2010: The year the Netbook turns into the Web-book

2010 is set to be a bumper year for Consumer Electronics. With people spending less outside the home they are focusing more inside and as just about everyone now has some monstrous TV it's the little things that count.

2009 was arguably the year of the Netbook. After Asus launched with their eeePC in 2008 a land-rush occurred last year with virtually every Notebook manufacturer providing an offering. HP's Mini and Acer's Aspire One ranges both did very well as did Asus with their eeePC.

At the end of 2009 however it became virtually impossible to get a Netbook that is truly still a Netbook. Acer, Dell, Asus and HP all fell back into their same tired old routine - bigger, faster, more capacity! And the Netbook experience suffered.

I've made this point before but the power of the Netbook is in the Network - not in how big a hard drive it has. Why do I need a 160GB hard drive when I have Terabytes of NAS and Gigabytes of cloud storage? I don't need 5 USB ports and I certainly don't need Windows.

Having said all of this the Netbook category has gone ballistic - having doubled from 16 to 33 Million units sold in 2009 - sales are worth about $USD11Bn globally (Display Search research for 2009)

My money is on the next generation - so called Web Books, Slates or Tablets. These devices are being actively invested in by a number of investors and represent a merging of several types of computing behaviour.

Architecturally, most are small form factor (10 inch or less), are either a tablet or have a folding range far outside the normal Notebook range (can be flipped over on itself entirely - so is just a screen), they are generally touch screen capable with many being multi-touch and the big one - most are not running windows (generally running flavours of Linux).

Behaviourally, the Web Book is designed to be a piece of Consumer Electronics. It's not a desktop replacement, it's not an office machine. It's a device that is a general purpose computer but built to use in the home as such it plays on the following:

• It's relatively small and definitely light.
• The processor is powerful but not an energy guzzler (Intel Atom's do brilliantly here as do ARMs)
• The display is gorgeous and has high viewing angles so multiple people can see it
• It uses wifi and may not even have Ethernet connectivity
• Solid State disks are a must but are low capacity (you don't need more than 16GB in a machine that is connected to a network) thus saving on energy
  
• battery life is a must - the longer the better thus every component is energy efficient
• Ideally the screen is touch capable and ideally multi-touch (thus eliminating the need for a keyboard)

The device is permanently connected to the network and thus the Internet. It's there to connect with people, view photos, play your tunes, watch movies and read web pages. It's not there to write documents, do full scale design or programming (though people will use it to do this in a limited, fast fashion).

I've been excited about Internet tables, Slates, Web Books - call them as you will since Nokia released the N710 and with Apple, HTC (Google), Litl and others all about to play in this space in a big way over the next few months, there will be a lot of people asking for a Web Book or Internet Slate in their Christmas Stocking next year.

Expect to see masses of innovation in this space as companies that have not been too caught up in the Netbook scene enter the fray for the first time and start showing off some new ideas. Litl does this with their awesome Easel Frame style web book and both HTC and Apple will doo some great stuff on the user experience end of things too.

2010 will definitely be the year that the Internet goes increasingly mobile both inside and outside the house but the experience of it literally becomes more tactile and less bound to the keyboard.

Prediction: 2010 will be the year Apple and Google have a cage fight

The pre- match slanging is pretty much over and the location of the fight has been chosen. 2010 is going to be the year Apple and Google finally stop dancing around and actually get in the ring. Unlike a nice clean refereed boxing match (Apple V Microsoft) this is going to be a dirty underground cage fight complete with barbed-wire wrapped gloves - expect to see a lot of blood on the floor - and fanbois rucking in the concourses.

The ground is, of course, Mobile and the massive dominance both organisations have taken in this space over the last 12 months. Mobile is still a fast growing area of communications but smartphones is where it's at. There's no question Apple ignited the world's imagination of what is possible in the mobile space and capitalising on the fact that the fashionability of a phone is important in a way that RIM and Microsoft just didn't get.

