Yuhsuanchen’s Blog

If you are excited at Google’s speech-to-text technology on Nexus One, but still have no chance to have your own one. Try “Jott”, a voice-to-text service for any phone on your hand. This service can transcribe your voice into text, and then send it to a destination via SMS texting message, email, or web update. The idea of Jott came from two former Microsoft employees. They found people sometimes have great ideas on the go, but cannot recall them later. To solve this problem, John Pollard took the advantage of mobile phone, an appliance people can have with them all the time, to help people capture their thoughts and ideas without miss. When you come up with some ideas, just call Jott and tell it. It would record what you say and then send a copy of it to you or someone you specify.

To use Jott, you need to open an account and set up some destinations and your message would go in advance. After that, you could use the voice-to-text service as your life assistant. When you call Jott, it will ask you a couple of questions to identify that who you want to Jott and when to send your message. For example, when you’re stuck in a traffic jam and you’re going to miss a business meeting, you can call Jott to send an email to notify your colleagues.

How this service works

If you think of this awesome mobile service resulting from high-end technology, you would make a wrong guess. Basically, Jott saves your voice messages as sound clips on their central servers. Human workers at a large call center in India log onto the servers, listen to the most recent clips, and transcribe them manually. In case a transcription is unclear, every e-mail from Jott also contains a link to the original sound clip for the receiver to check out. Sometimes, the transcribers in India may correct your wrong words in speech to make your message more accurately.

People have waited for the voice-to-text service for a long time. However, speech recognition technology is not ready to satisfy consumers’ demand. Jott’s innovative idea gives people an alternative to enjoy the speech-to-text service. This great idea reminds us high-end technology is good but not the only way to achieve success.

The mobile development is at an amazing pace to expand its territory to which no other media have ever made. Just like the development pattern in the developed countries, few people are first equipped with this gadget and then more and more subscribers pay their airtime as the price falls down. From 2G to 3G mobile networks and from plain services, such as voice and text, to various mobile activities, the developing countries follow the steps we seem usual in our world. However the materials inside is beyond our imagination and it brings a whole new landscape to the mobile world. These innovative business and management strategies allow network operators to offer the poor an affordable way to own its mobile handsets.  This powerful tool does not only make them to conveniently contact others but also releases the poor from the jail of information scarce. By acquiring information, the poor can efficiently trade their harvest in market, get better health care, and improve their life quality. Moreover, the innovative process in cutting down the cost of spreading mobile handsets leads to green energy, microfinance, banking and such great services going into their life. The transformative tool now has gradually kept the bottom away from poverty, diseases, and famine.

The mobile phone developments inspire me to think how this transformative tool and development experiences can furthermore reshape our developed world, particularly in the area of mobile information services. Since Google developed the android OS for mobile systems, I am not surprised that Google would enter into this potential market -the developing countries. Google always can smell the business earlier than other companies and take advantage of its powerful information technology to create valuable service such as combining the mobile SMS with Google’s information technology to provide the poor with useful knowledge and information. That is an excellent win-win-win pattern in developing countries. People can easily acquire helpful information with quite cheap price, operators can earn profit, and Google can expand its influence in the Internet world. I think this great idea adds more value to the low-end mobile phone and refreshes our thinking in how to access the Internet. Without computers, laptops, or high-end communication devices, the poor can use the cheap mobile phone as a liaison to reach the Internet and search information to enrich their life.

Mobile carriers have dominated the mobile industry since the demand for mobile service rose in the end of 20^th century. They establishes mobile infrastructure and provides essential voice and data services for handset users. The whole mobile ecosystem is built around these mobile operators. Handsets manufactured by OEMs have to bundle with carriers’ cell phone plans to enter into mobile market and these operators are also the main entry to access mobile services. They charge both users and application/service providers living on their mobile network and control the data or voice flowing through their gateway.

