Maybe I’m a case apart, but I have become both a consumer of iTunes Apps and have recently moved between two countries, the Netherlands and Luxembourg. Until recently, my account used for consuming iTunes content was Dutch. Now, I decided to switch the payment to a Luxembourg credit card, which required me to change the address in Itunes to Luxembourg as well.

And guess what, when you purchase an app in the Netherlands and then change the residence to Luxembourg, all or most of your content becomes invalid and gets deleted from the device you purchased it for. It doesn’t matter if the app was free or not, it’s just gone, even though your purchase history clearly states that you did pay for that app!

I have written to Apple to report this problem, but in the mean time I worry every time that the apps, in which I also produce content, may get deleted the next time I sync my content.

I’ve previously written about Media being the most “unflat” industry on our planet, but I really wasn’t expecting this to be the case for Software, which I thought was produced by hip, non-conformist guys like you and me, that sell to everyone over the internet and don’t care about national borders.

Can someone, an app developer perhaps, explain to me the reason for having a different license for different countries? I understand currency and language differences, but many apps are just in English and the whole of the EU uses the Euro?

If alternatively, you happen to know of a solution to keeping your apps while changing residence, please let me know!

All that aside, have a great New Year, everyone!

Vincent

What many of you might not know is that the reason Nokia became the biggest mobile phone manufacturer is because of Apple. When all their competitors were standing still, Nokia decided to think a bit differently. This story was one of the hidden gems in “Fast Strategy“, a book co-authored by Mikko Kosonen, a former executive at Nokia, and it tells the story how Nokia was able to challenge Motorola, Ericsson and other big players of yesteryear.

“When everyone saw mobile telephony as a professional service, Nokia’s leadership saw mobile phones as consumer – almost fashion – products. Rather than predict five or ten percent maximum penetration rate, Nokia quickly imagined everyone in the world having one – or why not several? – mobile phones for personal as well as professional use.” (page 3)

“[On the importance of strategic insight] Some insight may result from intense personal awareness and conviction, such as Pekka Ala-Pieitilä at Nokia being an avid Mac user and seeing the potential for Nokia to turn mobile phones into mass market consumer goods the way Apple was doing for personal computers.” (page 21)

One has to wonder why this Mac-love was only visible in the strategic thinking while Nokia’s Mac-support (PC Suite and other things) has been abysmal throughout the years.

So, what has changed so dramatically that blogs and business newspapers are declaring doom on Nokia? First of all, Nokia’s DNA changed the moment the became #1 mobile phone manufacturer in the world. Before that they were a challenger, trying out

The Nokia 1100, the best selling consumer electronics device in the world

different things and taking risks. But now they are playing defensive, trying to maintain their market share. According to Kosonen, Nokia is trying to counter this by being “strategically agile”.

But it isn’t just that. The backwaters of mobile innovation, USA, suddenly became relevant. I would argue that this is mostly due to Blackberry and iPhone and the huge domestic market. Also, one has to remember that the US is overpresented on the internet, so once the web broke through to mobile devices and Apple started to market the idea of software apps on mobile devices, things seemed to change a bit. Nokia has never been strong in the US, or for that matter in any market where consumers do not choose their own phones and where Nokia has never been able to work with operators. That’s probably the only thing that has been constant.

Couple of weeks ago yet another analyst group forecasted how Apple could pass Nokia in as soon as 2011. Now, this fantasy was based on how iPod users would convert to iPhone users and how Apple should launch low-cost iPhones (especially to developing countries) and sell customized ringtones and overall act in a non-Apple way (and eerily like Nokia). And yet, we’re still talking about smart phones which so far represent a tiny minority of total mobile market.

Sure, Nokia needs to get its act together, especially on the services front, but it’s too early to say that they’re doomed. Especially when you consider that Nokia is pretty strong in the developing countries. My prediction is that it’s not Nokia that will be irrelevant in the mobile phone market in the future, but the US market ’s importance will fade and it is the mobile players that win elsewhere that continue to matter. The sheer size of mobile phone markets in Africa just boggles the mind.

