Apple: The 3G iPhone will move units because it has an enthusiastic customer base that will continue to buy the latest from Apple. That’s powerful. Meanwhile, international expansion and enterprise interest keeps Apple rolling.

RIM: RIM isn’t going anywhere and will maintain its share and strength. In the enterprise, RIM is entrenched. In the consumer market, RIM is pretty interesting. As far as buzz goes, look for RIM and Apple to be the leaders.

Nokia: Was the Symbian deal savvy or desperate? Time will tell, but there are a lot of financial types saying that Nokia shares are a value. Nokia is a big dog globally and has a nice mix of high-priced and low-priced devices. It sure would be nice if Nokia were more of a player in the U.S.

Palm: It’s a bit depressing when Palm’s big plan is a refreshed Treo line powered by Windows Mobile. There are a ton of devices powered by Windows Mobile. Where’s the differentiation? And that’s the problem. There is little to differentiate Palm’s devices–except for Centro’s price. That’s not a great model.

Sony Ericsson: This device maker moves a lot of units and has some Walkman mojo courtesy of Sony. However, the company will have an increasingly difficult time differentiating itself.

Samsung and LG: Both are big. Both can be trendy. And both can play the price game.

Motorola: No groundbreaking designs. Commodity handsets. Still decent market share. Even when Motorola spins off the handset division it’s questionable whether the unit can stand alone.

The big three : RIM, Apple and Nokia, aren’t exactly Microsoft centric organizations. Each have embedded operating systems that play better with the network than they do with the desktop, and if Microsoft’s failed online strategy was the first nail in the coffin, this would be the second. Anyone for nail number 3?

• Garry Galinski is the Director of Product Innovation for Call Genie. If you have fifteen minutes, you really need to take a listen to this podcast, because Call Genie is providing an excellent platform for deploying services for carriers that follow the “two sided market” ideas championed by the smart guys at Telco 2.0. If you are unfamiliar with two sided business models, or think that the only business model for telephony is termination, listen up. Just like I think that Backflip has really solved the go-to market problem for CEBP enablement software, I think Call Genie is spot-on with providing enhanced services to carriers.
• Pankaj Shroff is the Chief Applications Architect for Sonus Networks. You could view Sonus as the smallest of the major switch vendors, or the largest of the next generation vendors. Either way, when somebody high up talks, I’m focused in. In this interview, Pankaj hints about how the larger carriers view the battle of the future.
• Irv Shapiro is the CEO of Ifbyphone, a service provider targeted towards enabling voice mashups for SMB, mid-market and smaller workgroups in the Enterprise. In our conversation, Irv and I touch on a bunch of topics… listen for Irv’s understanding of what workgroups need successfully deploy voice mashups.
• Shai Berger is the founder of Fonolo, the quintessential Telco 2.0 service provider. If you are a company that provides an API and targets the consumer, I would study Shai and Fonolo… it is the best example I can come up with when people ask me what voice mashups look like for the consumer.
• Bill Binnig is the VP of Marketing from Jaduka, a service provider targeted a bit higher on the food chain, providing voice APIs for the Enterprise. In our conversation, Bill and I talk about people confuse VoIP and next generation voice applications, which might have nothing to do with VoIP.

So for those of you who wonder if the desktop wars will be between Microsoft and open source, I say no. The desktop wars are between Firefox, Safari and Air.

To summarize and to be fair to Phil (as I like Phil very much, as a neat guy and a bright boy), his criticism centers around user interface, architecture and basic network philosophy. He points out that notifications kill foreground sessions, which can surely be user interface naughty. Agreed. He also points out that it breaks good network architecture by tying user’s hands as all notifications have to come through it. Agreed again, with a suggestion that just like the Sabbath being made for the man, not the other way around, good network architectures and principals are are good because they server people better.