Google have taken that to a whole different level with Android which just "gets" what it is to be a data capable and Internet connected phone. Couple this with some fashionability and the stage is set for an almighty fight.

Looking through the AdMob report for November, it's astonishing to see how fast Android has grown in the last 2 months (doubled on traffic requests through their network) but more importantly was the launch of the Motorola Droid and the whole Droid Does campaign. The Droid is one of the fastest selling phones of all time almost hitting iPhone 3Gs sales levels (which was working from an installed base upgraded) and is now accounting for about a quarter of Android device share - only behind the G1 which has been out for 18 months - expect to see that change over December.

Now Motorola have entered the fray and with Samsung and Sony Ericsson both scheduling major launches into Q1 2010 the mobile landscape is going to get increasingly messy as the iPhone isn't the only great phone out there. Indeed I think Sony is going to do a Motorola with the Xperia X10 as it is simply stunning and is a big name in the mobile space - especially in Europe. HTC have had a great lead but 2010 will see Motorola and Sony return to some dominance here - and they can fight Apple in the Fashionability stakes.

The biggest challenge for Apple is how to combat Google on the phone itself. Outside of iTunes, Apple has little in the way of first party apps for the iPhone and whilst it has a huge developer network it is definitely alienating them through it's App Store management nightmares. Many developers are developing for both iPhone and Android devices - especially those using Web technologies for building and apps like Phone Gap to cross-package.

A lot of what makes the iPhone really useful are Google applications (native Gmail, Maps and most importantly Search!) - Apple has no way to combat this. Are they going to deny Gmail or Search like they did with Google Voice?

Apps that are available on both platforms and services that are available "in the cloud" eg Maps, Comparison Shopping etc dilutes Apple's position as it's only point of differentiation becomes fashionability and both Sony Ericsson and Motorola have competed for over a decade against Nokia by building highly fashionable phones.

I'm not sure this fight will be a death match but all the signs are there for a battle of epic proportions. Both are likely to be extremely battered by the time they come out the other side and would be wise to hold a little bit in reserve in case Nokia's Maemo platform takes off the way they are expecting it to - at that point things could get really messy.

AdMob purchase by google paves way for interesting developer funding

It's just been announced that Google is set to buy AdMob for $750M in an all-stock deal. This is the third biggest purchase Google has ever made (the only two bigger are YouTube and DoubleClick).

AdMob started in 2006 so they have capitalised very well for a 3 year old business. Indeed they've been cash positive for a while now so this is a great acquisition by Google. The full gory details of the deal can be found here and a press site by google here

We know this is all aligned to Google's interest and in particular their big appetite presently for anything Mobile. However this also opens up some enormous opportunities for developers.

This acquisition brings with it some great opportunities for in-application display advertising that is delivered contextually but also based on Google AdWords auctioning technology. Along side this I can then use the same advertising account to drive ads on my mobile website that compliments my application and then use standard ads on my main website that provides additional information / community support etc.

All of a sudden a possible revenue opportunity opens up that was kind of there previously but wasn't very smart. Over the last 18 months in particular we've been watching the rise of free-ad-supported applications as well as paid-no-ad versions of the same application. I would expect to see a lot more of the ad-supported apps once this deal goes through.

The reason for this is twofold:

1. As a developer I can manage all of my advertising spaces with one vendor. I don't really want to have to deal with all these businesses I just want to get some beer money for my app that I'm spending my non-work hours producing.

2. With contextual ad serving, I can make certain elements of data within the application available and use that to generate calls to the Ad Server - much the same way AdWords works with a web page or in Gmail. This means the ads that are served will be more relevant to the content which should lead to higher Click Through which then leads to potentially more revenue for me (see note above about beer money)

This makes a lot of sense for an advertiser as well. Certain applications have huge amounts of uptake - twitterific on iPhone or Twidroid on Android for example. Imagine having contextual ads served based on the content of your twitter stream. Twitter might resist it but it could make some serious cash for the app developers.

