Posts Tagged ‘technology’

Technology Macro-Myopia

Tuesday, December 29th, 2009

Quotable quotes from Morgan Stanley’s ‘09 “The Mobile Internet Report Key Themes” 659-slide deck:

It’s a very consistent pattern in this business that collectively as a society and as individuals we all suffer from what I call macro-myopia. A pattern where our hopes and our expectations or our fears about the threatened impact of some new technology causes us to overestimate its short-term impacts and reality always fails to meet those inflated expectations. And as a result our disappointment then leads us to turn around and underestimate the long-term implications and I can guarantee you this time will be no different. The short-term impact of this stuff [the Internet] will be less than the hype would suggest but the long-term implications will be vastly larger than we can possibly imagine today.

—Paul Saffo, 6/12/1995 Interview with PBS in Palo Alto, CA

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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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A change in direction: Python, Django, and Google App Engine

Saturday, June 13th, 2009

This is a cross-post from my other for-own-use developer blog. I’m posting it here because people often ask me what I’m so busy with.

It’s been a while since my last post; I have been real busy. Anyway, just to quickly say this, I’ve made a change in direction in my development efforts.

I’ve said earlier that I am determined learn a new programming language this year because my brain is starting to rot, but have since decided a few months ago that it will not be Cocoa Touch, for various reasons: too niche (the emerging global mobile apps market is highly fragmented by Nokia, iPhone, Android, Crackberry and possibly Palm as a viable contender), and skills here only attacks a small piece of my larger effort, which my gut tells me it’s a task that could probably be farmed out and done cheaper/faster by outsourcing to a iPhone dev shop where Cocoa Touch is their core competency.

A mobile app that does not utilize any connectivity, nay, “intelligent” connectivity, is not much different from calc.exe on your WinXP desktop. It’s fine for a narrow and specific, uninteresting task. An interesting mobile app would tap the cloud for some form of intelligence. Why not leverage that mandatory data plan from AT&T for your iPhone?

When the time comes, if necessary (such as if the iPhone app will be an important part of my competitive advantage), then I’ll pick up Cocoa Touch myself. For now, I do not think that will be the case, thus I’m going to spend more time on laying the groundwork for the more important piece: the back-end, web 2.0 / cloud computing / SaaS piece. And as Microsoft knows, as Tim O’Reilly says – nobody with their right mind would bet against the Web! (Have you seen HTML5?)

The past month or two, I’ve tried real hard to squeeze time in to learn Python, Django and Google App Engine – all at the same time in parallel, not sequentially. Yes, I’m trying to rush – because I am impatient.
(more…)

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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

Shai’s Divide and Conquer!

Monday, April 13th, 2009

Shai Agassi is a real genius—one of my rock stars that I’m just dying to meet. I’ve already got to meet the other big name in electric cars, Elon Musk from Tesla.

He has said before that he’s good at break big problems into smaller problems, solving the pieces, then aggregating the results. I’m not familiar with his work at SAP, but clearly he’s proved this with his divide-and-conquer approach to problem solving here. Computer scientists make some of the best problem solvers out there.

In this TED talk, Shai talks about a shift in thinking: viewing the electric car’s battery a discrete unit that’s interchangeable, vs. today’s mentality where the car is one with the fuel tank (who would buy a car without a fuel tank, or vice versa?)

I’ve previously blogged about unbundling production from delivery before with examples of Amazon.com and it’s IT infrastructure, mobile phones as a poverty buster, and this is kind of like that, but with other concepts tied in – e.g. subsidized pricing (e.g. like how cell phones are subsidized by carriers).

The analogy Elon Musk uses (I can’t find where he said this, but I swear I remember him saying this), is like air travel today. I can fly to Europe from California for $500. But that’s because I’m not the first person to ever fly on that plane, nor will I be the last; the same air plane gets reused over and over for many flights. The point here is that the owner of the plane doesn’t have to recoup the cost of the plane with a single flight, it is done over a period of time. The higher the utilization rate, the faster they recoup the investment.

That’s why Elon’s SpaceX goal of building a reusable rocket is so revolutionary (most people don’t realize this) and is an important step for man-kind. Imagine being able to fly to the moon or other planets in our solar system for the price of a flight ticket?

Back to Better Place. In Shai’s talk, he shows how battery for electric cars follow a Moore’s law-like curve; battery prices will drop as its technology increases. By unbundling the ownership of the car and the battery, you can increase the utilization rate per battery which result in people owning these cars having access to the latest and most efficient battery at that time (vs. someone stuck with the same battery for the lifespan of the car). Small but important point.

Shai’s a very cool guy who is literally, changing the world. I’m a big fan.

Check out his TED talk if you haven’t already!

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Posted in changing the world, cleantech, entrepreneurship, ideas, innovation, passion, people i like, startup, technology | Comments