Land Line Telephones

As bad as the broadcast side of radio is (ignoring the naivete and pandering of some) it could be worse.

Just look at the land line phone business (from the New York Times today).

"The young, hip, cool people have cellphones only, and that is bad news for traditional phone providers. In a survey of Internet users, JupiterResearch found that 12 percent “do not subscribe to fixed voice service, and nearly two-thirds of them are ages 18 to 34.”"

But the future looks worse

“12 percent of online users indicate their intent to replace home phone service with exclusive cellphone use during the next 12 months,”

Of course this could never happen to radio broadcasting. Ha, sure it couldn't. An industry must be driven by its customers. Media consumption habits and needs are changing, radio must change to meet those needs.

Lots More Cell Phones

Gartner predicts 1.28 billion cell phones will be sold in 2008 (not that analyst predictions turn out to be all that accurate).

More Radios in Cell Phones

Chip makers are cramming more and more radios into cell phones. But they're not FM radios (sorry David Rehr)

If radio wants to reach the cell phone user then they need to find another channel.

1000 People a Minute

According to a piece in the NYT today 1000 people a minute are getting cell phones

Getting Bigger and Bigger

CTIA just published new numbers for US cell phone usage (at the end of 2007).

84% market penetration

255.4 million subscribers

13.6% of households are wireless only (up from 8.4% in 2005)

2.1 TRILLION minutes used (you don't often get to use the word "trillion" unless you're talking about the US deficit)

363 Billion text messages.

All I can say is; "ZOUNDS this market is on fire!"

Bye, Bye, Land Lines

Wired reports that for the first time Americans are spending more on cell phones than land lines. Americans are giving up their land lines in increasing numbers.

It's starting to look like another industry going the way of the buggy whip.

My New Demo Phone

It's a Kyocera MARBL running on Virgin Mobile. The handset was $29. There's no contract, the airtime is prepaid. It's the cheapest, most plastic phone I've ever owned and Foneshow works great on it. Smart phones are less than 5% of the US market. While the big part of the cellular market isn't quite as cheap as the MARBL, demoing that your product works on the least common denominator of device really gets the point across that what we're building is a product for the mass market.

As a demo phone, it's great. It's got a good speakerphone. It's got an easy to access SMS client. As on all phones dialing a phone number embedded in a text message is merely a matter of pressing the send button.

ATT Hates Trees

Submitted with no further comment.

2008 Election

The Foneshow team spent a good chunk of time last week at conferences talking with customers for our political activism and campaign products. We saw a lot of people talking about the role video (YouTube et. al.) will play in the 2008 election cycle. My position leans towards concern. I suspect their will be an enormous number of "unauthorized" campaign commercials released. We have already seen a number of these types of ads (the Hilary "1984 ad", the Edwards "I Feel Pretty" ad, lots of videos of Giuliani in drag, there was a nasty one about McCain which I can't find now).

I believe that understanding provenance of a political advertisement is key. You need to understand the agenda of the people creating the ad to learn something from it. I suspect what will happen is there is going to be lots of noise and video will get lots of press, but in the end it will be a wash and online video will not play a significant role in who gets elected. I fear it could get so ugly as to turn people off of the process and keep them away from the polls.

While the video people may make all the noise in the 2008 election, I think we mobile people have more power to actually influence the outcome on election day. We can coordinate getting people to the polls. We can do micro-broadcasts to campaign workers on breaking issues. Our groups product can coordinate large remote teams of volunteers in the field in real time. We may even be able to use our interactive features in getting people registered to vote. Hopefully we can get more people better informed and participating.

At the end of the day, YouTube is another broadcast channel. Mobile is a communication channel. I believe politics in this country needs more communication and less broadcasting.

Land Lines are Dying

More than 25% of young Americans only have cell phones.

Link from Y! News.

Video on Cell Phones

I've been skeptical of video on cell phones for some time. I've mentioned it here and here. I've been meaning to blog about it for a while. Hunter (who runs some segment of video for Google and/or YouTube) reminded me to finally do it, so I am.

There are a number of real challenges to mobile video. Technology can solve many of them at some level. But one of them is much more fundamental and does not have a real technological solution. That problem is driven by biology, and by market forces. There are also a number of business issues involving the cellular carriers, but we'll assume the carriers will wise up at some point and those will go away.

Technology challenges include:

Battery life
Bandwidth
Local storage
Limited UI capability of handsets
Screen size

Batteries are getting better all the time. Mobile bandwidth is also improving (here in the US it lags, but that too will pass). Storage is always getting cheaper. Clever engineers can make good UIs. Screen resolutions are getting higher and higher.