Overall I think this will really blow the top of mobile advertising. Advertisers who have been a little shy in the mobile space will be comforted by the fact it's Google doing it. App and mobile site developers stand to gain some good funding from it and it be relevant for their audiences and as the world goes increasingly smartphone mobile mad over the next 18 months this will be worth serious $Billions in the next 5 years or so.

Cross posted to Citrus Agency Blog

An unofficial endorsement of the Android platform?

As TechCrunch reported: Pigs Fly as Facebook and Google work together on an Android App - there's been a few indicators that this might be happening, particularly with some random mentions here and there on Twitter but no one was really expecting anything to occur given the competitiveness between the two businesses.

What's most interesting about this (particularly from my standpoint as an Android user) is that it will be the only other official mobile client besides iPhone; which really endorses the Android platform as the second runner to iPhone. And in acknowledging that, it also indicates that Facebook are considering that Android will have substantial traction in the coming year - not least when you consider there are two dozen Android based phones slated to hit the market in the rest of the year which could make a serious dent in iPhone's penetration.

iPhone launching with the Facebook client has been largely cited as one of the big levers in it's sales. Smart phones have been around for a decade and there have been sleek devices previously (Nokia 7710 for example was just one big touch screen 3 years before the iPhone launched) but the mind of the consumer wasn't fired by the opportunities it could provide to them. You only had to look at the marketing by the telco's around the iPhone launch to see that the Facebook client was the Killer App for the smart phone in terms of hooking people in. It gave them a very tangible benefit to owning what would have been the most expensive handset they'd have bought to date - "I can keep in touch with my friends besides calling them..."

With an official Facebook client for Android, the same endorsement has been conferred and one of the key marketing differentiators has been removed. I'm tipping late 2010 to be an interesting time as Apple and Google really go toe to toe and start slugging it out - which will be fantastic for innovation in this space.

The Golden Age of mobile? Soon maybe...

Some would say that it's already been in the heady days of GSM Data and WAP, some would say it stalled when European clients pulled all funding from mobile internet apps in the post-dot-com-crash GPRS days, some would say that with the advent of the iPhone we're there in all it's shiny-coverflow-enabled-finger-waggling-goodness.

It seems like every second person is now weilding some kind of internet enabled device and in Europe and the US the penetration is even higher than Oz although we are racing for a frontline position showing that reasonable access is more important than either coverage or cost.

Half way through 2009 it's interesting to look at some of the predictions for this year - particularly where mobile is concerned and take a quick stock.

The big 3 (Apple, MS, RIM) of last year are now well and truly the big 6 with highly competitive offerings from Android who we all knew had aspirations, the re-emergence of Palm with a life-recharging elixr known as Pre and of course Nokia firmly touting its Maemo platform that's been in development for many years and is arguably the most stable and feature rich of all.

Costs for data access across the globe are plummeting with Vodafone in the UK offering the first truly unlimited data packages on phones, showing we live in a commodity market that is almost free. EU laws limiting the charges for call and data roaming will see uptake rise as people start using their phones across countries as well.

Applications obviously make up a huge part of what our mobile experiences are like and I think if anything 2009 will go down in history as the year of the widget or micro app. Whilst iPhone still only supports Objective-C and Cocoa and their iron control is starting to hinder their progress on this front there are enough people keen to try and make a buck that the ecosystem around applications is phenomenal with over 50,000 available at last count.

Nokia, MS, RIM and Palm all have app stores however these are fledgling compared to Apple's and of all the other players Android is the only one that can be considered a contender with approaching 20,000 apps available, the vast majority of which are free. Android has a very hands off approach to this so its interesting to see what makes it through compared to Apple's more militant approach. Being Java based is also helping Android be the largest growing development community too as it's super quick to get up and running.

So where will we be in another 6 months? Will we look back and think 2009 is where it all started?

