Three "Special Events" in Silicon Valley this week... and not an Apple in the bunch.

While the Apple acolytes flock to the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco for another "Special Event" this coming Wednesday, Silicon Valley (which does not include San Francisco.. sorry) is the place to be for anyone interested in more than what the next iPod will look like.

Tuesday, August - 31: Samsung
On Tuesday, Samsung is hosting a Free the TV Developer Day at the Fairmont Hotel in downtown San Jose. Internet-connectable TVs were one of the big themes coming out of the Consumer Electronics Show this past January, and now Samsung is extending the app store concept from smartphones to the living room.

The lineup of guest speakers is especially interesting, including none other than the non-mock turtleneck wearing founder from Apple.. Steve Wozniak. Yes, the day before Apple's expected presentation of a reboot for the less than successful Apple TV, "the Woz" joins this lineup at "Free the TV":

• Boo-Keun Yoon, President & General Manager, Visual Display Business Unit, Samsung Electronics Co., LTD
• Tim Baxter, President, Consumer Business Division, Samsung Electronics America
• Tim Westergren, Founder & Chief Strategy Officer, Pandora
• Chuck Pagano, Executive Vice President – Technology, ESPN
• Steve Wozniak, Chief Scientist, Fusion-io

Wednesday September -  1: Global Foundries
On Wednesday, Global Foundries will host their first Technology Conference at the Santa Clara Convention Center.  Global Foundries has become a key player in the mobile wireless ecosystem with their participation in the Common Platform semiconductor manufacturing alliance along with Samsung and IBM.  Other mobile chip companies participating in the Common Platform include ARM and Qualcomm.

Wednesday/Thursday September - 1/2: Set Top Box Conference 2010

As if the Woz's appearance at Samsung's event wasn't enough to overshadow the Apple event on September 1, the Set Top Box Conference 2010 opens at the Holiday Inn on N. First Street in San Jose on the same day. STB sponsors include a broad spectrum of logos across the connected-TV ecosystem; from semiconductor companies to networking equipment, traditional media companies to internet brands, and a new wave of contenders for the consumer's TV consumption device.

Don't think that Cupertino folks weren't cognizant of the STB 2010 schedule when they chose the date for their event. At the very same time as Steve Jobs is scheduled to take the stage, here's what will be on the agenda just 50 miles south:

10:00 - 11:00

Executive Panel Discussion:
TV in the Internet Era: The Intersection of Broadband and Broadcast

Panelist: Marty Roberts, Vice President of Sales and Marketing - thePlatform
Panelist: Vern Smith, SVP Business Development and GM of ViP-TV - EchoStar
Panelist: Larry Yang, Lead Platform Project Manager Google TV - Google
Panelist: Vivek Khemka, Vice President for Customer Technology - DISH Network
Panelist: Mark Barao - Ernst & Young

Also, in a session later on that day, interactive TV company itaas will present on "GoogleTV: Changing TV As We Know It".

It's looking like quite a busy week leading up to the Labor Day holiday. There's no doubt that whatever Apple announces (in their highly controlled & orchestrated forum) will be live-tweeted & blogged ad nauseam, so I'll be looking forward to really connecting with the companies driving next generation digital media technology... right here in Silicon Valley.

Mobile Monday, "So Many App Stores…Now what?"

I've learned that the mobile industry is a very sociable lot. Besides the big industry trade shows like CTIA Wireless and Mobile World Congress, here in Silicon Valley you can probably find some sort of meetup related to mobile technology at least once a week. With all these groups and associations to choose from, Mobile Monday stands out for its global reach (100 chapters worldwide) and longevity (10 years and running).


The "Silicon Valley" (must have annexed San Francisco) Mobile Monday chapter recently put together a panel for its monthly meeting on the topic of "So Many App Stores…Now what?", to address questions such as "What makes a successful app?", and "How do developers to actually get paid?"

The panelists included two representatives of manufacturer-owned app stores:

• RIM: Ian McDonald - Manager, Developer Programs
• Nokia OVI: Michael Bergen - Senior Manager, Developer Relations & Partnerships

Independent, multi-platform app store Getjar: Chris Dury - VP Products, and app review website Chomp: Ben Keighran - CEO/Founder.


