Communications

Voice SMS, Network effects, or Creating a service people can actually use

Just because you've invented a communications service people want to use doesn't guarantee success.  You need a critical mass of users before any communications service is valuable.

It's interesting to see how this is playing out with the mobile industry's Multimedia Messaging Service (MMS).  In most markets, there are a dearth of MMS capable (and appropriately configured) handsets and interoperability issues between handsets.  So, MMS has been slow to take off.

What's happened?  Some enterprising entrepreneurs have launched Voice SMS, an audio messaging service that's taking off because it actually works with any handset, old or new. 

If you are interested, an article of mine, Voice SMS—Creating a Service People Will Adopt, has just been published in the NMS Telecom Innovators News.

What's after YouTube? Annotations — Mashups with anyone's video

China Internet users have reached some kind of critical mass, as interesting Web 2.0 applications are emerging.  Gang Lu at Mobinode describes Mojiti, which makes it easy for anyone to annotate a video — any video!  Look at the list of services they support.  One wonders when the copyright police will come after them — and what, if anything, could be done about a Chinese site.

Quoting from Gang Lu's post,

With Mojiti, you can tell your own stories inside online videos. Users can add text, hyperlinks, shapes, thought and speech bubbles, images and more anywhere on the video screen to narrate their own videos, subtitle videos with any language, or just comment on any scene. Its technology works by adding an overlay on top of video from all major video sharing websites (such as YouTube, Metacafe, Google Video and more) and in all major video formats (Flash, Windows Media, QuickTime). Users annotate on this overlay and Mojiti synchronize their annotations to the underlying video.

Most important for me, Mojiti is catering to western audiences with English as well as Chinese sites.  YouTube scoped the market for first generation video sharing communities, but Mojiti is poised to scope the market for video mashups!

When you consider that China already has multiple competing peer-to-peer TV services, some running for several years now, while we have only Joost (formerly the Venice Project), still an invitation only beta, it's clear the Chinese Internet community is as close to the bleeding edge as any in the west.

Mobile VoIP — When will it take off?

I've started writing a monthly column for Internet Telephony Magazine. My first article examines when and how VoIP will actually happen in the mobile space. 

Mobile telephony continues to be the fastest growing part of the telephony market, far exceeding VoIP in absolute numbers and in the scale of new subscribers and new revenue added per year.  But mobile voice telephony is nearly 100% based on circuit switching.  When will this change?  For answers, see my column in the magazine or on the web.

Interestingly, Internet Telephony Magazine doesn't offer RSS feeds for the electronic versions of their magazines, so there is no way to subscribe, on-line, to my monthly column.  I've bugged Rich Tehrani and Zippy Grigonis about this.  Feel free to add your comments.   :-)

Interactive voice & video on ATCA

CompactPCI and AdvancedTCA Magazine has published an article (pdf) I wrote about implementing interactive voice and video response (IVVR) systems in the AdvancedTCA architecture.  Until recently, these two areas have been rather disconnected. 

The AdvancedTCA market has started to take off — later than any of us expected back in 2001-2002, but it is finally happening.  However, ATCA adoption has been led by large (frequently ponderous) equipment providers and by high capacity packet-centric applications, for example, the SGSN packet router in 2.5G & 3G mobile networks — not a lot of media applications like IVVR.

Meanwhile the IVVR market has exploded in Asia and Europe, where 3G video telephony has been deployed, and NMS Communications is emerging as the leading technology supplier to IVVR developers.

Recently, we've started to see interest in deploying IVVR on ATCA.  We certainly want to foster this, as we've launched the first high capacity ATCA media product, our MG 7000A.  :-)

Awesome ways to display data

I looked at Gapminder a few months ago, after a mention by Tim O'Reilly (whose post also points to the excellent Worldmapper). 

But today, through a recent blog post by the data geeks at Swivel, I got a pointer to a video of Hans Rosling presenting his awesome visualizations at the February 2006 TED conference.  (It's 20 minutes, but well worth the time!).

Apparently after Hans Rosling's presentation at TED, Gapminder was invited to do a longer presentation at Google.  Then Google stepped up to host the Gapminder site (and presumably to sponsor their work).