In the new world of the mobile web, Nokia’s biggest problem is their own legacy, something that slowed Ericsson and Motorola down when Nokia was decided to bring mobile phones to the masses. Apple, on the other hand has shown that it can take advantage of market discontinuities in many different markets where traditional barriers to entry are crumbling down.

“For decades, the dominant players were EMI and RCA, and more recently Sony Music, which had built up the assets and capabilities … In today’s digital world, however, companies like Apple, which have none of the traditional music industry capabilities, are becoming leading players.”

In summary, it’s all about bringing technology to the masses. Apple did that for smartphones, but Nokia, inspired by Apple’s success bringing personal computing to masses, did and continues to do that for mobile phones. It’s just Nokia struggles with the US and smartphones for the rest of us. In Fast Strategy, Cisco’s Corporate Vice President Strategic Allainces, Steve Steinhilber is quoted to have said “…five years ago could Nokia really have expected Apple to be the main threat to their high end phone business?”

Last February, I was in Silicon Valley for a week thanks to a course I was taking. Here’s a summary of what happened there.

UC Berkeley: Center for new Music and Audio Technologies.

Prof. David Wessel showed us a new instrument that was basically 32 touchpads. Each was connected to a sample loop and the x- and y-axis and pressure modified that loop. It was an interesting idea, because it didn’t look like just pushing buttons to make sound.

Fail whale at LHS

UCB: Raymond Yee, “Mixing and Re-mixing Information”

A lecture from a course on web mashups. Yee has written the book, Pro Web 2.0 Mashups. The students need to plan and work on a mashup project. There were lots of interesting ideas, but I was worried that most of them were remixing for remixing’s sake and didn’t add value along the way.

Lawrence Hall of Science

Our contact at UC Berkeley had warned this place was mostly for children, and sure enough, this is a place to avoid unless you’re 7 years or less. Almost as complete waste of time as our Google visit.

We had also pizza available for but no-one from UC Berkeley came (we were too scary). Except one guy, whose name I forget. But he took some of us for drinks downtown, so that was great.

Digital Chocolate / Trip Hawkins

Hawkins really loved "Bowling alone"

Trip Hawkins talked a lot about how leverage is the key to successful business and what are the differences between the supply chain in when he was at EA and in operator-controlled world of mobile gaming. He told how he built EA so that it was NFL who wanted them to use their brand, not the other way around. This is why he sees that his competitors who just put out license games based on movies will ultimately be driven off the market, because they do not control the IP.

He thinks that the iPhone is the coolest thing in all time and how the rest don’t get it: “If you’ve played around with Storm or Android you know, wow, these suck”. In his view, the others had focused in Features (“What it is”) and not on Advantages (“What it does”) and not at all at Benefits (“Who cares?”).

Digital Chocolate’s game development doesn’t depend on the device, because they change all the time and they can publish all their games in every device. This is the only way to make the business work in the mobile space. Hawkins doesn’t see that there will be any standardization, because that would move the leverage away from mobile operators to handset manufacturers.

He also believes that the social starving that began around 1950’s because of TV is the reason people are so keen on the social gaming and internet services and is the driver for “omnimedia”. His suggested reading are The Innvator’s Solution and Bowling Alone. Even in the old days, he didn’t see gaming as waste of time. When playing, he said that “I was thinking, learning and motivated”.

He recommended that we try Tower Bloxx, their Facebook game. I was a bit disappointed, the game itself isn’t that bad if you want to kill time, but it is really spammy. Not only is more screen real estate spent on questionable ads than on the game, not only does it notify your timeline every time you play the game, not only the “social aspect” is just a high score table of your friends, but it also spams your friends every time you play to add the game. Not exactly what I’d expect from the guy who’s partly responsible for the great games EA pushed out in the early days. I asked why is it that as a former hardcore gamer, the only interesting game I played last year was World of Goo. In his opinion this down to how big corporations work and can’t innovate. If Tower Bloxx is Digital Chocolate’s answer to this, I don’t think it’s just big corporations.