The panel offered opinions and advice on a number of questions near and dear to the hearts of most app developers, posed by moderator Jessica Dolcourt - Sr Associate Editor at CNET/CBS Interactive.

Here are my edited notes from the discussion:



What about discovery & payment, these are major issues for developers?

• OVI: don’t rely on app stores. Use co-marketing. Talk to stores to get marketing exposure.
• Chomp: on their site apps are ranked by user ratings. To increase downloads, use AdMob, Tapjoy.
• GetJar: designed to solve the problem, focus on how to monetize.
• RIM: work with small app marketing shops, generate PR to get attention from media.

 
Strategies for monetization?

• GetJar: most app stores are horrible for monetization. Itunes average ~$20/user. Payments are extremely hard.
• Chomp: iPhone is now easier than ever to monetize.
• RIM: (App World) an “open ecosystem” with option for selling apps, partner closely with carrier partners, preloads,  use GetJar, Blackberry ad service to supplement revenue, can aggregate ad vendors.
• OVI: doing carrier billing is a pain. In markets where credit card billing and carrier billing are available (88 operators in 26 countries), have found up to 13X with carrier billing.

 
What are OVI, RIM doing to incentive developers?

• RIM: 46M subscribers, common misconception - enterprise Blackberry users are only 50%, investment in new 6.0 platform, have 250K registered developers.
• OVI: Nokia incentive is global reach, Forum Nokia.
• GetJar: get featured, get viral, get downloaded/targeted. Developers should build a mobile website. It's not possible to rely totally on viral. Fragmentation will go on. To get targeted - address a segment, virtual goods. Productivity - antivirus is a good good category, top 10 on GetJar.

 
How to overcome bad reviews?

• Chomp: app will be removed if review is bad. No 2nd chance!
• RIM: From a VisionMobile report: the #1 source for feedback is friends. Use Mob4Hire to get feedback in a closed environment first. Problem with not testing in global markets, use DeviceAnywhere, Perfecto Mobile, incorporate localization.
• GetJar: Developers always have a 2nd chance. GetJar believes that developers power the ecosystem, highlight the latest reviews.

 
Billing - preference for credit cards, PayPal, operator billing?

• Chomp: people will buy if app is good. Price point on iPhone is $0.99. People spending ~$10/mo
• OVI: all about ease of saying yes. Easy, secure & safe. Operator billing is a pain but easiest for consumers, and is important in developing countries where no credit cards.
• GetJar: open billing solutions, PayPal and credit cards in U.S. Using credit cards for payment misses game users because of teen market. The design of app stores is limiting pricing. Suggests looking at the Facebook model, they have a smaller number of developers but higher revenue, higher engagement.
• Chomp: users are now consuming apps like music.  Many users discovering new apps are “addicted” to consuming and shopping for the latest. There have been 17B searches across Yahoo, Google and Bing.
• RIM: Why not a target making a good app vs. churn? Highly integrated apps are more sticky (LBS, address book, etc.)

 
How do developers use ads in apps?

• GetJar: only iAd has enough penetration to be sustainable. Virtual goods model of Facebook, Tapjoy.

 
How many users needed to sustain a business?

• GetJar: similar to music, $1/user, need to get to $10k-$25k level,
• OVI: don’t skim on QA costs.
• RIM: advised catching defects early, follow standard manufacturing/quality processes.
• Chomp: start as early as possible talking to users. “What are you using now”? User-centric design for mobile apps.

Here are questions posed from the audience:

Comment/opinion from a developer: $35k average developer cost for good app + $20K marketing cost, +$10K / iteration? Is average cost $80K? Claimed that $1800 is average revenue for paid apps.

• GetJar: tough on iPhone for developers. Apple wants a lot of apps, but doesn’t care about how many make $$. Repeated point-of-view on strong advocates of mobile web for apps.
• RIM: Advised using app as a launcher, widgets, code in HTML-5 with Java script launcher.

 
What % of developers are actually making money?

