Google Mobile Vision column published

Per my last Blog, my new column "Google’s Mobile Vision: The Next 5 Billion" is in print.

[excerpt]

The Internet is “replacing the economics of scarcity with economics of ubiquity.”  . . . For all the expectant hype from press observers, Google still offers one of the best views from the top on where things are trending. There is a saying that success is never final, and failure never fatal - but courage through both is what counts. So despite an Android-centric slant on the mobile world, their courage to raise an idealistic pointer amidst all of today’s commercial noise and avarice is something I will give credit to where credit’s due.  

The article is about Google's Mobile World Congress vision, though their other mobile focus on driver-less vehicles is a story in its own right.

Google’s Mobile Vision: The Next 5 Billion

Google Chairman Eric Schmidt captured attention at Mobile World Congress (MWC) last month, the largest annual mobile technology conference that is held each year in Barcelona. 

With press and bloggers hanging on every word, it was almost nerve-wracking hearing commentators dissect his speech every which way. 

Remarking how amazingly connected world is today with two billion people online, he asked “wouldn’t it be great to have the other five billion online also?” 

NOTE: My full "5 Billion" article will be available later this month.

Facebook Socializes the World's Video

Do you recall the memorable lines from The Social Network: 

Sean Parker:  You don’t even know what the thing is yet. How big it can get, how far it can go. This is no time to take your chips down. A million dollars isn’t cool, you know what’s cool? 
Eduardo Saverin:   [Sarcastically] You? 
Sean Parker:   A billion dollars.

My latest article is about Facebook’s plunge into video with Facebook’s Zuckerberg and Netflix’ Hastings stepping out arm in arm at Facebook's F8 conference last month:  

“There’s going to be an opportunity over the next five years or so,” Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg has restated many times, “to pick any industry and rethink it in a social way.” Over 800 million users strong, and with a market cap estimated by some to be over $70 billion, Facebook
is well resourced to go where it wants.
...
So, VP EMEA Joanna Shields’ remarks to IBC delegates made perfect sense. Just two weeks before the annual F8 conference, Shields made Facebook’s direction explicit, declaring that the entire TV experience will soon be social by nature.

Her thesis, that television is better when it’s social, is based on the formula which was writ large on her PowerPoints: Social + TV = Better. Facebook’s first effort to apply that formula will be to enable ‘friends’ to contact each other and share what they’re watching. Together with its partner Netflix, Facebook sees this as new kind of viral boost to video consumption - one that Hastings said Zuckerberg envisioned doubling Netflix’s current 25 million members in the United States, Canada and Latin America.    (more ...)

Photos of Apple Store, Palo Alto, October 2011

@ The Palo Alto, California Apple Store

Links:

Intellicore.net founder
New York Times
Apple, Inc.

Monday afternoon, October 10, 2011

 

 

Monday evening, October 17, 2011

If cavemen had Twitter

On a lighter note...

Overheard in an Andy Borowitz (avid Tweeter, and writer of the Borowitz report) interview this week:

"If cave men had twitter, we would probably not have fire because they would just twitter all night about how freezing it was."

Akamai founder article

Last month's Akamai article on founder Tom Leighton is now available on my website. 

You can also go directly to the PDF.

[Excerpt - "A View from the Edge", by Howard Greenfield]

In the last issue of IP Television we discussed how yesterday’s ‘dumb pipes’ are giving way to intelligent cloud services and driving a new online video brokerage.

One calling of today’s Content Delivery Networks (CDNs) is to bridge network hub and router hops to provide a seamless Internet media experience. Like sherpas - the tireless pioneers that first muscled up Everest and K2 - CDNs are today’s super-porters of new media.

The only difference is that instead of going sky-high, CDNs increasingly take their cargo wide. That is, to support services like Netflix and iTunes, they must bring high-definition and high bit-rate streams to the edge of today’s tangled networks to carry programming to mass audiences.  

. . . 

It goes with the territory according to Akamai Founder Tom Leighton – which is why they maintain 90,000 servers in over 1,800 locations and 70 countries.  (more ...)

GigaOm Mobilize 2011 event predicts industry trends

The GigaOm Mobilize 2011 event I attended in San Francisco this week captured some interesting moments in video:

Pandora CTO: We jailbroke the iPhone, love HTML5
Monetization on mobile can’t be like the web 
T-Mobile EVP speaks

Just as insightful were some tid-bits from their “Future of Mobile” report. While lean on mobile media perspective, it makes up for it with a spectrum of studies in health, social location, ad-targeting, and lots of predictions such as:

Growth     According to a UN & ITU study in 2010, developing countries accounted for 76 percent of the world's total mobile phones, up from 53 percent at the end of 2005. This is where new cellular adopters come from. Meanwhile, in the U.S., smartphone penetration continues to surge as people upgrade from feature phones, with Nielsen reporting this month that the 40 percent threshold has just been crossed.

Android OS     Mobile devices running the Android OS currently hold 20 percent of the market, according to ABI Research, but the firm also pointed out that “no single vendor using Android (or any other OS) has been able to mount a significant challenge” to the iPad.

Tablet Prediction      Through at least 2013, Apple’s combination of price and functionality will be unbeatable. But Android tablets will catch up by 2014, eventually overtaking Apple’s market share, thanks primarily to lower prices (just as it has in smartphones).

Windows 8 Prediction      Microsoft will arrive far too late to attract many consumers, but by the end of 2014 it will gain a substantial foothold in the enterprise with tablets running Windows 8. Meanwhile, the iPad will continue to gain traction in high schools and higher education.

Interview with Akamai Founder Tom Leighton

My IBC (9/11 issue) column will be out next month based on my conversation with Akamai Chief Scientist and co-Founder Tom Leighton. The working title is “A View from the Edge: Akamai’s Chief Sherpa Speaks”. The epigrams give it away: 

"Well, we knocked the bastard off !"
       -- Sir Edmund Hillary, on first climbing Mount Everest

“If you want to get at scale, high-quality and -bandwidth videos, the only way you can do it is with an edge delivery.”

        -- Tom Leighton, Akamai Chief Scientist and co-Founder

 Tom Leighton, Akamai Chief Scientist, co-Founder, MIT Professor

Interview excerpt, click here for audio

 

Special thanks to my colleague Jon Haass, Tom's MIT classmate, for the interview concept and introduction.