Carlos Domingo - Un poco de todo

Since Telefonica is member of the Open Handset Alliance we were asked by Google to participate in the Android Developer Challenge as a judge. Initially they required two judges but shortly after due to the success of the challenge and the amount of submissions two more were requested. People from different areas of Telefonica (handsets, technology innovation, mobile services and R&D) were asked to participate and I took the judge role for Telefonica R&D. The laptop with the applications to score arrived several days late so we had to evaluate 74 applications in just four days counting the weekend (many thanks to Juan, Andreu y Josep Maria for their help!!). We have signed an NDA but the names of the judges and their companies will be made public and the first question in the FAQ of Google reads “Can an ADC judge blog/twitter about being a judge?” and according to Google, as far as I do not disclose anything about the apps, do not disclose how the process works beyond what is publicly available here http://code.google.com/android/adc.html and I ignore requests from the entrants after I disclose my role as judge, I am fine doing this. So this blog post will not be disclosing anything that you can find somewhere else (this is not entirely true as some blogs are reaching the fine line between what is publicly available and what only judges see) but my intent was to at least provide some first insights about Android. Btw, they fact that they mention Twitter in their FAQ also reflects how popular the service has become and how strong the brand is, at least within this community.

Everything related to the judging process is available with Google apps and services, a Google site dedicated to it, Google docs and the list with the scores comes in Google Spreadsheets. Even though I am not a big fun of Google apps (see a previous post here) doing this I realize how far has Google come in terms of providing a complete suite of Web apps for pretty much everything an office worker needs. Usability and funcionality is still not there but since Google since to be crusing along and not being impacted by the poor state of the world economy, I guess that they will continue investing on it and eventually catching up. No wonder Ballmer was saying this past week in Madrid that Google is one of their three main competitors (along side with Apple and Open Source).

The challenge is being judged using an application designed for it that comes preloaded in a IBM Thinkpad (and old one as it is not branded Lenovo) with Ubuntu as the OS. The app is simple but well designed and it links with the Google Spreadsheet that contains the list of apps assigned to every judge. Once you have login into the app, you are taken to an Android phone emulator that looks a bit like and HTC phone, large, high res screen that contains a carrousel in the bottom of it to access the main apps (one of them being the applications folder where everything else gets installed) and just five buttons (call, hang, home, back and menu) with a volume controller on the side. The look and feel is similar to some of the prototypes that I saw in the Mobile World Congress back in February. You then go app by app, showing its documentation, installing it in the phone and score it according to the following criteria:

1. Originality of Concept: Does the application introduce a great new idea; for example, a new angle on social applications?
2. Effective Use of the Android Platform: Does the application take advantage of Android’s unique and compelling features, such as built-in location-based services, accelerometer, and always-on networking?
3. Polish and Appeal: Is the application easy to use and aesthetically appealing?
4. Indispensability: Is the application compelling and essential, such as a game the user just can’t put down or a utility she can’t live without?

Since point number 2 is effective use of the Android platform and Android comes with Google Maps integration among others, many applications are actually using Google maps and location based services as well as Wen integration via the always-on-networking which makes me think that if Android phones are successful, they will finally make location based services and usage of contextual information for mobile phones a reality and a big differentiator from PC based Web apps.

The main challenge to evaluate the apps is that for many applications is hard to see its real usage without actually having a phone and use it in your day to day basis so you end up evaluating it based on the documentation and how you think it will work in a real live situation.

I think that this is as far as I can disclose without breaking the NDA so just add that while some apps are the obvious ones that you can think of it for a phone, there are some surprises (and also some very silly ones). In general, the level of the apps is very mixed, I am judging the first round so my apps have been selected from a total of 1,700+ initially submitted (see details about the submissions here). I understand that Google has not done any prior filtering to keep things fair but some applications really do not do anything useful and are very poor while others are very polished with a lot of functionality and good documentation. I was initially not planning on getting into round two but I am thinking about emailing Google to see whether I can also do so since I might get to see a better set of apps. Given the level of submissions, the challenged has been a success and it will go a long way to start popularizing Android with developers (the $10MM in prices certainly helped).