Apple breaks this by developing a new business model to bypass the control of mobile operators. It provides service, content, and application developers a new platform to directly deliver their works to end-users. In fact, this model is not a brand new idea. Qualcom has also developed a similar platform, Brew, for wireless application development and delivery services and gained quite success in this pioneer project. Apple duplicated the success in iPod story, by releasing an innovative and fantastic iPhone with built-in shopping software. Combing this software with Apple App Store, an online shopping store, users can buy music or wireless applications and payment directly goes to application developers and Apple. The complete business model, from hardware, software, online store, to payment, excludes carriers from playing and makes users stick in.

Mobile operators are traditionally essential mobile service providers and earn money from traffic flow. They used to dominate the mobile industry because they own mobile users and traffic. However, with the trend in the development of Internet and e-commerce, they know ISP model is limited in company growth. As a result, they also plan to become wireless application/service providers to create a new cash cow. However, Apple App Store proved that its innovative model could marginalize the control of mobile carriers. Thus now Nokia, Google, Microsoft, etc. follow this successful case to create their own application stores to alleviate the influence of carriers. If the situation goes on this way, mobile operators would gradually lose its dominance in mobile market.

For now, mobile operators remain the most powerful player in the mobile industry. They don’t completely lose in the war of mobile application store. They still hold the channel to distribute phones and basic mobile services. Every OEM needs to cooperate with them to sell handsets, even Apple iPhone. I am super interested in how the carriers will do to fight against the war in mobile application store. Will a brand new business model created by carriers integrate consumers, application/service developers, OEMs and carriers themselves to provide valuable mobile services? If this happens, what would the mobile world look like? I cannot wait to seeing what is next in the mobile industry.

If you keep following the recent development of mobile industry, you can find that it is experiencing a new wave of business growth. For instance, there were more than 70 million people in the US accessing the Internet from their mobile phones in 2009, more than $6.2 billion dollars will be spent in application stores in 2010, and over $ 429 million dollars will be spent on the mobile search ads in 2012, according to the Gartner’s survey Gartner Says Consumers Will Spend $6.2 Billion in Mobile Application Stores in 2010. All these reports indicate that everything in the mobile is going up but one is vague in its future. According to the eMarketer article M-Commerce Is Still in Its Infancy, mobile e-commerce is still struggling for blooming. The following statistics gave us an insight of what hindering M-commerce from expansion.

There are two major issues in pushing the m-commerce forward. For retailers, insufficient investment on m-commerce is the largest obstacle in creating a feasible, reliable, and user-friendly shopping environment. On the other hand, consumers have little confidence in making purchase with their mobile phones. They worry about the security and privacy in the purchasing process. These concerns drag the feet of both shoppers and retailers to embrace the age of m-commerce.

What are the issues slowing down the pace of retailers in putting money into the m-commerce development? This report M-Commerce Is Still in Its Infancy gave us one likely answer. The lack of standardization among smartphone browsers and operating systems impedes retailers’ resolution to move forward. “Mobile app developers need to carefully pick and choose where they think they can get the best return for their effort,” noted Mr. Grau.

We can find another interesting survey in this article M-Commerce Is Still in Its Infancy, which shows consumers are willing to buy on the air, even though mobile shopping environment is not ready for them. In this statistics, consumers are likely to buy items such as pizza, tickets, fast food, and coffee with their handsets. We can find that most items that appeal to on-the-go consumers cost small amounts of money. There may be three reasons resulting in this phenomenon.

First, the lack of confidence in security makes consumers intend to spend small amounts of money. If something going wrong, that wouldn’t be much loss. The second is the time spent on mobile shopping. For mobile users, they don’t have much time to search, compare, and purchase. Therefore, just duplicating today’s e-commerce experience on the Internet would not make things go right. To make people buy more expensive items, retailers need to make purchasing process simple and easy. One more important consideration is a well-integrated interface for users, which is user-friendly and helpful. Consumers need useful tools to help them efficiently finish the purchase process and fewer skills to use them. For example, a tool can easily compare product prices between retailers is wonderful.

A simple and secure mobile shopping experience is vital for users. Just like the article say, “But mobile phone users say they would make more purchases if the process were not so cumbersome, products were easier to find and their devices supported secure credit card transactions.”

