Paul Wallbank – Communications Professional
Comms, journalism and writing
Splitting apps is a big risk for online services
Much to the irritation of many users both Foursquare and Facebook have split their apps into separate tools.
Fred Wilson of Union Square Ventures, one of the investors in Foursquare, explains the reason for this are that different patterns meant the service had to cater for privacy models which threatened to confuse users.
The risk for both Facebook and Foursquare is that irritated users might give up on the service, it’s a tough balancing act.
BlackBerry stakes its future on increased enterprise security concerns and the internet of things
This is the unedited, submitted version of ‘is BlackBerry ripe for a comeback‘ that appeared in Technology Spectator on 30 July, 2014.
“What do we well?” is the question Blackberry CEO John Chen asked when he took the reigns of the Canadian communication company last November.
Chen was speaking on Tuesday at Blackberry’s Security Summit in New York where he and his executive team laid out the company’s roadmap back to profitability.
Since the arrival of the iPhone and Android smartphones, times have been tough for the once iconic business phone vendor as enterprise users deserted Blackberry’s handsets and the company struggled to find a new direction under former CEO Thorsten Heins.
In Chen’s view, the company’s future lies in its roots of providing secure communications for large organisations, “It became obvious to us that security, productivity and collaboration have to be it.”
“This is not to say we are not interested in the consumer, but we have to anchor ourselves around the enterprise.” Chen said in a clear move distancing himself from his predecessor and products like the ill fated Blackberry Playbook
An early step in this process of focusing on enterprise security concerns is the acquisition of German voice security company Secusmart which was the cornerstone of Chen’s New York keynote.
Blackberry’s acquisition of the company is a logical move says the CEO of Secusmart, Dr Hans-Christoph Quelle, who points out the two organisations have been working closely together for several years.
“It fits perfectly,” says Quelle. “We are not strangers having worked together since 2009,” in describing how Secusmart technology has been increasingly incorporated into Blackberry’s devices.
Secusmart’s key selling point has been its adoption by NATO and European government agencies; the Snowden revelations on the US bugging of Angela Merkel coupled with the Russian FSB leaking intercepted US state department conversations along with the release of Ukrainian separatist conversations after the shooting down of MH17 has focused the European view on the security of voice communications.
Along with the acquisition of Secusmart, Blackberry will also be launching an new enterprise service in November, the new Passport handset in December along with a range of security applications including BlackBerry Guardian, a new service that will scan Android apps for malicious software.
Blackberry’s executives were at pains to emphasise their products aren’t focused on any single smartphone operating system and not dependent on customers buying their smartphones although to get the maximum security benefits.
“We will provide the best level of security possible to as many target devices out there as possible,” said Dan Dodge who heads Blackberry’s QNX embedded devices division.
In the longer term, Blackberry sees QNX division as being one of the major drivers of future revenues as the Internet of Things is rolled out across industries.
QNX was acquired by Blackberry in 2010 to broadband the communication company’s product range, now it is one of the pillars of the organisation’s future as Chen and his team see that connected devices will need secure and reliable software.
Dodge says: “With the internet of things, you can have devices that can change your world.”
While QNX is best known for its smartcar operating system – it underpins Apple’s CarPlay system being rolled out for BMW as well as its own system deployed in Audis – the company’s products are used for industrial applications ranging from wind turbines to manufacturing plants.
Despite Blackberry’s announcements in New York, the company still facing challenges in the marketplace with the Ford Motor Company announcing earlier this week it will drop the Blackberry for its employees by the end of the year and replace them with iPhones.
Chen’s though is dismissive about Apple’s and IBM’s moves into Blackberry’s enterprise markets, “what we do and what they do is completely different.”
The focus for Chen is to differentiate Blackberry and play on its strengths, particularly the four markets it calls ‘regulated industries’ – government, health care, financial and energy that the company claims makes up half of enterprise IT spending.