This challenge has also allowed me to play around with the Android phone emulator. It is painfully slow. The browser is not very good, has similar issues as the one in the N95 when visiting regular web sites, it does not resize pages to fit the screen and it is very slow, I guess that because of the emulator so I wouldn’t draw any conclusions on speed yet. Mobile sites like m.twitter.com or m.facebook.com look good but lack the graphical sophistication and interactivity of iPhone mobile sites. Perhaps this will get fixed when actual Android phones come to market and people customize their mobile sites for them. Google maps is pretty cool and for the basic phone apps (call, SMS, agenda, etc.) are hard to actually see the real level of usability since you are doing it from the computer with the mouse but they are very simple, they are way behind in terms of usability from an iPhone although I am assuming that this is not intended to be a demo of the phone itself but just for testing the apps. Interestingly, how the phone apps are displayed on the emulator is different from how it is shown on the documentation provided, apparently there are two versions of the emulator around.

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Courtesy of Ramon Sanguesa who show me and my team these two videos last week about innovation, both worth seeing it. The first one (the best of the two in my opinion) is the project of a Stanford student and the second one is an ad from IBM.

Btw, this post is done from my new MacBook Air, my return to MacOS X after two years with Windows is about to happen, now I just need my corporate tools to work with a Mac.

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Daniel Graft, CEO and cofounder of Kyte just announced a couple of major developments for the company. First, the recent investment from Telia Sonera and most relevantly from Steamboat Ventures, this is Disney VC Fund, so this closes the loop on the shareholder ecosystem that he is building with leading telcos like Telefónica, NTT Docomo, Swiscom and now also TeliaSonera, mobile device manufacturers like Nokia and now a large media company, Disney.  Disney means not only Disney but also ABC (the network from Lost, Desperate Housewifes, Oprah), ESPN, Miramax, Pixar, etc.). Second, he has announced mobile live streaming directly to your Kyte channel and the new kyte.com website. Kyte has now become the best multimedia social sharing and publishing platform for media companies, artists,  telcos and users to broadcast their content and virally distribute it. I have been involved with Kyte for several months already and next week I will be with them in San Francisco next week and I can tell you that they are into something big, I am extremely pleased with our decision to invest and very happy of the quick progress the company is making. Check out their new introduction video here in the newly introduced kyte.com website. Here is the Techcrunch announcement of the release. Techcrunch has also just released their branded channel (first one was rapper 50cent in his website here, his channel has been viewed more than 4MM times and embedded in more than 13,000 web sites in just few months) using Kyte, I have embedded it below with Daniel interview of the recent announcement.

Go Kyte!!!

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I am reading this interesting discussion about Google Apps versus Microsoft Office and I cannot agree more with Karim´s comments, for productivity tools, today there is no real competition to Microsoft Office and its suite of products. Reading this comes at an interesting weekend when my company is finally moving to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook for email and calendar after suffering the lack of it for almost two years that I have been here. The argument for not using it before was mainly price since we were using some open source alternatives and some software we got for free from Oracle for the calendar app (highly not recommendable). If you look at Karim´s comment, the part that I find more interesting besides the laundry list of basic features missing in Google Apps is this one:

“$120 / 3 computers = $40 per computer. Assuming you upgrade every 3 years, that’s about $1.12 per PC per month for the MS Office suite. Why would I spend THAT kind of crazy money for software I use day-in, day-out when I can bang my head “for free” against the lame “experimental” features of Google Docs?”

Companies focused on efficiency and cost reduction tend to make the basic mistake of not looking at the total cost of ownership of things and only look at the direct cost of something. I am all for using free or open source software but only if its better than existing alternatives not just because is free. In the case of using Google Apps (or the situation we had in the company till recently), I am sure that the loss of productivity is much higher than the actual cost of the software by far. I have wasted a lot of company money (meaning my work time lost because of issues with the email and calendar software we were using) that is far more expensive that the few dollars per day that will cost us from now on moving to Microsoft Exchange and Outlook.

