What have people got against Blackberry?

So one of the things when you go on holiday and don't take your blog with you is that you start to notice what random old posts are still directing traffic to it in the absence of any new fresh stuff. I looked at my site analytics at the weekend, and found a lot (well, a lot in the context of visitors here - so like 5 a day) of people had tracked down a post I wrote about 18 months ago called "How to break a Blackberry".

It wasn't really about how to break one, no. It was a pun on 'break' as in break a new band, about the pitfalls of giving a review model of a new mobile phone to Apple geek Stephen Fry, a man who in Dec 08 couldn't tweet about picking his nose without the national press eagerly reporting it. So when he predictably hated the Storm, lots of tech publishers had a ready made story.
Anyway, I wondered how people were tracking this down, and naturally they were all Google referrals, but not ones that had ever cropped up before. So I wondered if there is something specific that Blackberry had done to provoke a mass breaking. But it turns out that this has been a steady growth of traffic
story (current global exact match volume is around 140 queries per month, so not by any means huge. But then that's exact match on one long tail query).

All of this is only mildly interesting in its own right, but puts the recent advertising assault for Blackberry Messenger into context. If the people who have always had Blackberries, the folk who get them free though work, are choosing to buy a smartphone instead because it can do all the work stuff as well as all the smartphone stuff, then Blackberry would need a new market who can't afford smartphones. Hence formerly rock solid email performance becomes rock solid messenger performance.

And why the need to break Blackberries? Well they're a 'gift' from your employer. If you want the latest smartphone then you'd need to make it look like a mistake. A couple of things happened around the time that traffic spiked. Droid was announced, and Microsoft Exchange (ie work email on iPhone) improved (it was around since 08, and I don't know how it improved, as I never worked out how to do it before whatever changed late 09)

Of course, I might be reading a whole lot of stuff into a harmless set of figures and post-rationalising it a little too much, but it all sounds plausible doesn't it?

Converse/Anomaly Domaination case study

I wish I wrote more stuff on here about advertising that I really like...... so the Converse case study below makes me really happy. Using real time insights to power lots of little culturally relevant productions. Using the obvious (paid search ads) to make something new (spelling bee live competitions). Sheer genius. Most people reading this probably know who Anomaly are and what they stand for, but if you work in the UK you might not have seen too much stuff that they have done (yet!).

Converse Domaination from Ross Martin on Vimeo.

(HT @dafdent)

Open vs 'just works - convergence part 2

So way back when IBM stalked the earth, computers were closed systems. The whole evolution of Microsoft from IBM OS provider to the monopoly that crushed Netscape was based on allowing market forces to drive down hardware prices whilst keeping control of the software. Outside of the design/advertising/music niches that supported Apple through the 90s there was no hardware plus software alternative. It wasn't until storage, processing and distribution became cheap enough to threaten content industries that closed hardware started to reappear: Sony, with music and movie businesses as well as the hardware to play them, drove DRM across all devices (not just in MP3 and DVDs: for years their cameras used proprietary memory sticks that had to be read on Sony readers). Usability and user choice became secondary to the requirements of content owners and device manufacturers.

While peer to peer or open systems have changed the way we think about communications (Skype), advertising (Google), IT (Linux), music (BitTorrent) etc over the last ten years, this has gone hand in hand with the rise and rise of Apple. iTunes may have removed DRM as soon as it was strong enough, but only because DRM is not Apple's control, it is someone else's. Having reinvented music distribution and mobile phones, Apple is now casting its eyes over the publishing industry. To be fair, the publishing industry is glad of the attention, as this offers book publishers an alternative to Amazon/Kindle, newspaper publishers an alternative to losing readers, and both of them an alternative to Google.

The marriage of revolutionary design, innate usability and utter hardware/software compatibility means that the 95% (NB made up stat) of people who don't care about how something works or how to improve it or how to squeeze every drop of performance out of it, will never need to worry about an Apple product doing what it is meant to. It just works. Apple created new categories: there are MP3 players, and there are iPods. There are mobiles, and there are iPhones. And by the time the iPad actually arrives in shops i'd guess there will also be tablet pcs. But they won't just work.

