Archive for the ‘mobile’ Category

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Morgan Stanley’s Mobile Internet Report Setup – pt. 1

Sunday, December 20th, 2009

The following screenshots are taken from a presentation deck of 92 slides. Some of the details are irrelevant to Web / mobile entrepreneurs & startups (e.g. carrier-side of things), and thus I save you the pain from having to read the whole thing. The Mobile Internet Report Setup is part 1 (of 3) of Morgan Stanley’s annual data dump covering the mobile + web industry.

(Click for larger image)

If you’re an entrepreneur in this space, now is the time to *not* fall asleep.

Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet Report Setup 2009

Smartphone market share is growing globally.

Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet Report Setup 2009

It’s the era of co-creation, nobody succeeds at it alone. A thriving 3rd-party application market place is key in a platform-play.

Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet Report Setup 2009

Counterintuitively, Internet usage on smartphones does not grow linearly to shipments of handsets (it’s much greater).

Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet Report Setup 2009

The Facebook + Apple combo = poster child for the future of mobile + web apps. Apple focuses on the handset superiority (hardware, app distribution), while Facebook focuses on the application software layer, user experience .. which in this case the mobile app strategically complements it’s core app (the actual Facebook desktop Web site). Facebook focuses on the viral network effects of its app, which itself is also a platform.

Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet Report Setup 2009

Facebook’s Web platform is also thriving.

Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet Report Setup 2009

Old news, but voice revenues are dropping and data is becoming more and more valuable for end users, and to carriers (to compensate for voice revenues).

Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet Report Setup 2009

Smartphones do make a difference in enabling users to really consume the mobile Web and apps. Feature-phones just can’t handle it.

Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet Report Setup 2009

Yet further proof that in this era, the democratized Internet will prevail. Iron-fisted dictatorships (*cough* Apple *cough*) will not win in the long run (my prediction anyways).

Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet Report Setup 2009

The rest of the world (ROW)’s mobile market usually lag what we see in Japan by a few years. Japan’s social networking trends shows us that social networking apps are increasingly being accessed from mobile at the expense of desktop.

Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet Report Setup 2009

8 years. ROW lags Japan by 8 years.

Morgan Stanley - Mobile Internet Report Setup 2009

Stay tuned for my summary of the other two slide decks .. those are some 600+ and 400+ slides long.

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Posted in apps, mobile, technology, trends, web 2.0 | Comments

Google Goggles (Giggles)

Monday, December 7th, 2009

Google just publicly unveiled this Labs project today called Google Goggles. The project is still in its infancy but you can already see some preliminary results that show what a game changer this application will be (see the video).

Excerpt from the announcement:

A New Era of Computing

Mobile devices straddle the intersection of three significant industry trends: computing (or Moore’s Law), connectivity, and the cloud. Simply put:

  • Phones get more powerful and less expensive all the time
  • They’re connected to the Internet more often, from more places; and
  • They tap into computational power that’s available in datacenters around the world

These “Cs” aren’t new: we’ve discussed them in isolation for over 40 years. But today’s smartphones — for the first time — combine all three into a personal, handheld experience. We’ve only begun to appreciate the impact of these converged devices, but we’re pretty sure about one thing: we’ve moved past the PC-only era, into a world where search is forever changed.

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Posted in innovation, mobile, technology | Comments

Ex-Google China Chief speaks on mobile internet, cloud computing, ecommerce

Monday, September 7th, 2009

It’s Labor Day, I’m still groggy from just waking up .. but this is a good piece worth sharing here if you’re looking for opportunities, and focused on mobile and cloud computing. Google’s China chief Kai-Fu Lee just left Google (some of us recall this as it was a controversial high profile hire because Lee was poached from Microsoft). Here’s what he is up to next, and his words from an interview with peHUB.

“There is a confluence of several things happening in China, and we’re at an inflection point of mobile Internet, cloud computing and ecommerce. It’s really now or never.

There is an abundance of companies here and VCs have lots of money, but there is a lack of angel funding and experienced entrepreneurs. It’s a compete imbalance. Whatever you might think of Y Combinator or Idealab in the U.S., the China market is different. China needs this type of business-building platform to hire and train people and provide angel funding, which is scarce.

There also is a worldwide economic crisis, which means that there is a bunch of strong talent out there that we want to hire, in order to start a lot of exicting businesses.“

On why it’s “now or never”, he says,

“Ecommerce in China has gone from 7% adoption to 25% adoption. Payment capabilities are just happening. Really, it’s a lot like the late 90s in the U.S. Remember how quickly Amazon and eBay and even Google search took off? You have to imagine the current Chinese Internet as news and games and blogging, but a big shift is inevitable. The average Chinese Internet user is just 25, compared to 42 in the U.S. That means they are getting older, getting more money, getting married, having kids… A rising ecommerce will lift all boats.