I think it's a little premature. We are really at the start right now. Much of what we are doing on phones right now isn't much more than we were doing 5-6 years ago just with a bigger screen and prettier graphics.

My money's on 2010 when we see a real rise of Augmented reality applications hit the phones. This is the area that will truly show what carrying the entire Internet around in your pocket can do and has been the spur for this part of computer science this year where it had languished for over a decade.

When my phone can alert me when my friends are nearby, interact with environmental sensors, buzz me when a store within 500m is having a sale on an item I'd previously shown interest in, automatically adjust its settings dependent on where I am and the privacy level I want to adopt and filter all of the information on the Internet into a 3 inch screen in a way that is contextual and meaningful then I think we'll consider the Golden Age has started.

EEEPC's power is in the network not the machine

Over here at Technology Treason we lurve ASUS' EEEPC. We liked the idea when they first came out and specifically trawled around Hong Kong computer markets to find one not long after they were launched. It's not the Apple Air or iPhone kind of aesthetic lust, we're talking about true "in sickness and in health" type love when it comes to the EEEPC.

Indeed for someone to now take this device off me it really would have to be from my cold, dead, rigamortis set fingers - and then only with a saw.

Go online and look at reviews. They fall into two camps - those who think it's great as a second machine that just happens to do a lot of funky things (see latest Linux Format June edition for a classic example) or those that just don't "get it" any wonder why the hell anyone would want a tiny-weenie machine when you can get a low spec dell for a few hundred quid now.

There is third camp however who are starting to realise that a linux based UMPC is truly a brilliant bit of kit and it's really because of the network it sits on not the thing plugged into it.

I've had mine for about 5 months and realistically I've installed about half a dozen bits of software - 10 at a push. I can do docs, review spreadsheets, skype, web browse hell even play games if I want and when hooked to a network I can do all of these things with all of the files I could possibly want.

My machine comes home and it auto connects to my home network, synchs to my media server and can play all my media files out of the box. I can check my mail and actually read it without squinting without firing up the laptop. I can connect from home to work via a VPN and mod some files for a client without leaving the sofa or the garden and be doing wht I want before the laptop has finished booting to a desktop.

At work I can use it for presentations and taking notes on projects without printing stupid amounts of documentation and hefting my laptop along with me.

It's not a replacement computer - it's a tool. A finely shaped, infinitely configurable tool. All the things I want in my phone but will never get because of the lack of keyboard,mouse and processing power and without it being much bigger.

The thing is I'm a techie, if I'm talking a walk down the street phone and wallet are it. If I'm going somewhere then it's satchel with camera, book, PSP and now EEEPC in place of a laptop.

ASUS have released details recently of a new version designed to hit off the people who think the other is too small. I don't know myself. Small is beautiful and in this case perfectly formed.

The state of Oz technology

Well rarely does an entire country entice me to start ranting (and at this point I'll point out I am in fact Australian) but by crikey Australian technology hasn't really moved in the last 5 years.

Now I appreciate this is a sweeping statement and I'll point out that the technology I'm talking about primarily is media based - mobile / web / internet. I have also had the benefit of living in London for the better part of 10 years so I've been at the hub of what is going on.

What I don't understand is why is it that for a nation that was at the forefront of new media ten years ago are we now in a position where nothing has shifted for the last 5. SMS is still massively underutilised and the idea of an SMS shortcode in Australia is a joke - 8 digits is only 2 shorter than a mobile number so is hardly short! Indeed everything to do with mobile is still more expensive, slower and less polished than we are used to in Europe. I went to Vodafone when I got here and asked for a pay as you go sim card for my phone that had pay as you go data on it... I was met with blank stares - Telstra and Optus were both the same.

General Internet access is similarly expensive and slow compared to what we are used to in Europe. Given a relatively modern telecommunications infrastructure, why telcos are flogging the ADSL route instead of fibre / cable begs the question of why so many roads were dug up in the capital cities to facilitate this in the late 80s and early 90s.