If you think about the future of innovation and technology, then this is a scary thought. One closed platform controlling access to music, books, newspapers and (somewhere along the line) TV. Ok you can develop for the that platform, but only along carefully prescribed lines and at the risk of not being accepted to run on it. (BTW i'm suggesting here that I think that the iPad will be a big success, but not as big a success as it will be in two years' time)

Even more worrying is that that platform is controlled by one person. However successful Apple have been recently, their share price dropped dramatically when the rumours of Steve Jobs' illness circulated in autumn 2008Although that could have been the recession as well. Nevertheless, it is an awful lot of control in the hands of one man with a recent history of health problems.

I think it is hard to square this one. Philosophically I believe in the power of open systems to drive innovation and human value. But I'm going to keep buying the closed ones because they work better. And I think that the number of people who think like that is only going to increase. I guess that this means that I'd better listen to those YouTube sales reps at work, as Google is only going to stay open and innovative for as long as the Google Revenue Equation holds true, and that equation is driven by the returns from paid search and video.

Things to watch in 2010

Okay this is a little late, but I wanted to have a think about some trends for this year. I'm deliberately not saying predictions, as this is all stuff that is happening, and in most cases I realised that I'd already written about the stuff I think will be important this year and don't have much more to add (we are only five days in after all). So I'm just going to link to the original posts rather than paraphrase myself.....

Location
Don't want to burst the bubble, as there is so much potential in always-on location-aware map-enabled applications, but I can't see Foursquare or Gowalla going mainstream this year. They are much more like where Twitter was two years ago. Proof?The 'also visited' section of a UK Trends for Websites search on Foursquare. We like it, no-one else cares. I think the overall rise in knowledge of and usefulness of location-enabled applications will mean that unless a killer app is launched before Q3 then this will be a slow burner (if 1/2m Android v2 handsets are sold before June then the satnav application alone might do it. Other than that I'm holding out for Foursquare turning Glastonbury into an actual competition with the whole festival for who saw the most bands, while Orange turn the festival guide into an AR app complete with on screen menus and pricelists for every food stall).

The year of mobile
Of course it will be the year of mobile. Just like last year, and the year before that. But more so. The iPhone has revolutionised not just the mobile market, but overall technology (ie communications, entertainment, everything else we use it for). Hyperbole? Well the sales figures agree: Mary Meeker's slide shows the speed of penetration of the iPhone/ iPod Touch compared to the previous fastest growing tech products (and a couple of other big hits from Apple's own categories). And why is this important? Because everyone else is catching up. Google/HTC, Motorola, Nokia, RIM are finally competing in a market that has changed beyond all recognition from the unwieldy backwards mobile landscape of 2006. And they are doing so by providing products that acknowledge that always connected technology based on ease of use and access to entertainment, friends and, well, pretty much anything that you want finally delivers on the promise of the mobile internet. Another lift from Mary Meeker shows the comparative market share and share of the mobile internet by mobile OS. The key stats are iPhone global market share at 11%, and share of mobile internet traffic at 65% - the opposite skew from traditional handset manufacturers RIM, WIndows and Nokia/Symbian. That is revolutionary. It means that using an iPhone means that you will use the mobile internet in a completely different way to someone who doesn't. Also worth noting that Android relative share back in April 09 (so Android v1) is skewed exactly the same way as Apple's - as Android is groing to grow exponentially on much better handests this year this is just as important. And if Nokia's N900, and the expected new releases from RIM and Microsoft are in any way competitive then they will work in the same way too. So yes, the year of mobile will be as true as it was the last couple of years, but for a lot more people.

While mobile applications will carry on growing at exponential rates across more devices, the Google Voice/Apple AppStore dispute shows where apps will start to develop over the next 18 months. As Apple wouldn't allow a web-based phone service in the store, Google rebuilt the app's functionality as a web app. As mobile processor speeds increase and browser functionality improves, websites will be able to do much of what apps can. The rationale for apps will be based on deep integration with the phone's core functions. Anything else will be a bookmark. I don't think that this will happen to any great degree this year as the handset technology isn't there yet, but brands should be asking of marketing-based applications whether they could be better served by a well made site or web app.