Here’s why I think Phil is wrong here: push notifications bring insane value to the enterprise by enabling the business process. Arguing against it is like complaining to the doctor that you only use heart defibrillators with aluminum paddles, not steel, and could he please just find a better one. Push notifications are the heart of business process improvement for nearly every case I find, and it holds true for mobile workers, remote workers and consumers involved in the process. Remote notifications enable dissemination of data to the general public. Remote notifications provide decision support by delivering information to the right person at the right time. Remote notifications can kick off other applications to bring data back in from the field. It’s hard for me to imagine a more important feature and capability to communications enabled business process design, and I applaud Apple for figuring this out.

I can’t believe I’m about to say this, as I know my telecom history well, but this might be another case where a more reliable and guaranteed service is more important than intellectual purity. It is this feature alone that will drive me as a CEBP developer to invest time and energy into the iPhone platform.

Rubin also said that
the days of the “traditionally’ high cost of software development for
mobiles are numbered and believes that once Android hits the market the
costs of such developments will fall dramatically. He said, “We think
about 20 per cent of a mobile’s cost is software, and because Android
is free and open, that means close to zero cost on the software side.”



Andy Rubin also expects Android to be extensively customised, with
operators, developers and even end-users tinkering with the OS to
create a myriad of iterations and applications.



He said, “Android has come into existence as a direct result of the
freedom conferred by web development. It’s taking a lot of the concepts
that were formed on the Internet and bringing them to mobile, and the
chief architectural concept is the notion of mash-ups.”

Ok - I’m very cool with mashups (obviously), but as I read this, there’s more than one worry in my head…

Because 20 percent of a mobile’s cost is software, and because Android is free and open, that means close to zero cost on the software side.

Really? Where do I start with this one…

• Open source might be free to acquire, but is hardly free to integrate and support.
• So, you mean to say that the developers of the software aren’t going to get any money? Actually, considering how busted the mobile application business models seem to be, that’s probably not too far from the truth. The developers of the software won’t get any money.
• Ummm… so the majority of the problem, the cost of the HARDWARE, is unaffected here? Well, great. I guess.

Andy Rubin also expects Android to be extensively customised, with
operators, developers and even end-users tinkering with the OS to
create a myriad of iterations and applications.

Perhaps this is where all the money that we are saving from the software is going… to the support departments of the carriers that have to support the heavily customized, tinkered devices. Well, great. I guess.

He said, “Android has come into existence as a direct result of the
freedom conferred by web development. It’s taking a lot of the concepts
that were formed on the Internet and bringing them to mobile, and the
chief architectural concept is the notion of mash-ups.”

Well, OK. He’s got me there. Let’s just hope that somehow, brilliantly, all the carriers who deploy Android applications actually support web approaches.

As for me, here’s my bet. If the mobile market is like how the PC industry was back in 1984, then Google Android is the PC, and the iPhone is the Mac. Let’s see if it takes another twenty years before we learn the lessons this time.

The Evolution of the Cell Phone

My first column was published today called “Congratulate Failure”. The point of the article is to question our perceptions of risk as viewed through the recent demise of Jangl. My contention is that the greatest risk we face as an industry is to sit back and wait for the smoke to clear. Instead, we ought to be asking ourselves how we can fail faster and cheaper, bringing on a future where voice enablement is no longer unique or surprising.

Thank you to all for joining me in the journey. Even though I only write about the things I believe are true, I absolutely know that I’m wrong as much as I’m right. Please forward your ideas, comments and “helpful” suggestions along - we won’t get there unless we get there together.

The interesting part for me comes in Alec’s analysis:

And, touching on another very old theme from this blog, carriers are
finally understanding that they cannot hope to do it all themselves. My
friend Chris Wood first constructed this chart of Chris Anderson’s Long
Tail applied to telecom three years ago. Today’s carriers are duking it
out amongst themselves on the left side of the chart, but the potential
for rich new telecom applications in the blue area — applications which
marry dating, classifieds, travel and other web based services to
telephone — is immense. Monetizing that long tail is going to require a
platform based approach, and a focus on engaging the developer
community. Those that are afraid of the “talkification of the web” need
to find a way to embrace it.