And Bernard argument about collaboration is wrong, Microsoft has a great collaboration tool, Share Point and any serious analysis of MS Office versus Google Apps should have included it.

CD

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I just came back from my first few hours at the Campus Party Brasil in Sao Paulo, great event, more than 3,000 campuseros attending (huge for being the first time) and more than 50,000 people visiting the open area, lots of activities and more variety than the one in Valencia since it is less focused on online gaming  (even though 30% is open source people since Marcelo, the director, is one of the leaders of open source in Brasil). People also seem to be more participative and all the content areas, talks and seminars were pretty full. I will write some more detail post later but for the time being I will be uploading content to the Kyte channel embedded below that I created for the occasion. More info here in the official blog written by Pixel and Dixel.

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This year was my second year attending the MWC (formerly 3GSM) in Barcelona since I joined the telco industry and I had some sort of DjVu while walking the aisles of the congress. Why? Well, to start, most of the companies had the same booth and at the same location and there was nothing particularly new that they were launching that make you think that a year has passed by. Yes there was more LTE related products but this was already in 2007 (it seems that LTE is winning over WIMAX but this congress even though is global it has a bit of a European biased). Yes there were more femtocells but femtocells were already last year as well (btw, most femtocells vendors focused on improving indoor coverage but I did not see anything good in terms of new digital home services enabled by them). Yes there were more LG and Samsung phones with large, touch screens but some of those launched last year (like the LG Prada model). Yes Nokia had the N96 but the N95 was there last year and there is nothing exciting about the N96 that was not already in the N95 (and the crappy features like the user interface or lack of touch screen have not been improved at all). Many of the smaller companies in Hall 7 were also the same as last year offering more ring tones, downloads, mobile IM, etc. Again, nothing strikingly new. The Telefonica/O2 booth was similar to last year and the most remarkable thing for me was that many demos done by my team were there, the guys from El Pais highlighted our Second Life demos (check the link here since they have a cool video explaining the demo, we did some demos from the R&D center to a large group of foreign journalists and it was fun to see the other avatar being used in the MWC hanging at the island we have in Second Life) and apparently the minister of industry Clos tried himself our Shake and Throw demo using accelerometers.

And what about those Android prototypes? Well, unimpressive is the word. The hardware is not there and the user interface in the ones that I see is like a poor version of a Yahoo Go! or a iPhone so still way to go. They are not particularly slow as I read somewhere (my N95 feels slower in changing menus or starting the camera) but the user interface is also not particularly impressive. There are early prototypes so we will have to wait and see. I think that the most relevant around Android was the comment from Rich Miner about getting the price point of Android based terminals down to $100 in the next few years, that will really change the industry landscape. Another interesting comment I heard was from Arun Sharin, Vodafone CEO that in his keynote mentioned that one of the key issues to solve in the next few years is the fragmentation of mobile OS since that is stopping innovation. I could not agree more but the iPhone and Android for the time being are only adding fragmentation even though it could change in the future if we are left with four major mobile Internet enabled OS, iPhone, Android, Symbian and Windows Mobile. Consolidation on mobile browsers could also help solve the issue and here WebKit is getting more and more traction as the leading browser. I also saw a demo of Ovi but I was not very impressed, just putting together some of their existing sites and recent acquisitions. The OVI multimedia share site was still pointing at Twango in their demos and some other sites did not have an OVI look and feel yet but the old one). The "new" upload client was just the old Nokia Web Upload with a Ovi link. I guess is also too early to see where they are heading. 

And what about the parties? I did not attend many as some of my colleagues did since I was very tired from the weekend and the long days, I might be getting old (one of them, I will not mention his name to avoid public embarrassment, was twittering from two different parties on Wednesday night, then went sightseeing early Thursday morning in Barcelona and at 10am was looking very fresh in a meeting we had at the Telefonica stand). I attended the Open Handset Alliance party that  Google did at the MACBA, pretty cool set up and location but close to non OHA members till 10:30pm and in spite of promises from Google that the party was going to get wild after 10:30pm when they open to all public, it did not at all and overall was very lame, just good to have a drink with some of Madrid colleagues, Kyte video below.