HTML 5
A little bit out of my comfort zone on this, but I'm told it'll be ace. I haven't learnt much more since I wrote this

Real Time Search
I'd defy anyone to have predicted the speed with which Twitter took over the British media in the first few months of last year. By summer 2009 Google's search results were starting to look very antiquated: a search engine that could pull up results from 2 years ago when you were looking for a breaking news story? How quaint. And to be fair it didn't take long (roughly $25m) for both Google and Microsoft to access Twitter's (and in Microsoft's case the increasingly public Facebook's) real time stream and start to include them in search results. As Google roles out Caffeine over the next few weeks this will start to have an interesting effect on brands' attitudes to social marketing.

Brands that aren't regularly discussed in social environments have largely tended to avoid showing too much interest in them. In many categories these are brands for whom the internet plays a vital role all the way along the purchase path from research to transaction: ie those who rely most heavily on search results. Google's search algorithm ranked sites based on reputation (of the site based on links) and relevancy (of the content to the search query). As Google becomes able to analyse sites based on their visitors' social graph, this adds a new level of reputation to build into results. The ROI of social marketing? How about the ROI of SEO?

Obviously it is very early days for how Caffeine will affect search results, and the main real time pipe feeding Google results at the moment is Twitter's. For all the hype, actual regular Twitter users are still in the minority. However if Facebook succeeds in convincing even a fraction of its 32m monthly UK users not to change the revised privacy settings it imposed on them last month then this could rapidly start to have a significant impact on how search engines view brand websites (NB. Not Google, as Facebook won't share with them)

Online Identity
The first question that agencies and marketers should ask to gauge how good an idea or a proposal is this year is this: Does it properly integrate Facebook Connect? If it doesn't, you could probably do better. If it doesn't use it at all, you probably aren't doing it right.

Charging for online news
Murdoch's plans for charging for content haven't gone away, but then they haven't got any firmer. I've written a couple of posts on why i don't think it is a good idea, and on how it might work out, and there isn't really anything new to say other than it is definitely happening, and definitely happening this year.

The internet on TV
Considering how far the internet has come in the last year in getting TV onto our computer screens I'm amazed at how utterly difficult it is to do the opposite and far more rewarding job of getting internet TV onto the TV screen. I wrote about this exactly a year ago and thought we'd be a lot further down the line. So Windows 7 came out, Windows Media Center worked great, no-one really used it to run a home entertainment system as they didn't trust a Windows machine to do that; Apple didn't care about Apple TV, LG and Panasonic are still working on release dates for internet enabled TVs, Kangaroo died, Canvas is still a year away. I'm currently trying to build a new TV system so this is partly borne of frustration (and the subject of another post....) but my view is exactly what it was this time last year: the market is backwards looking and stifling innovation. Sound familiar? Music in 2003, Mobile in 2007, TV in 2010. I think Apple are all over this.

Companies to watch -
Polar Rose
Currently makers of facial recognition apps that tag your Facebook photos for you, Polar Rose have just recruited a new CEO from the mobile industry. His job will be to make the video below, real time facial recognition technology, come to life on mobiles, and more generally to make computers see. The internet of things is all very well based on data, but these guys are thinking about genuine visual processing.

Boxee
I've spent a fair amount of time tweeting about TV programmes over the last year, and I'm not the only one. While the main benefits of Boxee are around getting internet content onto the TV screen (their software already does a great job of this for the laptop screen, and the set top box to connect to the TV screen is on sale in the next few months), it also pulls a viewer's social profiles into the TV experience to create integrated social TV. While C4 will get more press when they integrate Facebook Connect across their site in the next couple of months, Boxee is a genuinely new product based on convergent technology that integrates social graphs into the viewing experience.