In terms of mobile, there are 650 million cell phones in China and mobile Internet usage is growing like crazy. It’s not just knowledge workers, but it’s also growing rapidly for groups like migrant workers and people making just a few dollars a day. They view it as the only way to access information, and with usage and volume a lot of things will grow.

There also is 3G, which is the one thing the Chinese government is going after and developing this year. In China, when the government wants to do something it happens.

For cloud computing: China has never really developed a software market, and what’s happening is like what’s happening in the U.S. – moving from packaged software to online or the cloud. In that process new businesses and models are starting to happen. If you look at the success of the Amazon platform or Google apps in the U.S., it will also be true in China because there are millions or people who want easy ways to build websites.

There is incredible opportunity right now.“

Via peHUB.

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Posted in business, cloud computing, entrepreneurship, innovation, mobile, problem-opportunity, regular reads, startup | Comments

A Thriving App Economy Key To Telcos, Social Networks, and Handset Manufacturers Survival

Monday, June 8th, 2009
  • Amazon.com was started with the idea that they would make money by shipping physical products. Today’s Amazon makes money by building a market place where every link that take you to a product is in fact an ad (revenue share). They make more money, not by shipping goods, but by referring customers to other goods.
  • In 2008, 3 billions apps where downloaded on the Internet, most on social network and mobiles. That’s 40-50 million daily active users
  • Today < 5% are paid apps, but that's ok because numbers shows that paid apps are trending up
  • Average app price people pay for is the price of an iTunes song, $0.99 – $2.99. There may be a threshold where people won’t pay
  • Many people have call-waiting which cost them $3.99/month, but do they even use it once a month? But you don’t hesitate paying for it again because they want the convenience of having it. Users will pay for apps
  • An app economy is emerging, with lots of little companies. There probably won’t be a big winners, but if you look at the aggregate, this could be a 1 billion revenue stream opportunity, perhaps a $10 billion market cap business.
  • It’s opportunity is viable, real, out there, just won’t support a large company today. A real trend that will continue grow. As Facebook grows, as smartphone industry grows, there’s going to be a need for new revenue sources to support these companies & activities.
  • Telcos: as voice rates continues to drop for telcos, flat-rate data plans begin to fill in these revenue gaps
  • Facebooks of the world: ad won’t support the model, need app-based economy
  • Take off your US-centric lens. People in other countries may not have iPhones but they do consume a lot of data apps
  • AT&T’s of the world: walled-gardens are coming down, because they are seeing the revenue opportunity. They will build their own app stores and take their 30% margin on the apps
  • As iPhone prices come down, AAPL will not be able to make money from hardware, they will increasingly need to rely on revenue from apps

The above is Ram Shriram‘s technology trend prediction, from the 11th Annual Top Ten Tech Trends at the Churchill Club. I couldn’t find the transcripts from that 2-hour long debate, so yours truly had to hit the YouTube replay a few hundred times over to capture the above. Too good to not capture!

You can watch the entire thing here:

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Posted in apps, mobile, problem-opportunity, silicon valley, social networking, technology, things to ponder about, trends | Comments

CNET’s “Android ‘a revolution’” key questions

Thursday, May 21st, 2009

The importance of thinking big, the big picture, scale, a product transcending products (a.k.a. a platform):

I’d much rather be the guy that does a platform that’s capable of running on multiple companies’ phones than just focusing on a single product.

A single product is going to have, eventually, limitations. Even if that was two products that’s going to have limitations. But if it’s a hundred products, now we’re getting somewhere, to the scale at which Google thinks people want to access information.

Proactively anticipating tectonic shifts in the landscape that would create a problem, and proactively attacking the problem now:

We look at it first from the scale perspective. The mission here is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and relevant. So the accessible part: think of a world in which you are somehow prevented from accessing the information you want. When I go to a hotel room and pay the $19.95 to get on the Internet and they have some firewall that doesn’t let me get to my Exchange server, it makes me berserk.

I look at things–and Google looks at things–in (terms of) how could the landscape change in such a way that consumers who want to access Google services can’t?

Full article here: http://news.cnet.com/8301-1023_3-10245994-93.html

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Posted in changing the world, google, mobile, regular reads, trends | Comments

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