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Today Elegy, the latest Isabel Coixet movie starring Penelope Cruz, Sir Ben Kingsley (in all the invitations he is referred as Sir, see here the one for tonight dinner after the premiere) and Dennis Hopper (who unfortunately, it is not here in Berlin, all the others are). Yesterday I bunch of people that are coming to attend the premiere came and we did some sightseeing, dinner and drinks. It was a lot of fun even though there was some weird nervousness on the air. The movie stars at 7pm, then dinner sponsored by L’Oreal (they have blanketed Berlin with pictures of Penelope) and then party at a Scholoss Hotel that apparently, has been refurnished by Karl Lagerfeld. Unfortunately, tomorrow also starts the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona and I need to get an early flight so I will not be able to stay for long but at least I will catch up most of the action. The experiment we are carrying with Kyte and Terra has been more complicated than expected, the N95 is a bit of a nightmare to use and the 3G connection here is not very good for videos. Anyway, all problems have been solved and I uploaded few videos to their Kyte chanel and lots more to my personal channel embedded below (I did not want to spam Terra viewers who are probably not interested in my personal pics and videos but are just looking for celebrities) as well as pictures in my Flickr account. You can spot many celebrities around here (yesterday night at the restaurant Catherine Deneuve was sitting at a corner table) but I have only recorded the ones I know since it seems very annoying when people come and asks for pictures (and they are doing it all the time…). Now out for lunch and to check out the Film Market where all the production companies are showing their new movies and then heading for the premiere.

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Yesterday was my first day at the Berlinale and after dinner with my sister, Paco and Anna (short clip here in Kyte, not rotated, anyone can help?) we attended the world premiere of Eskalofrio, a movie directed by Isidro Ortiz from Fausto Productions (responsible for Fausto 5.0, a highly recommended movie) and with a very young cast of actors mainly from TV, Junio Valverde (who gave a very nervous speech), Blanca Suarez and Jimmy Barnatan (picture below with the cast). The movie was pretty good, a mix of The Blair Witch Project and Japanese movie The Ring (the German girl in the movie has reminiscences of Sadako, the girl from The Ring) with some pretty funny humor bits and a surprising end. The movie draw special laughs in the audience due to the role played by a German family in the film (Isidro clarified that the choice of the family was done prior to knowing that the film was going to open here). After that, we hanged around a couple of bars and attended a live interview with Gregg Araki (Kyte clip here). Today a lot more people are arriving and we are gearing up for Sunday premier of Elegy.

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When news broke on Friday that Microsoft was doing an unsolicited $44,6 billion takeover bid for Yahoo!, first I was not surprise because this rumor has been around for a while but what I was surprise about was the price they were willing to pay, $31 a share, half in cash and a premium of 60% to the current trading price. I thought that it was a very desperate move to be willing to pay that much premium and that it was a very large acquisition even for Microsoft. After looking at initial projections of synergies and size of combined business, it even made less financial sense. Strategically, it does make sense. The Internet business is a scale business, so the larger you are in terms of properties and eyeballs, the larger your inventory is, the larger the advertisement network you can create (see how happy Madison Avenue is about this) and the more efficient your R&D and infrastructure investments are. This is the power of network effects that Microsoft has mastered in the desktop and office applications space. Also, there are interesting, less obvious synergies in domains like Web email and instant messaging (with the possibilities that a social networking spin can add to those applications) where the combined company is going to have a very large market share. I think that people is very focused on search these days but they are underestimating that a large share of online advertisement is going to come from other non search properties and the combined Microhoo is going to be the market leader in most of them. Also, there are interesting regional synergies since Yahoo! is stronger in Asia and Microsoft in Europe and Latam so when the online advertisement market takes off in those countries to the level of the US, Microhoo will be better prepared to capture that revenue (again, except in search even though in China and Japan Yahoo! has a good position there as well). So back to the financials, why the huge premium? Apparently, Ballmer had made a friendly offer for Yahoo! few months ago that was reject by the board so looking at Yahoo! stock price, you can see that it has significantly drop in the recent months. In other words, Microsoft was ready to pay something around this price few months ago. Also, being this an unsolicited bid, they need to convinced a large amount of shareholders to go along and therefore, you need to pay a premium not only above the current price but above the average price for the recent period. Yahoo! stock has been trading between $35 and $25 during the last two years. So $31 is probably the price they have calculated to get a sufficient number of shareholders happy to go along the bid. As for how to pay this, Microsoft has no long term debt, generates close to $20 billion in cash flow from operating activities a year, and has a market cap of $280 billion (after a 6% drop on the news on Friday) so they will be paying less than 10% of that in shares. Summarizing, they can easily afford it. The other interesting financial point is that the revenue of the combined company will be less 10% of Microsoft total revenue so this shows their understanding that the future is the Internet and even if they manage to keep a decent cash flow generating business (actually, a great one in fact) from Windows, Office, enterprise apps and Xbox, they still need to be a leader on the Internet to protect the future of the company. So in my opinion, a great, bold, forward looking move from Microsoft.

