Posts Tagged ‘trends’

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.

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

Can we contribute to a conversation without being present?

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

Update 12/16/2009 — My “minimum viable product” (or at least the first very rough iteration of it) is complete. Check it out here http://www.jaysernbot.com. See how my own Twitter account is own its own, chatting up people (screenshot of day 1) I have never discovered before. I would love to hear from you!

I’m a geek and I like to automate stuff, because it’s cool and I am lazy. Not that we aren’t already suffering from chronic email fatigue, but with the advent of social media / Web 2.0 – especially Twitter – the more you try to keep up, the more you actually fall behind.

This sucks.

Case in point: You have to be constantly checking Twitter about what’s someone’s saying about you, or saying to you, or what someone’s saying about something (perhaps a topic of your interest where you have some domain expertise) – if you want to participate in the conversation. If people are tweeting about the ice hockey game right now, and you chime in 3 days later, you’re already out of the conversation. It’s all real-time (or at least “near” real-time) now.

Does anyone else wish that you could participate in a conversation without having to be tethered to your Twitter client 24/7 ?

Tags: , , , , ,
Posted in problem-opportunity, things to ponder about | 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:

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

Tom Siebel on problems to focus on – if you’d like to change the world

Monday, February 23rd, 2009

Tom Siebel (from fame of Siebel Systems) identifies the next opportunities for entrepreneurs looking to change the world. Using surfing as an anology, these are the waves in the horizon—you have to paddle hard and fast now before it reaches you. The IT wave has already floated us far. And although IT will still play a large role in solving these problems, these are the broader world problems that need to be solved (technology is just the conduit for the solution).

The big problems are .. *drumroll*:

  • food
  • water
  • healthcare
  • energy

Counterintuitively for most technologists, these are all “lower in the stack” type problems. Why? Because more people are living longer/child mortality rates improving (thanks to advances in health care), hence an aging population – with inadequate health care infrastructure, especially in China.

Here are some notes from the Mark Logic CEO’s blog (that I mostly cut-and-pasted here, thanks to Dave Kellogg for actually transcribing):

  • He (Tom Siebel) did a long riff contrasting the period from 1980 to 2000 with what he anticipates in the period from 2010 to 2030.
  • The 1980 to 2000 period was a paradise of government policies, efficient capital markets, and a free flow of capital to information technology that ultimately created a $1T information technology industry.
  • IT growth was 17% CAGR from 1980 to 2000. From 2000 it grows, he says, with GDP at a rate more like 3%. “The party here is over.”
  • “It’s done. Tell me the next step that’s a replacement technology. Right now it’s all bells and whistles.”
  • The big picture from 2010 to 2030, he says, is (1) increased government regulation, (2) exponential population growth, (3) aging population, (4) increased demand for healthcare (of which 85% of an individual’s lifetime consumption is spent in the last year of life), and (5) energy scarcity.
  • It took from 8000 BC to 1750 AD to grow the world population to 1B. In 2008, it’s 6.5B. In 2028 it will be 9B. (Says the guy next to me: “and they’re all going to need to buy things — how is this bad?”)
  • These trends make for the following opportunities: (1) food, (2) water, (3) energy, and (4) healthcare.
  • Per-capita energy population is increasing exponential. So if you combine exponential population growth with exponential per-capita energy consumption, you end up with energy demand that is — pardon the expression — exponential squared.
  • He then discussed the concept of peak oil, an idea that I’d heard of but that I hadn’t known was postulated in the 1950s by an engineer at Shell. By 2020/2030, says Siebel, this gets to be a real problem.
  • He then said we have two choices: drill / drill / drill or invent / invent / invent.
  • He then discussed two initiatives he’s working on: (1) an Energy-Free Home Challenge that is soon to be formally announced, and (2) a new company called C3 that he was involved in founding.
  • The Energy-Free Home Challenge is a contest with $20M in prizes paid for by the Siebel Foundation (2007 annual report here). The goal is to find a way to build houses that consume net zero energy at the end of a year, built with no more expense than traditional construction methods.
  • C3 (which I think is related to the acronym carbon-conscious consumer) is a new company, run by Siebel veteran Pat House, that will make enterprise software to help companies manage their carbon footprint. The company started by calling together a panel of 29 experts during the summer of 2008. “Deliberations were concluded 12/08.” C3 was founded last month, in 1/09. Operations will begin in 2/09. The product spec will be completed by summer 09. And — if I heard correctly — they will have demonstrable product one quarter later in fall 09. (And one heck of a development team if they can actually build a product in a quarter.)
  • C3’s goal is to help companies “monitor, mitigate, and monetize” their carbon footprint. I tried for about 15 minutes to find a website for the firm and failed. If you find one, let me know via a comment and I’ll link it here.
  • Almost to the point of comedy Siebel strained to not position C3 as an information technology company, despite the fact that it will sell enterprise software. “C3 is an energy tech company.” “IT is incidental to C3.” “C3 will not have an IT rate of growth.” (How quickly they turn.)