Sun Microsystems / Mårten Mickos

FAQ: "If heating is a problem, why is it black?"

We were given the tour at Sun’s Executive Briefing Center. They showed the SunRays and other stuff and it was pretty nice to see up close the Black Box.

Afterwards, Mickos gave us a presentation about open source development and MySQL. He said that MySQL is like “New Orleans” of web apps in that if you want to control an important river, you need to control the important cities and this was the reason Sun acquired them. He also anticipated the question about superiority of Postgres, which is probably asked from him all the time. “When I joined MySQL, Postgres was better. Some say it still is. But who cares?”

He also started a discussion about “Why are web companies so closed?” – a poke directed among others Google, who benefit a lot from GPL software, but due to a loophole in the agreement can get away without publishing their improvements because the software isn’t redistributed. This is what he calls the hypocrisy of open source: “People just want to get stuff for free”.

Like Hawkins, he said that the most important thing for startup business is category-leadership. One advice he gave for Finnish start-ups was “not to be Finnish”: MySQL didn’t have sales offices in Nordics, only in the US. Other thing was that if something sounds good in Finland, it takes 10-15 years for until it’s widely accepted as a good thing, so don’t go to market too early. “There’s still time to make a Google-killer”, he said.

This was one of the best sessions we had, not only because Mickos isn’t there anymore and looks like Sun won’t be either but also because we got vodka and swag. You could see there was an economic crisis, because elsewhere we didn’t get anything.

Nexit Ventures / Michel Wendell

Wendell, from Nexit Ventures, a VC firm interested in Nordic IT startups, told how the VC market works and what kind of mistakes Finnish companies usually make. He told how he ended up in the business of helping Nordic companies make it in the US. Being a VC has lot to do with knowing people.

Lots of interesting discussion, but it was late in the evening and it’s pretty hard to upstage either Hawkins or Mickos.

IDEO

We got a standard theme park tour at IDEO. If you have seen the documentaries on TV or at YouTube, there’s not much to see. I was surprised that they actually avoid any systematic or analytical approach to design and focus more on a holistic, iterative and therefore probably pretty expensive (to the client) approach. As a case study they presented Nokia N-Gage platform they did concept work for. A surprising choice, because not only being old was also a spectacular flop. I guess they thought that being from Finland and the course given by ex-CTO of Nokia, we’d be interested in Nokia or something. If we were, we probably didn’t need to come all the way to Palo Alto for that.

Stanford University / VHIL

At Stanford, we got a nice presentation from Jeremy Bailenson from Virtual Human Interaction Lab. He was talking about the Proteus Effect, or how avatars change humans and their behaviour. For example, even though Blizzard has nothing in World of Warcraft code that gives advantage to taller avatars, they nevertheless level up faster than shorter ones. Also, taller avatars get better results in the Ultimatum Game, the real world height of the human is irrelevant. As I’m interested in behavioral decision making, it was nice to see that it might be possible to do empirical studies in virtual worlds, where we can control many variables that social sciences haven’t been in the real world.

Nokia Research Center at Palo Alto

First NDA of the tour. They showed us some research projects they were working on and had the worst slides of the tour. Most of us came out there frightened how out of touch Nokia can be.

Stanford University / Entrepreneurship Week / “Next Big Thing” Panel

Tim Draper, Tony Perkins and Michael Moe talked mostly about Twitter and iPhone and how making revenue is irrelevant. Draper really loves the free trade. Apparently ad-supported business model is the next big thing.

These guys were either drunk or lived in a bubble of their own. Probably both.

IBM Almaden Research Center / Ray Strong

There's pr0n in it, I'm sure.

Strong talked about how IBM tries to predict the future. First of all, the Almaden Research Center looks like a super-villain’s secret lair from Bond movies (it didn’t help that the guy we met had a Bond-esque name). Forget Google, this is the place to visit. There was the world’s first hard drive in the lobby, which was a nice monument to how long IBM has been in the game.