By the way, if you are interested in data but not familiar with Swivel, check them out.  I'm looking forward to Swivel becoming the Flickr and YouTube of data.  All they need is some of Hans Rosling's technology.  :-)

Mobile phones vs. PCs to access the Internet - Crossover in 2007-08

As I catch up on back reading, I came on Tomi Ahonen's "Putting 2.7 billion in context: Mobile phone users".  It's a long but interesting article, worth printing out and reading in detail (something I can't do in the airport lounge) as it puts mobile phones in context:

...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.

Yes, that 2.7 billion subscriptions includes duplicates.  There may be 2.4 to 2.5 billion discrete users, but the context is clear.  More importantly for the Web 2.0 crowd to think about:

During 2007 the first cross-over will happen, with more users accessing via phone than PC. Fascinating data coming on that usage as well, the Japanese regulator reports that those who access the web via mobile phone do so more frequently than those who access via a PC. Similar data now coming from several converged (broadband and mobile phone) web services like Flirtomatic in the UK. Its no wonder Google's new CEO Eric Schmidt, says the future of the internet is mobile.

So pay attention to Internet and mobile phone usage in Japan, Korea and China as there, mobile phones are already the dominate form of Internet access.

Great Engineers - Brunel

More specifically, Isambard Kingdom Brunel.  I've been holed up in meetings which finally ended an hour ago.  So, since we're at the Paddington Hilton in London, I went to pay respects.

Tunnels, bridges, railroads, ships, and the Paddington Station — he did it all, and in a relatively short life.

Being here is very timely as, for Christmas, I got a copy of Brunel: The Man Who Built the World by Steven Brindle and Dan Cruickshank.  It's an easy and enjoyable read.

Under estimating future trends - like bandwidth requirements or mobile adoption

James Enck questions many of the estimates of future consumer bandwidth requirements, for example

BSkyB has publicly stated a working assumption that end-user bandwidth demand may double every five years.

and others, leading to:

I am uncomfortably reminded of other previous industry predictions which proved wide of the mark - "no one will ever need or want their own computer," "SMS has no potential as a consumer service," "mobile penetration will peak at 20%," "the public internet will never support acceptable quality for voice," etc.

I agree with James and would go further to suggest that doubling in five years is completely ludicrous — representing just 15% increase per year.  When I look at my personal, residential data connection, my capacity has grown from a symmetric 1200 bps Hayes modem in 1982, to an asymmetric 15 Mbps/ 2 Mbps Verizon FiOS service installed in the summer of 2005.  That's a 23 year history in which my download bandwidth grew 51% per year.  Even my lame 2 Mbps upstream service represents a 38% per year growth over the past 23 years.  Why should the next five year's growth drop to 15% per year?

Interestingly I was looking at a similar estimation error in a different field just a few hours ago — projected growth in the number of mobile subscribers for the next four years.  The particular report I was looking at was from one year ago.  I won't embarrass the firm, but they are globally recognized telecoms market analysts.  They estimated there were 2.1 billion mobile subscribers in the world as of December 2005 and they projected there would be 642 million new subscribers added by December 2009.  This is nuts!

According to their own estimates (confirmed by ITU data and other sources) there were 343 million new subscribers added in 2004 and 345 million added in 2005.  Why would the rate of additions suddenly drop to 160 million per year? or did they expect the rate of growth to tapper off to near zero in four years?  What were they thinking?

I don't know the answer for under-estimating bandwidth requirements, but I have a theory about under-estimating mobile phone adoption.  People don't believe Moore's law will continue.  If you expect mobile phone infrastructure will always cost what it cost in 2005, and people will never get wealthier (despite the positive economic benefits of mobile phones), then perhaps you could conclude there's a near term limit on how many people can afford mobile phone service. 

But Moore's law does apply!  Every year the capital cost to build mobile networks declines and every year the cost of low-end handsets goes down — in both cases, despite the ever increasing functionality of the mobile networks and handsets.  More than that, countries with growing mobile phone adoption also have growing economic prosperity, so more people can afford the every lower cost service.

Indeed, all indications are that we added more mobile subscribers in 2006 than in any previous year.  Even better for me personally, rumors are that Verizon is about to up the bandwidth limits on my current service from 15/2 Mbps to 20/5 Mbps.  Bring it on!