And doesn’t that last sentence distill the problem? Those that are afraid of this need to find a way to get over it. It’s sort of like what happens in my house at bedtime. My youngest child is sitting in bed afraid of something ridiculous to us, but very real to him. (We’ve been through aliens, tornadoes, robbers and yes… the Bermuda Triangle.) My fatherly response is “Hey listen, the problem is that you are afraid of the wrong thing. You’re afraid of aliens that don’t exist, but you’re not afraid of your mother who’s going to be pissed when she sees that you’re still awake. Aliens don’t exist. Your Mom does. Go to sleep.”

Web technologies exist. The age of software based telecom has arrived. Traditional barriers like geography, regulation and walled gardens are fading. Let’s all make sure that we’re afraid of the right thing. Don’t be afraid of the web, be afraid of not being able to support the innovation it provides, because if you don’t, your alien competitor will.

• The up-front planning was very critical, and helped the back-end go much smoother. Our program manager was excellent, and put together a cross functional team that really covered the bases. Our team included a security team member, the Active Directory engineers, the phone engineers, a representative from the IS and IT departments, the support team, a test engineer, our team and the manager. As you put together your teams, remember these departments.
• It really took about a day to integrate into each enterprise system, even when the specification was pretty good. Issues like inconsistency in the databases and directories, legacy issues like dial plans and overloaded active directory servers, and issues with connecting non-Microsoft devices all added to the delays. In the future, good projects will allocate a day to each interface, then a half a day to test the interfaces after installation.
• Our interfaces into the Enterprise IT system included Microsoft Active Directory, Microsoft SQL Server and the Cisco telephone system. H.323 and Skinny were the deployed protocols in this implementation. SIP was not.
• It’s possible that our Linux box was the first our brothers in the IT and IS departments needed to manage. Everything is from Microsoft. From a political and business perspective, it’s probably a better solution to provide them with a “box” than a software solution. Organizations know how to purchase and maintain “boxes”. Non-Microsoft software… not so much.
• We used Adhearsion on top of Asterisk as the heart of the application. It’s been rock solid. One really, really good choice for us was to use the Ruby exception handling to catch any errors in the code, and then to dial a real human being in response to any program error.
• Recording voice prompts is pretty straightforward, but took us five iterations before we were happy with the results.
• Using a “dial by name” like approach to inputing remote data works fine… unless you have a Blackberry. If you do, then you look at the keypad and say “Hey! There’s no letters on this thing!”

As LignUp expected, there’s a market for deploying Voice Mashup boxes… When the Enterprise starts to put that line item on a budget, companies like them will do a fine business. So far, though, those lines don’t exist. The work that we find is work that we create. The CIO simply does not have voice mashups on the top of the IT list. The good news is that the CFO will love the savings, and will eventually demand the CIO add one.

Technorati Tags: adhearsion, Rest

• SynchroSpot - Shaun Terry: This application does location based personal reminders and location based ads. So, you can drop information about a location, and as someone else enters it, it will be displayed back to you. I’m sure there’s advertising possibilities here, but I’m more interested in the geo-overlay possibilities. Imagine being able to annotate a great campground for the next campers, or linking a location into your CRM for field applications. Even though it’s an android app, there’s no reason it couldn’t be ported using the new iPhone SDK…
• gWalk - Klaus ten Hagen, et al: This application enables tourists to to discover a destination individually using context sensitive information. I love how this blends data discovery with 3D space. I’m thinking about emergency services applications, where data may be changing dynamically and emergency workers need to access it in real time. BreadCrumbz is almost as good: allows you to navigate using pictures of what you should be seeing.
• BioWallet - Jose Fernandez: This application does biometrics to identify people using Iris scans. The example given is for securing your phone; I’d use it in homeland security applications.
• FreeFamilyWatch- Navee Technologies: Mashes together a location with known crime data, showing you in real time how safe your family members are. I like the dashboard nature of this, but I will say that if you live somewhere were you need this… move.