Whether this is enough to bring Blackberry back on track remains to be seen but Chen says this is where he sees the company’s future, “This is why we are so focused on enterprise and so focused on these pillars.”
For Blackberry, the emphasis on enterprise communications is a step back to the profitable past. It may well be successful as businesses become more security conscious in a post-Snowden world.
Paul travelled to the Blackberry Security Summit in New York as a guest of the company.
Ericsson’s head of broadcast, Thosten Sauer, sees context as key to using mobile video as telcos struggle with exploding internet traffic
One of the great changes to the telecommunications industry is the rise of video. As part of the Decoding the New Economy video series we had an opportunity to grab a quick chat with Torsten Sauer, Ericsson’s Vice President of Broadcast services.
Video is the great challenge for telecommunications company, broadcasters and consumers with Cisco Systems predicting by 2018 over 50% of internet traffic will be videos.
As designer Gadi Amit told this website a few weeks ago, the problem is compounded as the broadcast world evolves from a three or four screen environment to an almost infinite range of screen sizes and devices.
With most of that traffic being over mobile devices, Sweden’s Ericsson has been adapting to the the industry’s change to mobile video with a series of acquisitions in the broadcast production space. Sauer explained some of the motivations and strategies behind Ericsson’s moves in the industry.
Ericsson’s acquisition of British content house Red Bee Media earlier this year is one of the areas where the company is looking at growing its services.
“Consumer behaviour is changing and that represents a huge transformation for the industry,” Sauer says. “We want to be a catalyst for that transformation through providing the right services.”
Along with more traditional fields like basic production services, Sauer sees the company’s opportunity in building the metadata into videos making them more accessible over the very crowded internet.
The other key opportunity Sauer sees is that by creating richer content, it becomes easier for creators, broadcasters and advertisers to serve appropriate content to viewers depending upon both their interests and the devices they are using.
“It’s a great opportunity for broadcasters to address new opportunities and revenue streams on different devices and in different locations.”
Sauer’s view ties in with Gadi Amit’s in that the proliferation of ways to watch videos is going to create great opportunities for broadcasters to find different ways to show their work.
With the proliferation of channels, the field isn’t just left to the incumbents with Suaer seeing the entry of new broadcasters as one of the great opportunities.
“There will be a lot of opportunities for a lot of new players, that will create a healthy innovation base. It’s a very exciting time to be in this industry.”
With video marketing exploding, Sauer sees it’s important for non-broadcast businesses to experiment with video; “It’s now the time, business models are not all set and technology models are not all set.”
Just as businesses have to deal with a more mobile marketplace and workforce, we’re also seeing video becoming more important. It’s a great opportunity for businesses to develop new channels.
The first advert for Microsoft’s Nokia phones is a little mysterious and worrying
“Not like everybody else” proclaims Microsoft’s first ad for its newly acquired Nokia phone division.
In what way the Microsoft-Nokia product isn’t like its Apple and Android competitors isn’t clear from the ad, but hopefully they’ll tell us.
The real concern with the Microsoft ad is that it again appears the business is being left behind in a marketplace shift as Google, Samsung, Apple and all the other smartphone leaders move to integrate their phones with smarthomes, fridges and even football stadiums.
Sadly it might turn out that, once again, Microsoft isn’t like everybody else.
The Tizen and Firefox smartphone systems threaten to disrupt the entire industry and ruin the plans of both Apple and Google.
It’s been a long time since we’ve had a three or four way war in the technology industry, with most sectors settling down into a two way fight between alternatives.
Mozilla’s promised $25 smartphone project threatens to open the mobile industry into a three way battle just as it appeared the market had comfortably settled down into an Android and iOS duopoly.
Now we see a three way race and possibly four if Samsung can get traction with its Tizen operating system that it’s bundling into the latest version of the Gear smartwatch.
One positive aspect of the four way battle is that three of the participants – Firefox, Tizen and Android are relatively open so compatibility between them isn’t impossible.