You only get one shot at capturing a new customer

When launching a new service, initial user experience is critical.  This seems obvious and yet it’s missed by startups and major players like Microsoft and Vodafone.  I’ve come on this three times in few hours:  3G video calling from Vodafone UK, a new Mac and a mobile social networking service that’s still in stealth mode.

First was an interaction with several folks in our UK office.  I’m in a meeting in London and, during a break, we were playing with Mobile TV services.  By far the most compelling service was Hong Kong CSL’s 3G Mobile TV service.  It’s actually interactive — one second channel changes! — because it’s based on 3G video calling.  It’s only available to CSL subscribers who are in Hong Kong and able to dial the CSL short code ‘888,’ but one of our folks had a private backdoor phone number that gives access from anywhere in the world — sorry, if I gave you that number, I’d have to kill you.  :-)

The glitch arose when I was experimenting with 3G-UMTS handsets, one from France, one from Hong Kong and two from the UK.  The first (Vodafone UK) handset I borrowed didn’t work.  After a few experiments it became clear the handset wasn’t correctly configured for any kind of video calling!  The answer was “Oh yes, I signed up for video calling, but it never worked.”  Then I asked the person currently setting up demos for next month’s 3GSM conference.  She had just purchased several demo handsets, being careful to test them in a Vodafone store because her personal handset has never worked!  Based on this sample of two, it appears Vodafone UK has problems configuring handsets for 3G video calling.  But the key point is, when the service didn’t work immediately, their customers gave up, and they never tried again (until forced by circumstances, i.e. an upcoming trade show).

That was at 10:30am.  At lunch, I sat across from a newly minted Mac enthusiast — a savvy executive with engineering and finance degrees.  After years of using Windows, he’d purchased a 24" iMac for use at home.  His whole rave was about how easy it was to plug in the Mac and immediately start using. it  As IT geek for family and friends using Windows, I know how people struggle to get a new Windows machine up and running.  For problems with really essential applications (needed for work or to communicate with friends), they ask for help.  Anything else, if it doesn’t work the first time, they don’t pursue it.

Finally, I’m involved in an email dialog with a startup that has a really interesting mobile service. At this time, service sign-up is via a website — OK for a US-only launch, but a problem when they move to other parts of the world.  My focus is on how they can instrument their web interface to track user behavior.  When they go to beta, they need near real time audits — the ability to quickly recognize problems and tweak the user interface to increase initial adoption rates.

Four hours, three incidents, one clear idea — focus on the initial user experience.  You only get one shot at capturing new customers, don’t blow it.

1-18: editted to repair HK CSL's 3G Mobile TV URL, which appears to have changed in the past 24 hours!

 

Peer to Peer TV

I've mentioned peer-to-peer TV in China, several times in the past, but I've never pursued the subject in detail, as I don't speak Chinese and I don't watch much TV anyway.  However, I was interested in The Venice Project as it's was started by the same team that brought us Kazaa and Skype, i.e.  Niklas Zennstrom and Janus Friis.

Last week I got an invitation for the beta courtesy of James Enck (Thank you!).  The initial installation failed, but after a brief exchange with the project team, I was able to get up and running this weekend.  On my Verizon Fios connection (currently ~15 Mbps / ~2 Mbps) audio was perfect and the video was very good but occasionally had brief pauses. I did a brief test at NMS HQ (6 Mbps / 6 Mbps) this morning between 7:30am & 7:50am.  Everything seemed to work very well until I stopped being able to connect to new channels at all.  I haven't pursue it further as I have some real work to do.  :-)

Most likely it will be next weekend before I have time to make actual measurements, on bandwidth consumption, etc.  But meanwhile, if you are interested, I just got two invitations to participate in the beta which I'd be happy to give to the first interested parties who contact me.

Asian submarine fiber route detail

James Seng has an excellent illustrated post showing submarine fiber route in Asia and providing an expert explanation of the impact of last Tuesday's magnitude 7.2 earthquake off the coast of Taiwan.

If you are at all interested in submarine fiber, the Internet backbone or the Internet in Asia, this is the article to read.  It beats anything else I've seen in the press.