• Audience member: < 5%
• GetJar: activity now in apps as a marketing channel, trend for big web properties.
• Chomp: (Mobile apps) like web in 90s, space is just starting to grow, still early.
• RIM: comes down to the business model. Need to build an app not just a feature, the whole value proposition. 

Are developers clamoring for better app stores or better tools and platforms?

• OVI: Qt (used to was develop Google Earth), can port to MeeGo and Symbian. Importance of mobile web: Qt has SDK, and Mobile web SDK.
• RIM: it’s both, widget tool kits, Blackberry App World 2. 

So.. still want to be an app developer? It's become quite a gold rush, especially here in Silicon Valley. My observation is that developers are very much in demand, so the ROI is much more in your potential employability to one of the bigger mobile companies (or a startup) than in the money you are likely to make from making that 1-of-100,00 apps. 

Regardless... Get out. Get social. Join a mobile meetup group. It's lots of fun and you never know who you might meet.

Oracle's patent infringement claims against Google

A search of the U.S. patent database finds that there are nearly 2000 patents related to Java. If you are interested in digging into the seven patents that Oracle has accused Google of infringing in Android here is the list:

1. 6,125,447 Protection domains to provide security in a computer system
2. 6,192,476 Controlling access to a resource
3. 5,966,702 Method and apparatus for pre-processing and packaging class files
4. 7,426,720 System and method for dynamic preloading of classes through memory space cloning of a master runtime system process
5. RE38,104 Method and apparatus for resolving data references in generated code
6. 6,910,205 Interpreting functions utilizing a hybrid of virtual and native machine instructions
7. 6,061,520 Method and system for performing static initialization

Hide in Plain Sight? Rumors that really aren't.

Two headlines caught my eye in the Business + Technology section of this morning's San Jose Mercury News.  Both stories were sourced from Bloomberg News.

• Nvidia Said to Take On Intel in Tablet Computer Chips
• PayPal Talking With Google About Handling Android Payments 

I think that some technology writers are now so eager to break the next lost iPhone story that they don't bother checking the background facts. While both of these "revelations" were credited to unnamed "people familiar with the matter", neither story is a secret.

First, let's take PayPal "talking with Google". As you can see from the graphic at the top of my post, eBay was one of the founding members of the Open Handset Alliance, the group that Google established to develop the Android system. As you probably know, eBay owns PayPal. So, yeah... I think they've probably been talking to Google for quite a while.  In fact, a representative from PayPal spoke at the May-26 Meetup of the Silicon Valley Android Developer's Group, about how to incorporate their payment mechanisms in Android applications.

Now let's take a look at the "news" that nVidia is going to challenge Intel in the tablet market. This was announced way back in January, at the Consumer Electronics Show. The headline of an nVIDIA press release from January, 7 2010 read New NVIDIA Tegra Processor Powers The Tablet Revolution.

I wonder how long Bloomberg worked to find "two people familiar with the matter"?

In the image above, you can see the setup from a picture I took at Verizon's LTE demo at CES. The placard clearly shows the nVIDIA logo. Although the Android-based tablet is often mistakenly referred to as a Motorola tablet (mixing rumors), it was in fact manufactured with the nVIDIA Tegra processor by Innovative Converged Devices. Motorola is likely working on an Android tablet as well, but Motorola's role in the CES demo was only to show an LTE modem.

A Variety of Location-Based Apps from WCA's "Locationpolooza"

This is a followup to my earlier post on the recent WCA Location-based Services (LBS) SIG event, dubbed "Locationpolozza". Links to videos of the presentations have also now been posted at the WCA website.

The five companies presenting at the WCA event showed how location data can be put to use in a variety of applications; from the very serious reality of civil emergency response, to augmented reality in shopping experiences, to enhancing your ability to "hookup" and flirt on the go (this might also turn out to be augmented reality.. you never really know till you meetup in person do you?).

CiviGuard showed how their application is able to communicate location-specific emergency alerts to up to 1M people in less than two minutes. The app is currently available on iOS and Android. Besides speed, an advantage of CiviGuard is the ability to facilitate two-way communication with civilians, potentially to crowd-source responses as an aid to help direct resources where needed.

