Carlos Domingo - Un poco de todo

Enjoy!!!! Go Telefonica!!!!

http://www.kyte.tv/ch/18059-tef-ambassadors-for-innovation/63481-web-show-2

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Brian Fling moderates and does a very good job to give turns to every speaker and to keep the topics moving (prior to the panel we discussed the risk of only talking about the iPhone…). Here are some random notes, unedited notes about what each panelist said (I was typing as I was speaking so this is very incomplete…):

Risto: IPhone is flow based versus task based. Do not ask users what they want or what they like but find out what they need. What they want is not to think and express their emotion through their device. Charles Revlon quote: we fabricate cosmetics but we sell hope.

Christian: Focus on the seems and if you get that right you will improve UX (example.- Shozu). Risk of handset makers focusing on who has the ability to put a bigger screen in the pocket? Super small notebooks are the future? Google apps is liberating us from the desktop and computer paradigm. Only important question: Is my service relevant on users life?

Kelly: Is the iPhone a phone or a mini computer? She loves Helio. Ford quote: if you ask people what they wanted they would have said a faster horse, we need contextual behavior analysis. People want to play and have fun. Doing just one thing well is a proven model, iterative development model with user interaction is the way to go. People are going feature crazy with their mobile apps and that is a problem.

Carlos: iPhone will raise the expectation of what mobile user experience is and that will drive innovation across the industry.  Device and application framework fragmentation is a big issue to improve user experience, carrier desire to make money in each application/services drives them to support as many phones as possible lowering the overall user experience. Iterative development does not fit well with carriers and data is still not their core business so their focus on mobile apps is relative. Convergence is important because it will force people to think about the context of an app and not the device it goes into.

Q&A session:

What about convergence: Brian, mobile browsers supporting web standards helps convergence. Kelly, you need critical mass so big events are the opportunity (eg. Olympics). Carlos, carrier convergence helps to think about the app. Christian: find the sm and persistence storage (Web mail with partly cash content). Risto: find apps that people love

What about emerging markets (China and India) and how to deal with 2.5G and SMS based applications. SMS based apps are important. Emerging markets are important.

Who is going to own the UI? The Browser? It matters who owns the UI because UI consistency will improve user experience. The browser has probably the bigger chance to provide UI consistency and not the handset makers or the carriers.

What feature will you remove from a phone? Carlos: remove the distinction between SMS and MMS (applause from the audience!!). Christian: data cost. Kelly: keyboards (she mentions Zenzui)

CD

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Here are some unedited notes from Toni´s keynote (btw, he is a great and entertainment speaker):

Don´t try to copy the Internet and squeeze it on the phone

Mobile is the 7^th mass media (print, recording, cinema, radio, …, Internet)

Mobile can do anything that the previous six media can do, no other media can do that

Mobile media is unique because of always-on, personal, always carried, built in payment, creative, accurate audience info

Example of Docomo QR code as example of new apps that are useful

Talking about the 4 Cs (the flower diagram as he calls it): Connectivity, culture, commerce, community. Argues that Second Life is in the center of these 4Cs. The new mobile community and social networking opportunity is at the intersection

Talking about SeeMeTV: UGC for users with revenue sharing for the creators, role out by 3 in thre European countries, very sucessfull

Talking about Blik and how they are inventing mobile advertising and also providing examples of the success of mobile advertising in Japan

Innovation ping pong: Haboo hotel (they make $35MM a year, $5 per subscriber a year), according to him, CyWorld copied their business model in 2003, (check out “Digital Korea” by Ahonen and Oreilly). 30K business are active in CyWorld, 43% Korean population, Flirtomatic.com sold 3.5MM virtual roses (1.6MM$ revenue in a year), they have dropped subscriptions because they make money with virtual presents and advertisment.

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Esta semana fui invitado a dar la charla invitada en el evento de inaguración del curso de la escuela de telecomunicaciones de la UPC en Barcelona. El tema que escogí es sobre el futuro de la Internet móvil ya que quería algo facil de entender (la charla es bastante sencillita) y que motivara a los asistentes (en su mayoria, alumnos que se graduaban y recogian el diploma ese día) sobre su posible futuro profesional. No pude evitar hacer una pequeña broma sobre el intrusismo profesional en nuestras profesiones ya que yo tengo a muchos telecos trabajando de informaticos y a mi, que soy informático, me habían invitado a dar la charla de inaguración del curso de telecos.

He colgado  la charla en Slideshare que hacia tiempo que quería probarlo. Aqui la teneis.

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I just realized that the last few weeks I have been posting things to Facebook that naturally belong to my blog but since I am spending a lot more time there and I already got more than 100 friends in just four months (it took me more than 3 years to get to 300 contacts in Linkedin so definitely Facebook growth seems to be faster) so I am reaching most of the people I want to communicate with that way. Moreover, I keep my Facebook profile open so you can check my Facebook posts here .

I am also  sort of randomly updating Twitter and I got a plugin into my blog that posts my Twitter activity. I do not know of a Typepad plugin to add my Facebook posts into my blog but if I start doing that, why do I want to continue using my blog?