For Google and Apple though, this four way tussle presents a problem to their business plans.
Apple’s iOS ambitions of putting the software in smarthomes, connected cars and, possibly most lucratively of all, into retailing with iBeacon are threatened by a fragmented market and a rapidly eroding market share.
For Google, both Firefox and Tizen threaten the dominant position of their Android operating system that forms a plank in the company’s ambition to control the planet’s data and become an ‘identity service’.
Worse still for Google’s information ambitions, Firefox is working with Deutsche Telekom on a security initiative that will lock away users’ data.
So the stakes are high in the smartphone operating systems wars.
It’s early days to forecast the demise of either Android or Apple iOS, which is unlikely in the short term, but if Firefox’s operating system does take hold it will mean the smartphone industry is about to become a lot more complex.
Can HTC avoid the looming commodity trap for smartphone manufacturers?
HTC’s announcement that the company going to focus on lower margin, mid market smartphones illustrates the maturing of the phone marketplace.
Smartphones have been a huge, and immensely profitable, business for cellphone manufacturers however the devices are now becoming a commodity as the high end western markets become saturated and cheaper devices start to enter the marketplace.
Having been comprehensively defeated in the high end marketplace by Samsung and Apple, Taiwanese manufacturer HTC hopes to make money in the lower end of the market.
For HTC it’s questionable how profitable these cheaper markets will be; rebates to telcos and distributor markups tend to eat up most the margin while pushing up retail costs.
The biggest factor of all though is the entry of newer Chinese businesses into the market, it’s going to be a tough for the Taiwanese manufacturer to compete with these suppliers.
Even Apple and Samsung are being affected by the slowing demand for high end smartphones.
HTC’s dilemma would be familiar to most electronic manufacturers; the high end of the market is a narrow niche – the premium smartphone market, like PCs, is dominated by Apple – while the other suppliers fight not to find themselves locked into the commodity end of the market.
For HTC the trap is not to fall into the commodity trap; although it’s hard to see how they’ll do this in a smartphone market that’s increasingly becoming a low margin, high volume game where, like the PC market, there is no middle ground.
Where to next for Apple in an era of lowered expectations?
Last Friday I had a story in Business Spectator on the future of Apple in light of the company’s warning of a 20% fall in revenue next quarter.
The clear message from Apple’s executives was that the company is facing a terminal decline in iPod sales and the iPhone – it’s most profitable and highest selling product – is facing slower sales.
So the search is on to find something that will replicate the iPhone’s success, with the biggest candidate being the iWatch.
The problem with that is the entire wearable technology market is only forecast to be $6bn which is a seventh of Apple’s $42 billion profit last year, so the iWatch can never replace falling iPhone sales.
It may well be for Apple that the period of massive profits and growth is drawing to an end, it doesn’t mean the company is dying – for a start they has nearly $200bn in cash reserves and a healthy $150 billion in sales each year.
Short of Tim Cook unveiling something similar to the iPhone, the future for Apple is probably going to be a bit modest than past few years of huge growth, that’s not a bad thing.
Rather than being the end of Apple, it’s more a revision to the role the company has held for most of it’s existence – a high profit, niche business that sells on quality and brand rather than fighting in the commodity markets.
The Apple iPhone reinvented the smartphone and mobile internet industries. Can it also define the internet of things?
“Once in a while a revolutionary product comes along that changes everything.”
Those were Steve Jobs’ words when he launched the iPhone seven years ago.
It was a strong opening that was reinforced by the event’s tag line, “Today Apple reinvents the phone.”
It wasn’t an idle boast, the iPhone was a leapfrog development – using Jobs’ words – over the existing clunky smartphones and it changed the entire industry and spawned some new ones.
Smart Company’s Yolanda Redrup asked me for a few comments on her story on the iPhone’s birthday and her questions triggered some thoughts on just how the iPhone changed the mobile phone and telco industries.