Check the entire podcast for the entire story with stats.

Tom Siebel – Emerging Opportunities in a Post IT Marketplace

Tags: , , , , , , , , ,
Posted in changing the world, entrepreneurship, innovation, problem-opportunity, stanford, things to ponder about, trends | Comments

Oracle’s 20% price hike (rock) + Slumping economy (hard place) = where do you go?

Wednesday, August 27th, 2008

A snip from an interview with Red Hat’s new chief exec:

Q: What’s your biggest surprise since starting at Red Hat?

A: I think I finally get the joke. I was a senior exec and, like every other senior exec, I had a huge IT budget. Mine was as large as Red Hat’s revenues last year. You sit there and say: “Why are my IT costs going up, but I’m getting less and less functionality?”

Every IT professional says the same thing: “My lights-on costs are going up. But — wait a minute — I bought a laptop, and it cost me half as much as it did three years ago, and my costs are going up?” I get the joke now.

If you look at the S&P 500, seven of the top 20 companies are tech and, other than Google, they’re not high-growth. But they’re just printing money because switching costs are so high. There’s this incredible amount of residual goodwill to Red Hat because we’re seen as an alternative to that. Oracle announced a 20-something percent price increase just as the economy starts heading south. How can you do that unless you’re pretty sure nobody can switch? High switching costs led to infrastructure cost creep. Once you get hooked, you can’t get off.

I chuckled as I read this. The switching cost problem sounds like the case between AT&T and Bell Atlantic in the 1980’s, which I coincidentally just recently blogged about recently.

Those who cannot remember the past, are condemned to repeat it.
— George Santayana, in his book The Life of Reason.

I think the comment about Oracle’s 20+% price increase is certainly good news for on-demand SaaS/cloud computing players – to disrupt the market. As companies start tightening their belts, the pay-per-drink model would inevitably look a lot more enticing.

Even when placed between a rock and a hard place (between the US economic slump and technology behemoths’ Oracle-style price increases), the numbers show that companies still can’t afford to cut back on technology spending. Technology is a business competitive advantage.

According to research firm Gartner, “It can be hard for a business to stay ahead if its technology is falling behind. That is one reason that despite an uncertain economy, worldwide information technology spending is on track to reach $3.4 trillion in 2008 — an 8 percent increase over 2007.”

PC sales (especially laptops) are surprisingly stronger than expected, according to S&P’s Equity Research. “The latest evidence came from the Aug. 19 earnings report from Hewlett-Packard (HPQ), which said unit shipments of PCs rose 20% from a year ago”

The bottom line is that businesses can’t afford to be without technology. And with such pricing pressures, online business apps are just much easier on the wallet. $50 per user/year for Google Apps, or $350 user/year MS Office.

Granted, Enterprise Web 2.0 still has a long way to go to fill the shoes of traditional on-premise apps, but I am confident that more innovation will come (I certainly plan on being a part of that innovation!), and SaaS/cloud computing/Enterprise Web 2.0’s benefits will be too good to ignore – and eventually, its benefits would exceed those from the traditional legacy on-premise apps.