The main thing Strong told was that it isn’t possible to predict technology in to deep future, only in to the business horizon of up to 5 years. This is what they told to an unnamed government agency that wanted them to do so. As government usually gets what it wants, IBM decided to find a way to do it. They brought in people from academy, futurologists and social scientists. Their approach is half scenarios and half technology landscapes, but their ideation emphasizes backcasting from deep future (>50 years) using trends that can be with high probability assumed to continue.

One problem with scenarios has been that it’s really hard to transform them into strategic actions a company should take. IBM tries to close this gap between scenario planning and strategy by using what they call signposts. These signposts are future events that are both recognizable (when they happen) and actionable.

Strong also talked about how predicting future, it’s important to stay in the qualitative side of things, not only because quantitative side of things usually doesn’t work and might be harmful because of the tendency to use numbers to calculate expected values or other figures, even though they are full of uncertainty and can be harmful.

This was by far the best visit during the tour.

Google

NDA. It was a standard theme park tour. It was pretty clear that Google is exactly as “open” as SEC demands it to be, not an inch more. I guess many for many of us the myth of Google was totally burst.

To be fair, this was the only place where our contact wasn’t executive level so we might have gotten a better experience with a more suitable contact. Even though our host was great and all that, he probably wasn’t the right one for our group.

HP Labs

Runner-up in best architecture for a research lab.

NDA, but they mostly showed published academic research about nanophotovoltaics or something to that end. Our guess is that they didn’t want to tell us anything but out of courtesy showed something. When they talked about things I could understand, they talked about MagCloud and how HP is transforming from a printer and computer company into printing and computing company.

Next day, couple of us went to see the garage (more like a shack) Hewlett and Packard started from and what is considered as the “Birthplace of Silicon Valley”. Not much to see, but at least it had some historical value.

All pictures by me. All rights reserved. Originally published in my private blog, but I decided to get rid of it so I republished this thing here for people interested.

…Is if this were possible on it (apologies for the deformation, apparently Windows isn’t good for everything):

Concept iPhone keyboard – a composite made out of  an iPhone + a Bluetooth Blackberry keyboard

I’m actually quite surprised that something like this isn’t possible. The iPhone screen would make a fine portable screen and the touch keyboard is pretty terrible for typers (at least my polls have revealed). With the current bluetooth keyboad even, I would think a simple synergy was possible and I don’t at all get why Apple does not allow for this to work.

Let’s make some noise!!!

Vincent

I spent quite a lot of time evaluating smart-phones this last week, including having hands-on time with the Nokia E71, the Blackberry 8900, the iPhone & iPod Touch, with a firm eye on their capabilities as a mobile computer, more so than a mobile phone or a mobile entertainment device.

My conclusion: the iPhone (or respectively iPod Touch) are interesting insofar as interfaces are concerned that either require mouse-like interaction or that require no interaction whatsoever, e.g. listening to music. And it’s pretty consistent with my first post about the iTunes app store, where I wrote that developers should focus on developing games and other visual applications, rather than on typing-intensive apps.

Now I may be perfectly wrong about this and if you’re a long-time iPhone / iPod Touch user and are able to type long messages without a problem, please drop a comment.

There’s no denying that the Apple gadget (whichever version) is h.o.t. But I think it’s a matter of the software-features being over-hyped and people forgetting that the hardware isn’t mature yet.

• First of all: touch-keyboards, really? It just doesn’t seem precise enough for accurate typing.
• Second: 400 dollars/euros for 32GB of space seems way over-priced, more so because it’s also a video-device and increased video-quality also comes with (much) increased file-sizes. Add to this that streaming video from your Mac doesn’t seem possible, unless you employ one hack or the other.
• Thirdly, I think that the web2.0 hype of developing application after application after application has strongly spilled over to the iTunes appstore, which is one of the few digital venues to have some kind of business model, but it totally overshadows any hardware deficiencies the iPod and iPhone may have (and I mean that only in terms of typing and storage, as I think apps for gaming and other entertainment work perfectly fine).