Reference

Anonymous (2009, September 3). M-Commerce Is Still in Its Infancy. Retrieved on February 6, 2010 from http://www.emarketer.com/Article.aspx?R=1007258&Ntt=billing+revolution&No=-1&xsrc=article_head_sitesearchx&N=0&Ntk=basic

Egham,U. (2010, January 18). Gartner Says Consumers Will Spend $6.2 Billion in Mobile Application Stores in 2010. Retrieved on January, 28, 2010 from http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1282413

If you keep following news about the recent development of mobile industry, you will easily find one repeatedly popping up in front of you. The tremendous revenue growth in mobile application market ignites the business competition in mobile application stores. According to a recent survey by Gartner Inc., consumers will spend $6.2 billion in 2010 in mobile application stores while advertising revenue is expected to generate $0.6 billion worldwide and mobile application stores will exceed 4.5 billion downloads in 2010. The download number will go further beyond 21 billion by 2013 and the total revenue will be seven times in just four years (see Table 1).

Table 1
Mobile Application Stores’ Number of Downloads and Revenue, Worldwide

Source: Gartner (December 2009)

Mobile application stores now become an alluringly emerging market, which the mobile industry is eager to capture. OEMs, mobile platform vendors, mobile operators, and traditional aggregators either created new app stores or repositioned their existing offerings as app stores. These app stores play the role as a platform for allowing developers to distribute and retail their applications directly to the end-consumers. The developers share the revenue with app stores. For example, in Apple app store, about 70 percent of the proceeds go to the creators of the software applications and leave 30 percent for Apple itself. This business model provides software developers an undeclinable incentive to participate in the development of mobile applications. They can gain huge benefit if their application is getting popular in end users.

For software creators, although the business seems promising, the battleground for survival is stern. More than 1 million applications are ready in Apple app store. Most of them are free because developers offer them at no cost to the consumer while charging for other things within the application. These include charging end users for delivering physical services/goods or deriving revenue from advertising. If you would like to charge for application download, Samsung research may point out some insight into the opportunities and untapped markets available for you. The survey found that “42% of current feature phone users would pay to download applications if they could, with a further 54% would pay up to 5 Euros for each application they download”.

The Samsung survey also highlighted the types of applications, which people are willing to use. According to the report, “Travel and navigation applications were most in demand with 34% of people surveyed eager to use them, followed by photography (12%), work (11%) and shopping (9%).” Another interesting survey in this report indicated that education apps on mobile is highly expected to be developed, because they don’t find a suitable solution available for them at the present time.

These app stores open gates for those software developers, who were interested in but had no chance to get involved in mobile market before, to enter into the mobile application market. To get into this market, developers need to study what types of applications would be a niche for them and what business model they can benefit for their mobile applications. Moreover, they have to determine carefully not only which platform to support but also which store to promote their applications in.

Reference

Egham,U. (2010, January 18). Gartner Says Consumers Will Spend $6.2 Billion in Mobile Application Stores in 2010. Retrieved on January, 28, 2010 from http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=1282413

Mobile Europe (2009, December, 08). Samsung publishes mobile app market survey results. Retrieved on January, 29,2010 from http://www.mobileeurope.co.uk/news_wire/115300/Samsung_publishes_mobile_app_market_survey_results.html

Since the CES 2009, one technology has successfully captured consumers’ eyeballs and drawn several vendors entering into the market. It is the pico projector. Pico projectors are tiny projectors, which are so small that you can put them in your purse or even your pocket. Although pico projectors are small, they can show large displays. Therefore, instead of big and heavy front projectors, you can now easily project images on any surface of objects, like the ceiling of your room or someone’s T-shirt. It is cool, right? But it seems more promising to be embedded inside other hand-held devices such as phones, cameras or media players.

Microivision, a major player in projector market, announced that this technology would revolutionize the mobile handset market and become a standard configuration in mobile phones within five years. Samsung and LG have unveiled their first mobile phones with built-in pico projectors in 2009. They think the integration of projectors into mobile phones is a favorable solution to escape the shackles of small screen. This innovation would provide mobile users with better viewing experience in sharing photos, watching videos, and presenting works on their phones and make a huge impact on both the business and entertainment segments.