What is also interesting is the lack of FOSS out here. Linux is relatively popular but no where like it is in Europe. Indeed corporate America has it's laser telescopic sight firmly trained on the Australian market and even getting Linux hosting is no where as simple as getting a site hosted on a windows server. Linux certification and knowledge is still seen as a specialist skill.

Overall I'm disappointed that Australia hasn't maintained it's lead in internet technologies. In part people like me are to blame for starting our careers here and then being drawn to the brighter lights of the UK and the US where visas are easily come by, pay levels are higher and the ability to work on cutting edge technologies are plentiful.

Perhaps we are on the verge of a change in Australia and I hope that some of the ground lost can be regained over the next five years.

SMS Bamboozlement...

I'm doing some work for a client at the moment who's industry is particularly technophobic. The absolute cutting edge is a bit of YouTube video thrown willy nilly into a page. I'd also point out that design is something that rarely makes an appearance in this particular industry.

So it was pretty refreshing when we went to them with a series of ideas from the more commercial sectors of New Media and one of the things they latched onto was SMS. Queue annoyance though when we had already got everything ready to go other than to push the big green "launch" button and another company got involved and started talking about location aware services and high end data capture etc.

At this point the client dissolved into a mess of indecision - "Why weren't we doing all of this?" was the question, to which the answer was "Because you don't need to - primarily because your text messaging service is built around raising revenue through donations!"

I've had this happen in the past, notably with SEO companies. I do pity the poor clients who get stuck in these situations where they've finally decided to push their technology base along but then get waylaid by all the glittery, flashing and hypnotic LEDs.

At the end of the day it is important to remember why you are doing something and not get sidetracked (and not get ripped off). Once a strong foundation of technology is laid there is always something new you can build - you don't have to have every shiny present under the tree to have a great christmas.

Bye bye OpenMoko

Google announced today that they would be partnering up with a load of other companies including Samsung, Motorola and LG to produce a new phone "software stack". For those of us in teh technology game this basically means Google plans to release mobile phone operating system to rival that of Microsoft, Symbian and the various Linux flavours out there already.

What I find most annoying about this is that Google has for years now feasted upon the fruits of the Open Source Community, using many of their projects to enable additional features and indeed their core search facilities to work. While it may be argued that the Summer of Code gives back to that community, there is a sense that rather than sponsoring an existing project like openMoko (a Linux based, open source version of what Google has announced) they've decided to go out on their own and start from scratch.

Given Google's tremendous resources it won't be long before we see the platform hit the market.

Within the commercial market there is already Maemo (nokia's Internet Tablet platform which they actually open sourced) and QTopia, a commercial package available on the GreenPhone which is a development kit and is mostly open source too.

My guess as to why Google didn't run with any of these options is that there are already thriving communities surrounding them and trying to work with these existing communities makes it difficult for the Google techies to throw their weight around.

Hey ho. As a developer, mobile development is already a nightmare having to support various versions of Symbian, MS Windows Mobile, BlackBerry as well as smaller (but vocal) numbers os Maemo users we are now having to think about iPhone from Apple so adding "Google Phone OS" isn't that much more work.

For me, having had a mobile phone for the better part of 15 years and having had a data capable phone for nearly 10 years I've watches OSes come and go, killer apps be talked about every 6 months and watching the market mature the only two things ever to take off properly on a mobile was SMS and now e-mail.

I've got an E65 nokia and it is the best phone I've ever owned. Why? Because the web browser works seamlessly on standard web sites and the email is easy to use, even without a full keyboard. Oh, and it doesn't crash as do most of the rest.

Spending all this time and money in my opinion by Google is absolute folly, but then they have virtually limitless cash reserves and they have a staff of many thousands across the world that they have to retain doing something - they may as well be making a phone OS as anything else.

Who knows this might end speculation that we are about to have Google OS on our desktop next year as well.