My gut tells me that iPods are mainly for entertainment and not productivity and even so that there’s a better deal to be had waiting for at least another generation beyond this.

Once again, I’m very open to you (trying to) convincing me that I’m am completely and utterly wrong.

Vincent

Bear in mind that by calling you cheapskates, I also call myself the same (plus, I’m Dutch…). Remember that I was the one raving about a €30 contract-less phone not too long ago, the Motorola Motophone (which I have since given to my mother, who hates it). Since moving to Luxembourg, less than a month ago, I’m shopping for a new phone and am considering the iPhone.

At the same time, do the math! To get the 16GB version, I have to shell over €99 + €50 per month for the next two years. That’s €1300 as a base price for the iPhone, not including the cost of getting hooked to paying such prices in the future.

Some other factors to consider:

• There’s is city-wide, free WiFi in Luxembourg (at least one good thing about this small city, apart from me being there )
• Skype was just released in the app-store, making calling on the iPod Touch + Wifi a viable option.
• Signing a 2 year contract seems like a big deal, considering I just started the job and still need to be able to keep it.
• The country of Luxembourg is so small, that I ‘ll be in international roaming mode before I know it (Mobile in Europe sucks, did you know that?)
• Taking a 32GB iPod Touch + a internet-less phone, would be ca. €400 + €30 per month = ok, €1120 for 2 years (bearing in mind that I usually NEVER take 2 year contracts on anything!)
• I already have an excellent portable camera, the IXUS 870 IS
• I also expect an upgraded iPhone to come around, hopefully within the next 6 months, but too long for me to wait.

So, it’s a tough decision for a cheapskate like me.

It’s taken me a long time to get to the point of wanting to use a touch-screen, which I considered an inferior typing solution, until… I watched this video. It’s amazing that this guy, sitting in a moving vehicle shaking like a bull on steroids, can type intelligible words on his iPhone, and nothing at all on a regular button-based keyboard.

Take that together with the iPhone OS 3, due to come out within the next 1-3 months, and it sounds like an interesting option. But €1300 for a phone? Man!

What do you say, cheapskates, buy or don’t buy?

Vincent

With both the launch of the app-store and the “global” (western) release of an affordable iPhone 3G, it is clear that the rules of the game are changing a little as far as adoptability of software is concerned. While, if you hang around the blogosphere, you’re exposed to a tech-crowd in a tech-world, many of which are anglophiles also, this is no longer so when you’re dealing with a consumer-targetted electronic device, like the iPhone, available in many countries, in all the major stores, and at a fairly appealing price & cool-factor.

No, instead you’ll be dealing with customers from countries like Germany, France, Spain, Italy, etc. many of which prefer to think in their own language. And you’ll be dealing with mainstream users of telephones, who are, let’s face it, often of a younger generation.

So the implication is: how do I, as an app-developer, reach out to both a global, non-english audience? And how do I appeal to the typical demographic (age, income, etc.) that will buy this phone?

The answer seems fairly straightforward: Games !

1. Games have the advantage that they can easily bridge the language-gap, by mostly focussing on visual communication.
2. Games appeal to the younger crowd.
3. And, let’s face it, the iPhone is not (yet) a business-phone, and hence again not aimed at the typical blog-reader & app-user.

Addendum: a possible fourth reason is that I’m personally not so impressed with the iPhone/iTouch keyboard; i.e. I won’t be writing a blogpost on it any time soon. Games are another matter.

So, if you ask me, all you people aiming to create or invest in the next “productivity” app, I would think again and focus on what the lowest common denominator is between your skills and demand.

Inspiration for this quick post: Fred Wilson on the iPhone app-ecosystem.

Vincent

P.S. don’t forget to check out some of the smart comments this post is receiving.