From CNNMoney/Fortune: Merrill Lynch estimates that online business applications will grow to a $95 billion market within five years. The market for online office software is “wide open,” said Guy Creese, an IT analyst with the Burton Group.

“My lights-on costs are going up. But — wait a minute — I bought a laptop, and it cost me half as much as it did three years ago, and my costs are going up?”

Yeah. It doesn’t make sense.

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in business, cloud computing, problem-opportunity, regular reads, saas, technology, things to ponder about, trends, web 2.0 | Comments

Mobile data adoption on the rise

Saturday, July 26th, 2008

Some mobile data trends (numbers + commentary):

  • Total mobile data revenues for 2007: US$157 Bil
  • Total mobile data revenues for Q1 2008: >US$49 Bil, 42.7% y-o-y increase. Of this, non-SMS data made up approx US$17.46 Bil (35.6% of total data revenues)
  • Mobile data revenues is now almost 20% of mobile operator total revenues
  • 40% of world’s data revenues come from APAC (>US$20 Bil in Q1 2008)
  • Fastest growing is EMEA, which despite only representing 2% of world’s data revenues, is growing at 91.7% y-o-y to US$927 Mil. This acceleration is aided by the 321% y-o-y increase of HSPA subscribers
  • Operator that generated highest non-voice revenues this quarter is Japan’s NTT DoCoMo (US$3.6 Bil), overtaking China Mobile (US$3.5 Bil)
  • As a % of overall revenue, Filipino mobile operator Smart Communication is the world’s market leader, and the only carrier to depend on non-voice revenues for > 50% of its income *I wonder how much of this is attributed to microfinance and mobile payments i n that region, hmm ..

And as always, I’d like to extrapolate some meaning from raw numbers, so let’s go.

Obviously, the trend clearly indicates that your cell phone is becoming more of a general purpose computing device (like your desktop PC, as opposed to a single-purpose device that makes phone calls only), with more rich features that PCs don’t have (e.g. GPS and accelerometer), and it’s all hooked up to the wonderful internet.

Action items: First, we have to get out of the habit of thinking of cell phones as desktops, because the use-cases are completely different; treating them as such is the clearest way to die. Second, with mobile devices becoming more powerful (computationally, Moore’s law), having more storage (cost of storage trending down, Moore’s law), internet connectivity improving (coverage, speed, cost, again, Moore’s law), and throw on top of that added new hardware features (GPS, accelerometer, etc) .. this sounds to me like having richer and more powerful tools in a technologist’s problem solving warchest — so bring on the problems, bring on the opportunity.

I chuckle as I write this because this reminds me of what Stanford University’s president John Hennessy once mentioned in an interview, about his prediction of what would happen in mobile technology down the road:

  1. Information at any where, at any time, on any device
  2. A user experience that works well, independent of what that information is: Be it a Google map, stock listing, web site, email, etc. Making that convenient and natural, and seamless
  3. Imagine walking in a brick and mortar store and wanting to buy a product. I want to look up my phone and do a price comparison on the product and know what people are saying about it. I want to do that in 5 seconds. Today, I have to open a browser, visit a review site, search, etc. (too much work)

The iPhone is clearly one of the pioneers in making that happen, especially with the iPhone app store. I have previously commented on why I think the iPhone app store is very much Apple’s competitive advantage, and as much as I root for Google’s Android, it remains to be seen how the Android incarnations would address the iPhone platform threat.

With mobile carriers having trouble increasing revenues from voice, you betcha they are thinking of every single way to make money from mobile data. I have also previously written a rant about iPhone/AT&T’s data pricing strategy (there’s nothing wrong with the strategy per se, I’m just a price-sensitive geek at heart).