Apple’s iPhone triumph was born out of the established players’ orthodoxy; companies like Nokia, Blackberry and Palm were wedded to the idea that a tactile QWERTY keyboard was essential for a smartphone.
Those keyboards took away nearly half the real estate on the phone, Jobs called it “the lower forty”, and it made surfing the net a painful task, let alone watching videos or movies.
Full featured keyboards made making calls difficult as well. One of the barriers of adopting smartphones was that using the things as phones was quite difficult.
By having software keyboard and dialling pads that only appeared when needed, Apple solved the problems that faced smartphone users.
The other orthodoxy in the smartphone industry was that the telcos were essential gatekeepers. Nokia and the other incumbents put the needs of telecommunications companies over users of their phones.
As a consequence email and web browsing capabilities of the existing smartphones were crippled as the telcos tried to lock their customers into their own proprietary networks rather that giving them access to the public internet.
With the iPhone, Apple broke out of that telco dominance and started to dictate terms to the phone companies. This wouldn’t have been possible if the iPhone hadn’t been a far better, and much more popular, product.
Another area where the iPhone disrupted the phone companies’ business was with the App Store. Every smartphone had its own add-on programs but they were expensive with poor functionality and developers had to build versions for every company’s operating system.
Both the telcos and the phone vendors could see that app stores were a potentially lucrative area but systemically failed to execute on the idea with clunky and expensive software.
The App Store showed how smartphones should work and coupled with music, another area where the handset vendors dismally failed, Apple is now earning over a billion dollars a month from iTunes.
Some of the iPhone’s success was due to technologies maturing; earlier smartphones were crippled by slow data connections over 2G or CDMA networks and cloud computing, or software-as-a-service as it was then called, was just beginning to mature as a technology.
Cloud services and 3G connectivity meant the iPhone could hand off most apps’ processing needs to the service provider, something that the earlier smartphones couldn’t do because the technology wasn’t there.
That connectivity did come at a cost, the iPhone and its competitors created huge challenges for telcos as they struggled to meet the data demands of their enthusiastic web surfing customers.
While the iPhone came to dominate the smartphone market, that dominance didn’t last as Google Android devices started to flood the marketplace. Now Samsung is as big a player as Apple and a wave of cheap Chinese products are now flooding the industry.
For Apple and the other smartphone vendors the opportunities now lie in the internet of things (IoT) as connected cars, workplaces and homes require a device to control them. That device is often the smartphone.
In the next few years the market battleground is going to be creating the applications, platforms and ecosystems around these IoT technologies and its no coincidence that Apple has partnered with BMW on providing software for their smartcar.
Jobs finished his iPhone presentation with the Wayne Gretzky quote, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been” and committed Apple to always being where the market is going to be.
Where the market is going to be in the next seven years is anyone’s guess, but it would be dangerous to count Apple out.
We may well see both QR codes and NFC succeed eventually, but right now they are the classic case of a technological solution searching for a problem to solve.
One of ‘coming real soon’ technologies of our times is Near Field Communications (NFC), a short range radio service connecting suitably equipped electronic devices.
NFC has been tipped to arrive ‘real soon now’ for several years as mobile phone companies, banks and telcos fight to control the payments system.
The service hasn’t taken off for a number of reasons; it’s clunky to use, the technology itself isn’t consistently applied and many smartphones don’t have the feature, the most notable being the iPhone.
Most of the applications cited for NFC are contactless payment services where a customer can wave a phone to pay for things, a good example is this parking meter in San Francisco.
On the other side of the Pacific, Google are running a campaign in Australia encouraging commuters to try the NFC features that are built into most Android phones.
Unfortunately the technology doesn’t work, as the comments to this blog post indicate. The users’ problems illustrate why NFC is struggling; it’s clunky, unreliable and customers don’t understand it.
It’s notable the Google campaign includes a QR code, another technology that’s been pending for nearly a decade.
Both are doomed though while customers struggle to use them.