CD

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Just arrived to San Francisco to attend the Mobile 2.0 conference. I am at a panel on mobile user experience with Brian Fling from Blue Flavor (Moderator), Kelly Goto from Gotomedia, Risto Lahdesmaki from Idean Enterprises and Christian Lindholm from Fjord. With all these quality speakers the panel is going to be great, user experience (not just necessarily mobile) has been a big topic since I joined Telefonica R&D and we have set up a UX team in Barcelona to focus on this very important issue where, to say the least, there is room from improvement on what Telefonica is doing.  Obviously, the iPhone is going to be a major topic but I hope that we discuss other things as well.

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Early this year I had a chance to visit the telepresence system that HP has set up near by Barcelona and later in a trip to Tokyo I saw the one that Cisco had in a NTT showroom of their new generation network. Both systems are very similar, you have a room with a table in a semicircle and in front of you there are three huge (60 inches, probably) plasma screen where you see the other side of the videoconferencing. The speakers are at full size at the screen and they are sitting in a room exactly like yours (their table seems to complete the semicircle of yours), video quality is great as well as audio. The rooms are somehow set up like movie studios, where the lighting and audio conditions have been carefully set so that you get a very good image and sound. Compared to commonly used videoconferencing systems, the notion of reality is way higher and therefore it is more useful than a regular one. However, the cost is huge, they required dedicated fiber connection to each room and as I mentioned, the room itself has to be decorated in a particular way to increase the sensation that you are with the other people in the same room. At work we are prototyping a videoconferencing system using 3D screens from Philips to increase further the perception of reality. I think that we are seeing the beginning of one trend that will develop during the next ten years, telepresence, videoconferencing were the notion of reality and of being in the same room is much higher and therefore, eventually substitutes face to face meetings. And some of the makes are making sure that you do not miss this trend. Check out the season six of 24 where the president of the United States talks to the president of Russia via a telepresence system from Cisco.

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The municipal WIFI projects (basically, blanket a city with free hot spots so everyone can be online for free all the time) have been a topic of discussion since a year ago at work. Obviously, when you make money providing Internet connectivity to consumers, the idea of the city using taxpayers money to provide the same service for free is pretty challenging for your business model. I also defended that those projects were not going to be successful due to the difficulty and cost of covering well enough the city for the service to be useful. At least, not with WIFI technology, WIMAX is a different story but then WIMAX runs in licensed spectrum while WIFI in unlicensed so we are talking about different things here. The last couple of weeks there has been a string of news announcing projects being killed or postpone (Chicago, San Francisco) and more importantly, EarthLink (the main company behind this projects) has announced that it will lay off 900 workers, including the head of the municipal WIFI division. The main reason is that they do not see how to make money with a “free” service (there is no free lunch, remember?). Actually, those projects were never completely free to start with (obviously, being a company involved that is suppose to be there to make money). The idea was that the city puts some money to subsidize part of the cost and then the “free” version was either ad supported or low speed with a higher speed version available for free. Two things have happened, the number of pay subscribers has been generally very low and then to get a decent coverage, they have had to install lots more WIFI receivers than expected. Not surprising, I cannot even get WIFI all over my apartment with just one receiver so I always wonder how they were planning to get coverage throughout a whole city full of buildings like Chicago. Now it seems that they want the city to pay in advance the cost for everything so even if the number of subscribers do not go up to cover costs, the company deploying the service will not lose money. The moment this becomes very expensive for a city, all these projects will end. I think that solutions like the one in NY were you get free WIFI in most of the major city parks are good, they do provide some sort of free connectivity for the citizens but are not too costly for the city.

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I am no fan of republishing links to other articles but this article of Richard MacManus from the Read/Write Web blog is so right on spot that I wanted to share it with as many people as possible. Many of the topics he is listing are already here in some form or another (virtual worlds, mobile web, RIA, online/Internet TV), some others have been here since ages like AI (btw, mencioning Amazon Mechanical Turk as an example of AI is not correct, as far as I know, there is no articial intelligence involved there) but without becoming mainstream and others like the Semantic Web, everyone talks about but there is no where to be seen yet.

Here is the list of trends, for specifics, read the article:

1. Semantic Web

2. Artificial Intelligence

3. Virtual Worlds

4. Mobile Web

5. Attention Economy

6. Web Sites as Web Services

7. Online Video / Internet TV

8. Rich Internet Apps

9. International Web

10. Personalization

CD

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This summer I have seen two of the latest Marvel flicks, Spiderman 3 and Fantastic Four 2 (disclosure, when I was a kid I was a huge reader of Marvel comics, specially X-Men, Spiderman, Fantastic Four, Daredevil and Conan and I like most of the movies they have made). In both, I clearly recognized Stan Lee doing a cameo (specially in the Spiderman one since he is in a scene talking to Peter Parker) so I went to the web and discovered that he in fact has been doing cameos in most of the movies, some of them very hard to recognized. This YouTube video summarizes most of them.

Incidentally, looking for this video in YouTube I found these set of parodies of the Mac vs. PC Apple ads with Marvel vs. DC, some of them are very funny, just follow this search link and you will get them all.

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