Now’s a good time to be a mobile app developer .. there’s money already being pledged for the BlackBerry platform (US$150 Mil) , Google Android platform (US$10 Mil), and the iPhone platform (US$100 Mil). I can see mobile carriers snapping up these mobile app startups to further bolster their mobile data revenues. Technology IPOs are almost non-existent today, much to a Silicon Valley VC’s annoyance, so exits via acquisition to a mobile operator would make sense for mobile app startups.

I’m passionate about innovation and problem solving with tech, and I can’t wait to see more new applications in mobile given these trends. The question I try to ask myself given these stats above are, “what else is possible today that wasn’t yesterday?” Think it about it.

If I were to wish for anything, I should not wish for wealth and power, but for the passionate sense of the potential, for the eye which, ever young and ardent, sees the possible. Pleasure disappoints, possibility never. And what wine is so sparkling, what so fragrant, what so intoxicating, as possibility!
–Søren Kierkegaard

To go off on a slight tangent, it’s interesting to note that a Filipino mobile operator is the world’s market leader in depending on non-voice revenues. I wonder how much mobile payments contribute to their revenue stream, and how much of that is related to microfinance. If anything, I think that could be a classic BoP example because it would illustrate another example to bust the myth that corporations cannot make a significant and sustainable profit in selling to the poor.

If I was all the other mobile carriers looking to make more $ from mobile data, I’d be watching this Filipino carrier, Smart Communications closely to glean some lessons.

Click here for the full story of the stats above from cellular-news, and regional breakdown of revenues.

And I’ll end this blog post with vivid taste of possibilities for mobile — a very cool Android project in the making called Enkin. Do check it out!

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in geeky, ideas, innovation, microfinance, mobile, problem-opportunity, regular reads, stanford, technology | Comments

Web 2.0 weekend roundup: Mashup (projected) money, Slide, plus mobile

Sunday, June 8th, 2008

Forrester reports that mashups are taking off. A trend/wave to take note of. This reminds me of what Greg McAdoo (VC with Sequoia) said, that the tiny companies have no power to change waves (technology trends), only the option of riding the wave. So here’s the wave, for those who want to ride it!

Mashups — custom applications that combine multiple, disparate data sources into something new and unique — are coming to the enterprise. Forrester projects that the enterprise mashup market will reach nearly $700 million by 2013; while this means that there is plenty of money to be made selling mashup platforms, it will affect nearly every software vendor. Mashup platforms are in the pole position and ready to grab the lion’s share of the market — and an entire ecosystem of mashup technology and data providers is emerging to complement those platforms. Those vendor strategists that move quickly, plan a mashup strategy, and build a partner ecosystem will come out on top.

The full report costs $775 ( ouch! psst .. can someone share? :) )

I got that link from Dion Hincliffe’s report on the mashup industry. An interesting read, do check it out — I do no justice in summarizing it here. It’ll get you a quick overview of the state of the mash-o-sphere (did I just invent yet-another-useless new Web 2.0 buzzword?) Plus, it features cool San Diego tech startup by two cool people I know; shoutouts to my friends Steve and Aaron from MindTouch!

On another note, Slide reports that they are doubling down their efforts on their current top widget properties to make them even better, .. implying that they are going to slow down on churning out new and potential “disruptive” widgets. I’m all about focusing on your core business for sure, but I hope they still carve out some time (as a percentage) throw stuff against the wall to see what sticks, since there’s no time better to encourage innovation than during hard times. Maybe this is all just an investor-relations fluff .. in which case, fine.

Max Levchin is no stranger to innovation, and I am sure he knows what he is doing. He is definitely someone I admire, and I’ve covered him previously on my blog here before.

Someone I spoke to this weekend was blindingly oblivious to the revenue opportunities in value-added services for mobile, so I thought including this pretty picture from this very worthy blog post from Alec Saunders here was in order.

Silly wabbit, of course you can make money writing apps for mobile :) — just google for {iPhone, Android, Blackberry} fund.

mobile value added services: long tail

Tags: , , , ,
Posted in mobile, regular reads, web 2.0 | Comments