We may well see both QR codes and NFC succeed eventually, but right now they are the classic case of a technological solution searching for a problem to solve.
Haitian photographer Daniel Moran’s victory over Agence France Press and Getty Images is a reminder to journalists and media organisations that just because something is posted to social media it doesn’t mean it is free to use.
One of the long running scandals of modern journalism is how media organisations have misused social media.
Haitian photographer Daniel Moran’s victory over Agence France Press and Getty Images is a reminder to journalists and media organisations that when something is posted to social media it doesn’t mean it’s free to use.
Since the rise of social media sites it’s become common for journalists to grab images or videos from them to illustrate stories. At best, the media organisations have credited the sites they’ve stolen the content to allay copyright concerns.
The problem is media companies and journalists don’t have the right to do that; users don’t give away their rights when they post to Twitter or Facebook — they grant a license to the company to use those that content as they wish.
If a photographer, writer, computer programmer or musician wants to give away their work for free then there’s a range of ways they can do it and many are happy to make their efforts available to the community without charge. It just happens posting to a social media site isn’t one of those ways.
Hopefully journalists and media organisations will learn a lesson from Daniel Moran’s case, social media doesn’t mean open slather.
Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff says he’s gone completely mobile, will other executives follow?
“I don’t want to use a laptop again,” Marc Benioff told the closing Dreamforce 2013 customer Q&A. “The desktop remains the biggest security threat to corporations — it’s a nightmare. The PC and laptop we never designed to be connected to a network.”
Benioff was walking his talk in promoting his company’s Salesforce One mobile platform, claiming at the Dreamforce conference opening that he hadn’t used a PC or laptop or nine months as he’s moved over to tablet and smartphone apps.
That push to move the company and its customers onto mobile services was emphasised by Peter Coffee, Salesforce’s Vice President for Strategic Research.
“Your mobile device is no longer an accessory,” says Coffee. “It’s the first thing you reach for in the morning and it’s the last thing you touch at night.”
Salesforce’s push into into the post-PC market follows Google and Apple’s lead, much to the distress of Microsoft and its partners.
“We saw the phenomenal engineering work of Scott Forstall at Apple and the visionary work of the late, great Steve Jobs,” Benioff told his cutomers at the final Dreamforce Q&A. “When we saw the iPhone we sat up and thought ‘wow, what are we going to do about this?'”
“This is a paradigm shift, we’re moving from the desktop world to the mobile phone world and then of course we saw the iPad world emerge and that amplified it.”
Salesforce’s impressions were shared by much of the business community as senior executives, board members and company founders quickly embraced the first version of the iPad, which on its own triggered the Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) trend in enterprise computing.
In a mobile age, Benioff now sees three key priorities for Salesforce; “we want to be feed first, we want to be mobile first and we want to be social first.”
Regardless of Benioff’s vision, not everyone will go mobile which is something that Peter Coffee acknowledges.
“The laptop will occasionally be used to author creative work like a presentation or to deal with something that needs a large screen like pipeline analysis,” says Coffee.
Marc Benioff though is adamant. “Honestly I don’t ever want to use a laptop again,” he told his audience.
It will be interesting to see how many business leaders follow him in abandoning their desktops and portable computers as the post-PC era of computing develops.
Blackberry CEO Thorsten Heins leaves with a big payout and investors with a headache.
Six months ago I wondered if Blackberry CEO Thorsten Heins was the world’s bravest executive?
It turns out his bravery wasn’t rewarded as Blackberry’s brave attempt to reclaim their smartphone market share failed and now their hopes of a private equity takeover has failed with Heins announcing his resignation.
Heins is still a risk taker though with Business Insider reporting that he may have forgone up to fifty million dollars in termination payments.
Still he walks away with several million dollars, so life isn’t too hard for Thorsten.
For Blackberry though the struggle continues with the company hoping to raise a billion dollars through a convertible note issue. It would be an investor braver than Thorsten Heins who takes that offer.