Technological advances will solve many problems, but Moore's law will never give us better eyes.

A biological fact: Human eyes are limited in their capability. Very small complex video images, even at very high resolution, are difficult to see. It has more to do with the angle subtended in your field of view than with how many pixels there are. If you get a small screen close enough to your face to subtend an acceptably large angle, it will be too close for your eyes to focus on.

A market reality: People really like small cell phones.

So...

A) On one hand you have a downward market pressure for smaller and smaller handsets.

B) On the other hand to make video viable and viewable a handset needs to have some minimal X-Y dimensions.

If the dimensions required by B are greater than the maximum acceptable mass market size defined in A, cellphone video will be niche.

The iPhone will provide an interesting test here. There's been a lot written about the iPhone; battery issues, connectivity issues, storage issues. The one thing that is seldom discussed about the iPhone is how physically large it is. It's bigger than an iPod. It's bigger than a Treo or a Blackberry. It's MUCH larger than a RIZR or a KRZR. It's big enough to need a belt holster. It's smartphone size and smartphones are a niche market. The iPhone has 3.5 inch screen. I suspect that's about as small as you can go for an acceptable video experience. But a 3.5 inch screen necessitates a really big phone.

FWIW, I rarely see people watching video on their video enabled iPods.

Some Links

Sorry about the lack of posts recently, we've been really busy (in a good way).

MobiTV closes UK office, cuts off 3 and Orange. I owe you all a post about why I've been dubious of cell phone video for aeons.

There's a serious lobster shortage. Lobster Rolls at Red's Eats this year are $21! Eeek.

Podshow and Sirius have not renewed their contract. No one is talking about why.

Is Google making a big database of voices?

Bridge has new projections out,

"Growth of the podcasting phenomenon is severely limited by the process, according to this sample of the general population. A simplified process for listening to podcasts would greatly enhance the technology's growth potential."

Hey that's a good idea...

I love the GeekDad Blog

“It’s lonely when you’re early to the party.”

One of our favorite people is on one of our favorite web shows.

... and he's got a great line.

“It’s lonely when you’re early to the party.”

Both Greg Clayman and Howard Linzdon (Exec Producer of WallStrip) are friends of Foneshow.

Ubiquitous Platform

You know the platform has become ubiquitous when there are vending machines selling cell phones. My daughter Ellie and I check out the Moto vending machine in the international terminal of SFO.

Content Snacking

Since Candice asked about content snacking in the comments we'll tackle content snacking first.

Content snacking is not about displacing or changing your current media habits. Content snacking is the consumption of additional media in time periods when you have not previously been consuming media. It is media consumption between your larger media meals.

The type and form of media consumed in content snacking is different from media consumed through traditional channels. It tends to be "bite sized" in scope and scale. It needs to be micro-chunked, one topic per chunk. It needs to be easy to share with your friends. It needs to require little or no commitment on the side of the consumer.

Mobile is all about content snacking. Mobile media consumption will not cannibalize the channels through which media is currently consumed. Mobile opens up additional channels.

Many, Many Cell Phones

I almost never re-blog, but everyone with an interest in mobile should read this.

Now we have context. 800 million cars, 850 million personal computers, 1.3 B fixed landline phones, 1.4 billion credit cards, 1.5 billion TV sets. How many mobile phones in use today? In use today, yes, 2.7 billion (technically 2.7 billion in January, not December). They sold 950 million phones last year and the total worldwide mobile subscriber base grew from 2.1 billion to 2.7 billion. Three times as many mobile phones as automobiles or personal computers. About twice as many mobile phone owners as those of fixed landline phones or credit cards. And almost twice as many mobile phones in use as TV sets.

It boggles the mind. Looks like we picked a good market...

Erik's Obligatory iPhone Reaction Post

Looks cool.

EDGE? Non wifi browsing won't be fun.

No tactile feedback on the keyboard. I have to look at the keyboard while dialing/typing. That soft QWERTY keyboard is really tightly spaced.

I can't add my own applications?

No Java or Flash in the browser?

No wireless synch? Not even calendar or contacts via BlueTooth?

It's kind of big. Not so pocketable.

That screen+WiFi+BlueTooth is going to eat the battery before lunchtime.

I have a variety of opinions on the viability of mobile video, too many for this post.

It sure is pretty though...

I know this is iPhone version 1.0, but is it like iPod 1.0, or like Newton 1.0 ?

All that said, if Apple wants to send a unit over so that we can confirm Foneshow compatibility, I'll happily try it out (if I can wrestle it away from Nic).