As an interesting side note, CiviGuard traces its origins to the Singularity University, which Chris O'Brien wrote about in today's San Jose Mercury News. As Chris describes it, the central point of the Singularity Movement is that:

The pace of change in technology and science is accelerating so rapidly that the world is completely unprepared to deal with the consequences. And the message from the people who champion Singularity: We need to prepare.

Google is one of the primary sponsors of Singularity University. I'll leave you to read the Mercury News article for more details on this "movement".

ZOS Communications complemented the emergency notification theme of CiviGuard, but as a middleware provider rather than an end-user application. ZOS has developed "relevance filters" to avoid information overload, by using location data to more narrowly target messaging. ZOS  serves applications such as the Amber alert system, but also expands the concept beyond emergencies to "lifestyle" alerts for situations such as park closings, or notification of public events.

Skout is touting their application as "the future of dating". Think real time location-based Match.com on a mobile device. Their service has more than 1 million users, and claims to be adding 10,00 per day, not surprisingly - mostly 20 to 30 year-olds.  The app can notify users when a match comes into the vicinity. An attempt is made to protect user's privacy, by not revealing the specific location.  Skout also has a separate app called "Boy Ahoy" for the gay community.

In order to monetize their app, Skout allows users (i.e. males I'm sure) to spend virtual currency in order to enhance their rankings. As an attendee remarked "does this mean a rich sleazy guy gets rated higher"?  It's worth noting that a customer survey conducted by Skout found that 20% of their users employ the app to cheat on their partners!

MotiveCast is an application that employs augmented reality for "engagement marketing". The idea is to use hyper-local data that would be specific to a given store, so that shoppers could engage in games or contests as part of their shopping experience. Personally, I try to minimize my time spent shopping, but I'm sure I'm not their target demographic. This might go over well with mom's handing ther iPhones off to their kids to keep them amused.

With the increased adoption of smartphones, you may have already seen oblivious pedestrians looking at their handhelds in a crosswalk when they should be checking for traffic. I'm imagining oblivious shoppers running MotiveCast and banging their carts into each other, or into merchandise. That could bring a whole new element to shopping! Kind of like bumper cars.

Finally, Geodelic presented their offerings for consumers and enterprises. For consumers, the Geodelic app enables location discovery, i.e. a location browser that is more interactive and adds real time information as an improvement to something like the static, list-oriented Yelp or the checkin-based Foursquare. Feeds from Yelp, Wikipedia, etc. are added to the database of location information.

For businesses, Geodelic provides a platform for creating site-specific location guides, such as in airports or amusement parks.  The company is also developing a a web-based authoring toolkit that could be used by consumers and businesses alike to create and publish personalized location guides. By incorporating advertising, and the ability to make purchases directly from the location browser, Geodelic has the opportunity to generate revenue from a number of different channels.

The last two location-based services, MotiveCast and Geodelic, show how LBS is much more than GPS. Hyper-localization will rely on enhancing GPS through WiFi, both to pinpoint location much more narrowly and satisfy the bandwidth requirements for rich media experiences.

My Interview with Fortune Magazine: Building Your Personal Brand

The concept of establishing a personal brand existed long before the emergence of social media and the internet, but there's no question that online tools have made the process much easier. If you're on Facebook, have a blog or use Twitter, you are establishing your personal brand with every message. Career counselors advise job seekers to develop a strong personal brand, but it is important to also be aware of the potential pitfalls along the way.

If you are new to "personal branding" I recommend my presentation on Developing your personal brand through blogging as a starting point. You might also want to read my blog post - More on "Developing Your Personal Brand".

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Businesses of all kinds now have no choice but to adopt social media in order to remain competitive. As more employees are now engaged in blogging or tweeting for their company, the intersection of the corporate brand and the personal brand has increasingly become a perilous area.

During a recent online Tweetup that I participated in (see The Impact of Social on the Analyst Industry), one of the comments that stood out for me was this:

the purpose of social media is to have conversations, and corporations don't have conversations... people do. 

It is vital for companies to have real, credible (and brandable) personalities who can conduct these conversations. Anonymous or ghost-written messaging is greatly diminished in value, in my opinion. The challenge then is to ensure that the intersection of the personal and corporate brands is mutually beneficial, i.e. symbiotic and not parasitic.