For a long time, several devices have competed for the ultimately convergent platform, which is capable of powerful computation, ubiquitous communication, mass storage, and comfortable display. As we know, the main weakness of mobile phones is the small screen, which largely limits its applications in entertainment and business sections. Mobile industry is constantly seeking for practical solutions to breakthrough the display bottleneck and enable better viewing experiences for users of mobile devices. Scientists and engineers have created several technologies with the intention of expanding the screen on mobile phones. Currently the pico projector seems the most promising one in revolutionizing our visual experience on handheld devices.

Although the power consumption for pico projectors is large resulting in a poor battery life and it is better for display in a dark room, I am glad to have this option to enrich my viewing experience before other competitive technologies appear.

Smartphones may become the next sweet target for worms, spam, viruses and hackers to rage. They’re not just for your desktop or laptop anymore. “It’s guaranteed that almost everything we see on a computer will show up on a smartphone – and some new things,” said Jake Widman, a San Francisco-based technology writer and analyst.

Today, smartphone is one of the hottest trends in mobile industry, especially after the launch of iPhone by Apple. All mobile OEMs, content providers, and application developers dedicate themselves to offering products and services in an incredibly swift pace. Wireless carriers also find an incentive to upgrade their network equipments to satisfy the bandwidth requirement from their smartphone users. All of a sudden, the prospects for mobile industry are brightening and everything is right if the mobile goes smart. However, when the market increases, there are generally more people with malicious intentions going after it because there’s a bigger potential for gain.

Jon Espenschied posed 10 potential smartphone security issues in computerworld (Jon, 2007). We can recap these issues into two categories. The first belongs to the system vulnerabilities existing for hackers to exploit, no matter in hardware or software, and the other is the misuse of smartphone by owners.

Yesterday’s phone was a close system, which had specific interfaces, processor and embedded operating system. Every feature was added from ground up by mobile OEMs themselves or specific cooperative developers. It is not easy to break into this kind of systems. However, this situation is contrary for smartphones. To boost the applications and services running on smartphones, the system tends to open to the public. Everyone who is interested in developing applications and providing services on that can easily access the development platform. This action also opens a gate for malicious hackers to explore system weakness. Moreover, to speed up the smartphone development and encourage more mobile consumers diverting to the new gadget, the priority of security problem is not high such that security analysts say they’ve already seen all of the major online threats — Trojan horses, viruses, worms — spreading on smartphones.

The other security problem is the lack of security awareness for users on their phone even they take security precautions on their home computers. A survey by security firm Trend Micro Incorporated suggested that only 23 percent of smartphone users enable security software already loaded onto their phones and 44 percent think surfing the Internet on their phone is as safe or safer than doing so on a desktop computer — even with no security software ( Doug, 2009).

For me, the terrible nightmare would be the loss of my phone. If you use smartphone, you should be more anxious than me. With your smartphone, someone could easily access your personal information, like phone list, e-mail account and even your mobile banking accounts. Are they all? Nope, your more detailed personal information could be gleaned from your smartphone. For instance, if you use location based service, like the application called Sports Tracker that allows users to measure their athletic performance over time or calulate how many calories they burn off during exercise. It records the route you travel and the altitude fluctuation in your route. Someone could run these data through Google Maps and Street View, then he/she is able to see what you see in the route. The house number of your sweet home or office may be displayed clearly in front of strangers. Sports Tracker also recorded what time you normally leave the house in the morning and when you return from work. You shold now watch your phone to make sure it is at hand.

A lot of thieves now understand that the value of your lost phone is in the data, not in the phone any more. Therefore, we should treat our smartphones like home computers, enable passwords, and secure them with anti-virus or security software. Of course, the most important one is keeping your smartphone along with you anytime and anywhere.

Reference

Doug, G. (2009, October, 29) Smartphone security threats likely to rise. Retrieved on January 15, 2010, from http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/10/25/smartphone.security/index.html

Jon, E. (2007, March, 23) Ten dangerous claims about smart phone security. Retrieved on January 15, 2010, from http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9014118/Ten_dangerous_claims_about_smart_phone_security?taxonomyId=17&pageNumber=1