Microsoft
.... in a way that XBox users will be very familiar with, as Boxee software is based on Microsoft's open source XBMC (X Box Media Center) OS. Which has been integrating social graphs into XBox Live for months. So why a one to watch in 2010? Because Windows 7 was a return to form, and the music and mobile strategies are rumoured to be receiving similar overhauls imminently? No, becuase that is simply keeping up to date with what Apple and Google are up to. Xbox is the big revolutionary play, as from the looks of Project Natal it will do for consoles, in home entertainment and communications what the iPhone did for mobile and computing. Rumoured to be live before the end of the year, this is one to look out for.

Google Goggles Visual Search video intro

I've got very little info on this other than the video below and Google's post about it, but from the looks of the video this has the potential to cut out the need for QR codes or barcode scanners - simply take a photo and visual search will do the rest. (or for businesses don't even take a photo: hold your camera up and GPS/compasses will do the rest. So may be Google are going to cut the middleman out of the AR hype surrounding mobile in 2010 too)

The battle for control of the internet

A couple of relatively unrelated news stories caught my eye yesterday. On one hand, Peter Mandelson announced amendments to UK copyright laws that appear to put the onus of illegal download prevention onto ISPs (reluctantly) and lawyers (eagerly). On the other, Google released more detail on what Chrome OS is going to look like when it launches next year.



The signs are that the battle for control of the internet is picking up pace. Copyright owners seem to have persuaded the government that the 20th century is worth saving, and that ISPs are the people to police it for them. Which aside from being a bit like blaming the Department of Transport for every speeding offence, is also something that we should be very worried about. Britain already has an outdated infrastructure for broadband: BT's copper wires will have to be replaced before we can get anywhere near the always-on HD quality entertainment that is possible over cable, and this will take significant investment, either in cabling or in much higher speed wireless for all. All of this costs money (lots of money), which will not be forthcoming if ISPs are having to spend their time trying to police a system of copyright that was effectively written in the dark ages. In a month that both Finland and Spain have made access to broadband a basic right of their citizens, the UK's short-termist approach has the potential to harm the country's knowledge economy for a generation.

All of this is very serious, and I suggest that if you agree then you join The Pirate Party and the Open Rights Group to help protest. However, the idea that the internet should be open access and open source has some pretty powerful support too. Google are a bigger deal than any content owner both in terms of financial muscle and political influence. And Google's big opportunity is more internet access for everyone all the time. This is what Ben Parr at Mashable calls the Google Revenue Equation:

Revenue = Amount of Time on the Web

It's that simple: their ad business is so effective at monetising the internet that they can afford to make everything else free. Email, browsers, mobile OS, storage, video, office software, GPS, mapping, etc. And not just free, but as good as the paid for equivalent. So the launch of their operating system, a replacement for Windows (that will be free, and probably as good as the paid for equivalent) is a big deal. Not just because of the potential to cut the heart out of the Microsoft empire, but also because Chrome OS is open source and fundamentally supports the idea that information wants to be free (because Google know how to manipulate and organise information better than anyone else. Information is what makes people spend time online. Time online = revenue). So although at a personal level we might not trust everything that Google are doing with our data, they are probably the biggest ally that anyone who wants a free and open internet, and is in favour of the UK knowledge economy, can have.

Charging for news

So we are starting to find out a bit more about News International's plans for charging for news online. Rupert Murdoch's interview with Sky News earlier in the week suggested that he hasn't recently looked at the figures for how much traffic his sites receive from Google. As Google frequently point out when the print media criticise them, it only takes a robot.txt command to exclude content: Murdoch apparently intends to finally take them up on this opportunity to opt out.

On a less confrontational note, Times editor James Harding explained a little bit more to the Society of Editors about how this is going to work for his bit of the Murdoch empire. It seems that the plan goes something like this:

Micropayments are too difficult, and let's face it, too different to newspaper publishing. Newspapers' business model was based on the scarcity of news. So let's try and recreate it by charging for access to everything published in the previous 24 hours.

My words not his, but that is the general gist of it. However, this is apparently going to "rewrite the economics of newspapers" (Personally I think they were rewritten some time ago....)