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El proyecto CP Labs acaba de anunciarse públicamente hoy (post de David anunciándolo aquí). En el pasado Campus Party de Valencia algunos os preguntaríais que de donde salía una area como de chill out con tiras negras que estaba en uno de los pabellones donde ponía CP Labs (ver foto). Pues bueno, era el primer teaser de un proyecto con el que llevábamos tiempo discutiendo con el verdadero artífice de todo esto, Paco Ragageles, fundador y alma mater de la Campus Party. Al poco de entrar en Telefónica, hacia finales del 2006 dos personas con las que sintonicé inmediatamente (Patxi y Alejandro, los insiders de Telefónica ya sabéis a quien me refiero) me comentaron que tenia que conocer a Paco cuanto antes. Nos pusieron en contacto y al poco lo visitaba en sus oficinas de Madrid y me ametralló con su visión de Internet, ideas, propuestas, y mil cosas para hacer conjuntamente y lo que me quedó claro desde el primer momento es que la comunidad de campuseros con Paco al frente (y Beli, Alejandro, David, Richard, y los otros miles de asistentes, no nos olvidemos del resto) eran una comunidad super innovadora, llena de ideas, de energía y de ganas de hacer cosas con la que nosotros, como representantes del área de Internet y Multimedia de Telefonica I+D y cheer leaders de la innovación en Telefónica, nos teníamos que relacionar mas profundamente. Nuestra primera colaboración surgió ya en la Campus del 2007 (modesta, sacada adelante gracias a la iniciativa personal de algunos de mis compañeros) y este año haremos mas cosas y mejor (Alberto y demás compañeros, es vuestro reto). Poco antes ya discutimos el proyecto que ahora se anuncia de CP Labs, la creación de una plataforma que una a la comunidad de campuseros mas allá del evento de cada verano en Valencia y que les permita articular las muchas iniciativas innovadoras relacionadas con las nuevas tecnologías para ver cuales se pueden sacar adelante. Vamos, open innovation en estado puro. Arrancar esto no ha sido fácil pero se ha conseguido convencer a las personas adecuadas y el que Telefonica I+D este oficialmente apoyando esta iniciativa me alegra muchísimo y demuestra los cambios que se están realizando en la compañía. Felicidades a toda la gente que ha hecho de este proyecto una realidad y ahora, a hacer de esto un éxito. De momento se empieza con unos concursos para animar a la comunidad a empezar a participar con ideas sobre temas concretos, unos foros, los open labs para testear productos (espero pronto meter alguno de los nuestros) pero vendrán mas cosas así que apuntaros cuanto antes. Esta semana he estado cenando con Paco y a parte de los CP Labs está llevando el concepto de Campus Party por el mundo, este año ya arranca en Brasil, Colombia, Grecia y por supuesto sin olvidarnos de Valencia así que a ver si el CP Labs tiene el éxito que ha tenido Campus y se extiende también por otros países, en las manos de vosotros, la comunidad de innovadores, está el hacer de esto una realidad.

CD

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