Wednesday, March 14, 2012

Rosie the Robot and the MWC




And let's see here, MWC. For those of us who were not cool enough to go on a sweet vacation and hang out with other nerdy mobile people for fun, let me sum it up for you. Big findings include:
·          
Carrier OTT services trump pricing innovations
  • Carriers are feeling the squeeze (and the wrath of consumers) because, as consumers stream more and more data through their phones, they secretly curse the telecoms when they begin to get charged for their love of "Burn Notice" by the byte. Additionally, MNOs are beginning to worry about the (estimated) loss of ~$13.9B of potential SMS revenues in 2011 due to IP-based messaging like WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, iMessage, etc.
  • Solution? More value added service to justify the charges, or find a way to block the cannibalizers

Small cells eclipse interest in macrocell offerings
  • People are into the little things. Femto Forum believes that small cells will outnumber "macrocells" by year-end, growing from 3.2M to 59M by 2016. I personally love my EVO, but hate the fact that it's the size of a small car (and can someone PLEASE fix the battery issue?), so it's not a surprise that small is in. Unfortunately, some players who bet on the phablet (phone tablet, like the Samsung Galaxy Note), may be seriously reconsidering their investments now. Now my fantasies of having cool mini phones in my head like the Star Trek movies can really come to life...
  • Solution? Diversification. Samsung will live, since they also produce the Galaxy Nexus and has inked exclusive deals with some big players like Google.
Interest in native OS development replaced by HTML5
  •  Something something something. Developer stuff. Blah blah blah. Rich user experience, etc.... Okay seriously, HTML5 is really wrecking stuff, and if I was iOS or Android I'd be a little nervous. HTML5 is a web standard that basically gives the opportunity for rich software development that is major-OS-agnostic (or a direct major-OS-challenge, depending on how you see things) 
  • Solution? Telefonica and Mozilla have already announced they're going on their own web-based mobile operating system called "Boot to Gecko"...It seems like Google and Apple either need to get with the program and be more flexible, or pray that this huge influx of web volume (web-based enablement of core device APIs) crashes the interwebs system and renders it useless. Likelihood of that is about zero. Just sayin'.
M2M rises while tablets fall
  • Machine to Machine stuff fascinates me. Currently, I've really only heard about it in context of home management. On your way home you can tell your house through your mobile phone that you'll be there in 10 minutes. 7 minutes later, your house turns on the lights, sets the temperature to what you like, and opens the garage door. When you arrive and disable the security, it can unlock the doors in the rest of your house or even automatically open patio/porch doors, turn on your TV and begin playing your favourite show you previously recorded.  In a creepier sense, it can also allow you to track your kids and block types of wireless streaming in your house
  • Solution? None really, and I don't know if this really warrants a solution. This seems like something that will definitely grow in popularity as we get more lazy and more dependent on technology. I'm for it, but I do miss the days of Rosie the robot. Her smart-talkin' ways and sassy attitude always made me want a robot. But only if she'll wear an old-timey maid uniform.

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