A lot of the discussions of Murdoch's print business model though forget that behind all the hype there is a solid basis for increasing revenue. For all the talk about rewriting business models, I don't think anyone at the top end of News Int thinks that they are going to increase print sales over the next ten years. They seem to be doing a better job on online ad revenue: the chart below shows that despite all the pressures on ad budgets over 2009, the Times has maintained its revenue online (figures from Nielsen Media Research, so the increase may be partly due to the improvements in online tracking that Nielsen have made this year).

They have also been increasing UK traffic figures according to the latest comScore stats. To the extent that according to the combined Nielsen/comScore figures, to REPLACE their UK ad revenue would require some £0.17 per UK unique user. Obviously every unique user is not going to pay them: a Forrester report published earlier this week had a figure of 20% (of US internet users) who would be interested in paying for newspaper content. So based on an example of 15% of Times users being signing up to this project (still an extremely ambitious target), News Int would only need £1.14 a month to REPLACE ad revenue. Bear in mind that they aren't going to be stopping running banner ads any time soon, and will certainly be charging media buyers a premium to target subscribers based on user data. And that there will also be a substantial chunk of Times inventory that is outside of the paywall, also running ads to a wider audience. But £1.14 doesn't sound that much if you like reading the Times online: most people spend more than that per day on coffee.

This doesn't mean that this is a good idea, or that it will secure the future of News Int's media properties. I've written lots of random stuff about what I think might be, but then of course I'm a random blogger and Rupert Murdoch is a media mogul with a track record of leading the market. I think the point I'm trying to make is that this isn't a great crusade to save paid content, it is more a pretty plausible attempt to create a new revenue stream to cover for the lack of ad advertising 2010-2011. Whatever is going to "save news publishing" is something different (probably something that doesn't start off by treating news as a 'once every 24 hours' concept). It might be, as Conde Nast are eagerly anticipating, something that happens on a new size of Apple branded screen. It will certainly demand the sort of radical innovation that established market leaders often find difficult to embrace. But if it is found, News International need to ensure that they are still a leading publisher of news when it happens.

Twitter's deals with Google and Bing - changing everything and nothing

There's not been a lot made of Microsoft's announcement earlier in the week that Bing would include real time results from Twitter (and to a lesser extent Facebook) in its search results at some unspecified time soon. It has mostly been interesting to the likes of Mashable and ReadWriteWeb because of Google's counter a few hours later that they would also being doing so, so removing any competitive advantage that this might have brought Bing.

Leaving aside the debate about how scalable this level of traffic increase will be considering Twitter's notoriously unreliable infrastructure (discussed in the comments of ReadWriteWeb's coverage of the announcement), it also raises some interesting questions for brands that haven't so far found a role for themselves on Twitter.

In most cases brands that are successfully using Twitter at scale are succeeding because they have understood that it offers an opportunity for dialogue with their customers - whether that is Comcast's customer service, Compare the Market's advertising character backstory (Disclosure - client), or Ford's combination of one-to-one dialogue, customer relations and comms campaign amplification. Those that successfully use the service as a sales channel (usually based on exclusive offers) such as Dell tend to have an established two-way communication presence on Twitter before pushing sales messages.

This all makes sense, as to maintain any sort of following of the scale that would be useful to a major brand their Twitter stream will need to offer enough regular interest and value to encourage people to opt in to it. Sales messages alone wouldn't fit with how most people use the service. The resource cost of monitoring and maintaining this presence has tended to scare some brands away from getting involved with Twitter at all - there is no value to them in involvement at low scale.

Google and Bing's ability to index the real time web fundamentally changes this. Suddenly the value for brands pushing direct sales messages on Twitter becomes their SEO juice. It's fair to assume that Google sees Twitter as a threat, and that as people are increasingly searching for real time or as near as results, the best way to see off the threat is to push recency in their own results so that Google, rather than any development of Twitter's own underpowered search engine, continues to be the first place that you go to search. And as long as paid links continue to show up next to them, Google still hoovers up brands' marketing budgets. So results from Twitter are likely to assume a greater importance in SEO strategies over the coming months.