This is the subject that Fortune Magazine's Josh Hyatt tackled in Building your brand (and keeping your job), in the July 30 online edition of the magazine.  His lead-off sentence dives right into the parasitic or symbiotic issue:

Scott Monty's personal brand doesn't take a back seat to anyone else's -- not even that of Ford Motor Co., his employer. "I'm not somebody who can be accused of using Ford's brand to benefit my own," says Monty, the car giant's first global digital and multimedia communications manager. "If anything, the opposite is true."

This suggests a case where an individual brings the value of an established personal brand to his employer, potentially enhancing the company's brand. The opposite situation occurs as well. Social media provides new opportunities for companies to develop their employees, by encouraging them to communicate through their work.

I discovered that Josh was exploring this topic when he sent out a request for stories of workplace conflict arising from the use of social media.  (See Symbiotic or Parasitic: the intersection (collision?) of personal and corporate brands for more on my experience with a previous employer). He and I ended up talking for a couple hours over multiple phone calls. You can find his summary of those conversations in Case study No. 5: Be sensitive to changing priorities.

From my past experiences working with journalists, who typically spend much less time on a story than Josh Hyatt did, I expect that what goes to "press" can differ considerably from what I tried to convey. This can be due more to the editor than the writer, or my own lack of clarity, but it is always difficult to distill a long conversation into just a few paragraphs. Fortunately, I can use this social medium to clarify some of the points in the the published version of my Fortune Magazine interview.

Three years ago Mike Demler was a senior staff product marketing manager at Synopsys, a $1.3 billion maker of tools used to produce integrated circuits. When the company asked if anyone wanted to blog, Demler enthusiastically volunteered. The now 55-year-old had earned his MBA a year earlier, and decided that for his career and the company's strategy "it was critical for me to become a recognized expert."

As a former integrated circuit designer, as well as a published author of one engineering textbook, numerous trade press articles and conference presentations, my personal brand in this field was already long-established. One of the reasons I volunteered to become a corporate blogger was to lend the voice of my expertise, to establish some 'cred' with customers in an area that was not a company strength. In this regard I was perhaps in a somewhat similar situation to Mr. Monty at Ford. But companies often fail to understand how an employee's personal brand can work to their benefit.

... His direct manager told him that a VP said he "was wasting time blogging." Still, he carried on—often in his off-hours—partly because he had seen so many reorganizations in the past three years that he expected priorities to shift.

I could tell, from my conversations with him, that Josh was struggling to understand why I kept on blogging after my group's VP said it was a waste of time. The issue here is perhaps the challenge of working in a matrixed organization. In a matrix there are multiple lines of reporting, and multiple internal "customers" to satisfy.

My assignment as a corporate blogger began literally days before the fourth VP in three years took over the group.  While priority changes did occur, the real reason that I carried on blogging was because it was successful, and it fulfilled a commitment I had made. The launch of an online "community" and blogs was backed up by the top management of the company, above the level of the VP that criticized the effort, backed up by an extensive advertising campaign. Bloggers were treated like would-be celebrities at industry events, with a special booth to "meet the bloggers". So, there was a lot of positive feedback and encouragement along with the negativity.  Unfortunately, while many managers are typically involved with who is hired, it usually only takes one to lay someone off.

Summary lessons

The advice offered in the Fortune piece is "Be sensitive to changing priorities".  That is always good advice in a politically-charged corporate world, but here are a few things to think about specifically regarding the use of social media in your career:

• Take care to keep your personal and professional social networks separate. This is easier said than done. For example - I have decided that friends are OK for Facebook, while colleagues are restricted to LinkedIn. It's tough, but I really try not to mix the two. (So, sorry if I didn't accept your friend request).
• It should go without saying - Never criticize your employer online.
• If you are going to employ social media in your job, don't do it unless the managers that signoff on your reviews, and can decide to lay you off, strongly endorse the activity.
• Work with your social media teams to adopt policies and guidelines for best practices. Many companies are still learning on the run, but there is no point in re-learning lessons that others have already gone through.