell phone users are attracted by each carrier, and how each carriers’ users consume mobile content.
LDS PDA Products
Infobase Media Corp (one of our portfolio companies) has introduced its LDS PDA Library (in partnership with Deseret Book), which comes with hundreds of books that are ready for your Palm or Pocket PC. But more importantly, it works with the 2005 LDS Collectors Library so that you can save any of the 3,300 religious titles in that library — or portions of them — to your handheld.
As a RIM Blackberry addict, I keep suggesting a Blackberry version, and I know the company is exploring it. (Especially since Blackberrys outsell Palms these days.)
Has anyone out there used the Blackberry SDK? If so, any tips on getting started?
Crime Data Overlays on Google Maps
I can imagine a world where billions of people have portable devices (cell phones or mobile computers) with Google Maps.
They’ll be able to choose from thousands of databases wherever they are, and can overlay them on top of Google Maps, providing them with incredibly interesting and useful information for planning travel, shopping, housing decisions, and more.
Two weeks ago in Price, Utah I demonstrated Google Maps and Satellite Images with Local Search (way cool!) and told the audience to image Froogle data on top of Google Maps: where is the nearest place that I can buy X? I’m sure that won’t be far off. And it will be on our mobile phones soon enough.
Here’s an interesting one: http://www.chicagocrime.org/map/
I hope to have my own Google Maps implementation overlaid with some history data soon. I’ve got a project spec’d out, I just need a developer who wants to implement a project using the Google Maps API. Anyone interested?
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