It will be interesting to see how the search engines rank the Twitter data they now have access to. I'd like to think that Google has acquired deep enough integration with the data to apply its own version of 'tweetrank' algorithms, but given the level of competition between the two this might be unlikely. Microsoft has already announced that Bing will search either by recency or relevancy. Either way, there is now no reason for brands not to be on Twitter, as even running a sales channel feed to no followers has a potential SEO benefit.

However, a brand Twitter presence, however one-way and SEO orientated, will still attract lovers and haters of the brand to start conversations with it - it isn't ever going to be just a box to tick o improve ranking. While SEO will be the reason to get involved, brands will need a defined Twitter strategy covering customer relations, PR, marketing and SEO. And by the sound of it, they will need one fairly quickly given that both Google and Bing are going to be integrating their Twitter data access this year (indeed Bing already has a rebrand of Twitter's own search in beta at the moment)

Thinking through this, I worried at first that this was going to deluge Twitter with the sort of random direct response ads that you see everywhere else - after all, there is a strong rationale for DR advertisers to do this. Then I remembered that it won't make any difference to my use of Twitter because I won't see any of them, as I won't follow the brands. So while it does change how brands should view and use Twitter, the announcement makes next to no difference for anyone else.

IE6 No More

Mashable reported today that the campaign to kill off IE6 reached a new level as Google's Orkut social platform (the largest in Brazil) announced plans to stop supporting the browser. On the face of it this might look like Google having another pop at its biggest rival, particularly in the face of Bing's takeover of Yahoo search last week. But the recommended alternatives are not just Chrome - Firefox, Safari and for that matter IE8 are also suggested as upgrades. This isn't really about Chrome at all (although the implications for advertising are related to it, which I'll speculate vaguely about later on) - it's about the future of websites themselves.

IE6 dates back to 2001: if you can't remember exactly what websites involved in those days, here's an example of the BBC's home page from January 2001:
and this was the sort of site it was designed to browse. Even if internet connections had been up to it, web designers would still have been limited by the fact that 95% of interent access was through IE6 at its peak. This was after Netscape had been seen off, and well before the days of Firefox. So although 20% of internet users are still using this technology, it was designed for a bygone age. The world wide web was 18 last week, and this is the equivalent of asking a ten year old to graft like an adult.

Now up till recently that has only been a problem for the coders who had to shoehorn state of the art websites into IE6's limited abilities. It is becoming a problem for everyone who wants a genuinely useable internet. HTML 5 is capable of providing audio and video files that interact (ie edit and change) in real time on a web page. It removes the distinction between desktop applications and websites, enables dragging and dropping from web to desktop and back, and is built on the basis of complete location awareness. It removes the need for Flash and Adobe Air (the heavy duty code that PCs can run but mobiles can't) so blurs the boundary between mobile and pc screen. In short it enables all the things that are going to make the web a whole lot more useful. And it won't work with IE6.

So for Google, for whom interactive audio-visual (YouTube) and drag & drop functionality (Google Wave) are key to future innovation, HTML 5 is a pre-requisite. This is great news for everyone, because the main problem with changing browsing behaviour is that most people don't care about all the stuff I'm talking about. Or at least they won't until it is developed and ready to use. But if they are threatened with losing access to YouTube (or potentially Facebook) if they don't upgrade, then they will soon work out how easy upgrading is.

To be fair, Microsoft agree that they would love people to upgrade, but that they won't phase out support for the browser, which was the standard in Windows XP. On their IEBlog the view is:

"Dropping support for IE6 is not an option because we committed to supporting the IE included with Windows for the lifespan of the product, and we keep our commitments."

So (partly based on the failure of Windows Vista to tempt people away from XP) they seem happy to let other people put a range of non-IE options in front of them. And to bring this back to advertising, that opens up some interesting questions about Firefox uptake. Chrome and IE8 are based on being ad-friendly: Google and Microsoft have the world's largest ad revenues to support. Firefox on the other hand offers the opportunity to block all online advertising (although it too makes most of its income through a revenue-share deal with Google for search ads). Only a fraction of FF users (9m, or 3%, of the 300m users of Firefox) block ads. But then, back in 2005 only 3% of internet users ran Firefox. Now it is 23%.

Of course on the other hand maybe sites running on HTML 5 will carry interactive applications and realtime audiovisual narrative that people won't want to block. Let's hope we get the chance to find out soon

#atishoo - Kleenex UK Hayfever map

HT to John Willshire's comments page, but to be fair I'd spotted the concept before, back when Ben Marsh first created it on #uksnow day back in February. But this is a branded version of the Twitter/Google Map mashup that ticks lots of boxes - it is useful (especially if you're a hayfever sufferer like me), it is social (we like to find fellow sufferers to whinge to, and this helps build a national suffering map out of it. And that you must agree is a uniquely British socialness), it is shareable (both by contributing to it on Twitter, and by embedding it below. I think that might be the first time I have seen something created for an FMCG site that is easily embeddable), and it makes sense for the brand (he says from bitter experience). Only problem is that it is a bit late in the summer (hopefully). Anyway, top work Kleenex

Spotify Mobile app - the first view

This has been coming for a while, but the first view of a Spotify mobile app was unveiled today at Google's I/O developer conference. And the venue should give us a strong clue that this ain't no iPhone kit. Oh no. Given the huge potential conflict with iTunes, that has yet to happen, and this is an Android development.

To be honest, I believe that Spotify has too much potential for Apple to ignore, and it may well be that the iPhone app is in development (actually it is strongly rumoured to be: the question is more about whether Apple will approve it). Given Apple's previous preference for exclusive deals of the O2/AT&T variety, I had a suspicion that Spotify would only be allowed onto the iPhone as an exclusive (and no doubt premium subscription/buy-through-iTunes revenue share deal) handset partner.

The Android version has clearly blown this out of the water, and if this app can stream and cache to a handheld with the stability and zero latency that the Spotify desktop app offers, then Apple will soon be playing catch-up. I know I am a confirmed lover of Spotify as much as I am an iTunes-sceptic, but I reckon this could be the relaunch that Android needs.

Wolfram Alpha: the next generation of Search?

The possibility of genuine semantic search being just around the corner has been around for several years. With, let's face it, the strongest contender being the bottomless R&D budget at Google HQ. So the very soft launch of Wolfram Alpha the other day (no product demonstration, lots of theory, a request for the tech bloggers invited to the launch webinar not to post screenshots, etc) shouldn't really be anything to get excited about. The product is not a search engine as such, rather a curated collection of data and statistics already available on the web. This data is organized using natural language processing in response to user search queries.

So not a competitor to the existing search behemoth, but potentially a radically different vertical search proposition. The caveat being that no-one outside of Wolfram programmers Mathematica, really knows what verticals, or how specialist.

However, two days after the demonstration, on the 1st of May, some screenshots started to appear, principally on ReadWriteWeb. These show the output from Alpha from research-orientated search queries:

"Internet Users in Europe"

So automatically outputs a range of the most relevant data relating to the query. As a contrast, I ran the same search in Google, and received this set of results :

"Internet Users in Europe"

There might even be some of the same data there, but to me the Wolfram results look much more usable: you wouldn't need to go any further with the query to have a reasonable set of answers. Google is more about giving you a starting point to look for more.

I don't think that this is in any way a 'Google-Killer', but I do think that I will get a huge amount of use out of the Wolfram system. I've been building my network and tag history on Delicious for a couple of years to get to a point where I can use Delicious as a starting point for most advertising/marketing/planning/digital related searches, but I also work in finance, travel, charity, youth, auto and sports sectors, and there isn't (as far as I have been able to discover) enough Delicious history or users in the UK to make these worth developing. NLP seems like the obvious successor to social search, and so I hope to be able to write up how I have been finding Wolfram in a month or so's time after the Beta launch.

White Space and Super WiFi

Somewhere hidden away beneath the election fallout last week came the news from the US that white space, the unused frequency between TV stations' analogue transmissions, is going to be freed up for use by the communications industry. The FCC ruling came after heavy lobbying from Google, who stand to benefit most from the new bandwidth as TV switches over to digital.

The main benefit for people away from their home internet connection appears to be turbocharged Wifi, broadcasting over far wider ranges and at much higher speeds than is currently possible. Obviously more time spent online means more revenue for Google, so a good short term gain for them.... The real potential for immediate step change though is what happens if these bandwidths could be used for voice calling. As Jeff Jarvis comments in the NY Post

When we can get fast bandwidth on portable devices, we can use those gadgets to do anything from making phone calls to browsing the Web.

In other words, kiss those old phones and two-year contracts goodbye and turn to new, open devices that run software from - you guessed it - Google.

Suddenly the open platform Android looks like a the consumer champion when compared to those walled garden mobile networks, not to mention the iPhone. All radical stuff, and in the run up to the analogue switch-off over here, something that is equally applicable in the UK...

Or is it? After all, public service broadcasting is a far bigger beast in the UK than the US. Surely free national turbo wifi in place of the BBC's analogue bandwidth would remove large amounts of criticism over the licence fee (especially if it was subsidised by a partnership with Google). Alternatively, with C4 negotiating for licence fee funding to maintain its public sector remit, and basing the case on the fact that they are losing valuable analogue bandwidth when they switch to digital, is there a rationale for OFCOM allowing them to keep their current bandwidth after switchover, and auction it off on the open market?

Google Apps 1 - Microsoft Office 1 less

(from readwriteweb)
One US CTO, with a stated aim of making his local governmental organisation operate more like a start-up, has confirmed that he will be switching from Microsoft Office to Google Apps for all day to day emailing, spreadsheets, word processing, etc. Although this is only a total of 38,000 fewer desktops for the Microsoft empire, what is significant is the organisation: the District of Columbia. Although this is only District employees rather than national government, so won't be the email client of choice for obama@whitehouse.gov just yet, it is a significant symbol that web-based computing is reaching tipping point with large organisations.

On a related note, I'm currently trying to find the best combination of Zoho apps to provide an agency-wide planning portal - basically an upload and tag function. Hopefully form a post next week if I can make it work....

Customize Google - Adblocking for Search

At some point the exponential growth in search engine marketing has to level off, if only because there is only so much you can optimise it. Even generic keywords are searched for by people who are already active in the market. Like Point of Sale, Search cannot create demand. What we have done with it over the last few years though is radically change the distribution landscape in direct sale categories. In doing this, Google has built a business model that can shake up a whole range of other categories that don't rely on paid search. The beauty of the business model that Google created is that paid ads tended to be more accurate than the natural ones. In fact, there were probably a lot of brands who used it in place of a joined up SEO strategy for a few years. To someone searching for a product, it doesn't make any difference whether you click on an ad or a natural listing.

So far, so direct response 101. The point i'm ambling to is that Google built the brand on usefulness, with a side order of clean layout & design. Brands now know that a Search strategy has to include SEO and SEM, and have got good enough at it that natural page one results will be useful enough for anyone - the example below is for the highly competitive 'car insurance' term, with the comparison sites that are actually going to be the most useful for someone searching on that term in the top positions for both paid and natural search.


So who is that duplication benefitting? Not the person searching. And the layout is pretty scruffy too (even when it's screengrabbed better than I've done here!). So not very on-brand for Google.

Which is why Customize Google represents such a threat. Customize Google allows you, among a range of other things, to block paid search ads. The search results above now looks like this

Just as useful, and much neater. And that's before we've taken into account anyone who might prefer to avoid ads on principle.

Now this is not a threat to Google. Google are way beyond that. Customize is only available for Firefox so far, but since the launch of Chrome, another major incursion into Microsoft's business model, it will be really interesting to see Microsoft's reaction. How tempting must it be to add this functionality into IE8, and automatically dry up your biggest rival's biggest legacy revenue stream? (actually arguable whether they are rivals any more - you need to be in the same league to be rivals.... you might call it a North London derby question....)

So Google are too big and too clever to be hurt by this hypothetical tactic, but the fact it is only hypothetical must be a relief to any number of media and digital agencies, who see the absolute transparency of paid search as a life raft in the economic floodwater of 2009.

And will Microsoft do this? Well I would, just for the annoyance factor. They have lost the battle for search budgets, so why not just be a spanner in the works.......