The new competitor

I think most of us have long been envious of the customer data and distribution control that the cable television industry has. Compared to that of the mobile phone operators, however, it is minor. In fact, the industry that stands to lose the most from the next move in mobile technology is cable TV.

A substantial portion of the congress workshops and presentations was devoted to telling mobile operators how they can take over the media world. A key to this is LTE – Long Term Evolution. That’s the catch phrase for mobile technology’s plan to become the standard for high speed Internet. At the 2010 World Mobile Congress, most of the operators and handset manufacturers in the world agreed to drop their other plans for 4G wireless in favor of this single standard. LTE delivers data about half again faster than a cable modem, and it delivers it anywhere the user wants. Verizon will finish tests on LTE this spring and have 60 cities up by the end of the year.

Suddenly the Vodacoms and AT&Ts of the world are not just in the talking business, but have the prospect of being the premier information conduit. So the message hammered home to the operators at the congress was not to settle for a pipeline, but instead fill the pipe with your own content. Speaker after speaker gave advice on how to give phone users compelling content and to capture advertising dollars by providing businesses with astoundingly granular location and usage-based information.

The big question is a matter of will. Some operators have already jumped into the content business, but many seem to be hesitating while they decide if they have the business assets to make a strategy turn. That delay may offer us a chance to show that we are the content kings and strike partnerships.

“Today the telecom industry is finding it must connect physically with the media industry,” said Sanjay Kapoor of India’s giant Bharti group. “We don’t understand their world.”

That said, the competitors are lining up, chanting the mantra that mobile is “always on.” The biggest dog in this new pack is Google. Eric Schmidt told the congress that his company is Mobile First (in capitals), meaning that all of his developers and engineers are focused directly on mobile applications. The Google presentation of its vision of the new mobile world is startling.

Newspaper help

There were a handful of vendors at the congress who were interested in helping newspapers achieve mobile success. A Kansas City company offered app help, a Portland firm is linking print to mobile and Visa wants to facilitate micropayments.

Handmark uses a proprietary program to capture a newspaper’s RSS feed and convert it into native apps for a variety of mobile platforms. A native app, as opposed to a mobile Web site, sits on the handset and is specifically tuned to that particular variety of phone. Importantly, the Handmark system goes way beyond the iPhone. The Blackberry is still the most popular smartphone in the U.S. by a substantial margin, and the beloved iPhone comprises just 7 percent of American cell phones. Open source Android will be in hundreds of phone models by the end of the year, while Palm, Symbian, and Bada all take a share. There is no single app that will serve a broad market.

Once you have an app, you need to give readers compelling content. Digimarc is a Beaverton, Ore., company working with The Oregonian to link the printed page with the Web via mobile phones. Several years ago Digimarc perfected a copyright protection system in which photographers embed invisible watermarks that can be detected with a scanner.

The variation for newspapers allows editors to embed a photo with a watermark that the reader can scan with cell phone camera and an app. Once the photo is scanned, the phone launches a Web site with more information, a video or a photo gallery.

In much of the world, the cell phone is also a pocketbook. Americans, however, have been nervous about the security of money-loaded phones. Visa is approaching this by replacing the memory chip in many phones. Once it rolls out, people will be able to wave their phone over a receiver to make a smart card/credit card payment or to pay for even minor purchases remotely with their phones. The kicker is that it is Visa – already trusted enough to be carried in our low-tech wallets.

Technology: The future is here

If you were even minimally tech-oriented, wandering the many exhibit halls at the World Mobile Congress was like a visit to Santa’s Workshop. Here’s a quick look at technology of interest to newspapers.

• M2M. Weird acronym, but likely to be the buzzword of the year. It means “machine to machine,” the term for technology that embeds cellular connectivity in nonphone hardware. Samsung showed a vending machine that not only dispenses when you call a special number, it also automatically contacts the central office for restocking and repairs. For the newspaper industry, M2M may mean automated newsstands, cars that react to our weather and traffic reports or devices that serve up coupons when you approach a store.
• Cameras. There are camera phones, then there are cameras that are also phones. Several vendors produce phones with 7 to 12 megapixel cameras, along with zoom lenses and HD video. That means an army of photographers can be on the scene in an instant, snapping photos of even magazine quality resolution. Considering that many of these phones also link to Bluetooth keyboards and come with word processing software, it also means that your staff can carry an entire office in their pockets.
• Scanners. Those cameras are not just for taking images. They also act as digital eyes for mobile phones. The squiggly squares called QR codes are showing up everywhere. Newspapers in Europe and Asia insert them in print editions to give phone users instant access to Web sites or additional copy. But the scanner technology can be used to access sophisticated databases that recognize scenes – a technology called augmented reality. A phone pointed at a house, for instance, might tell you its sales price, the number of bedrooms and the name of the dog in the yard. But QR can simply be fun – one program lets you point your camera phone at a lawn or park and instantly produce a huge Pac-Man game – with the chompers chasing you.
• Projection. Samsung demonstrated phones with a built-in projectors. Point your phone at a wall and watch a movie. Or, perhaps, read a full-size image of a broadsheet newspaper?
• Not smart, but handy. App-laden smartphones will remain the minority device for several years yet. Why? Browsing the Web isn’t as important to many people as the convenience of a small phone, the bling of a stylish device, or the simplicity of text messaging. The burgeoning middle ground is the “feature phone,” which has a few apps and the ability to perform specialty tasks like tracking your workouts, alerting you to stock market changes or providing a key to World of Warcraft. One of our tasks is to make content available to the huge and important strata of users that chooses to keep its mobile life simple.
• Here I am. One major difference between mobile phones and PCs is the ability of the phone to constantly locate the position of the user in the world. While GPS-equipped phones do this within a few feet, even simple phones triangulate their location between cell towers. New applications take this ability to the max. Phones not only provide directions to the nearest coffee shop, but automatically warn you of nearby hazards, send you ads from nearby businesses and deliver news or other information in context to that time, that location. It’s hyper hyperlocal.
• What Pad? Apple’s iPad has healthy competition coming about Christmas. Almost every major equipment maker showed a notepad of some sort. Most were Android-powered, Internet-enabled devices that can use both apps and Web downloads. But E-ink devices in both monochrome and color will be available to consumers by the end of the year.

The new technology is fun, sexy and exciting. But the key to understanding and surviving the mobile mania sweeping the industry is to pay attention to its simplest assets. The cell phone is much more than the universal communications device. It is a unique extension of self that is more like an organ than an accessory. Noting that the cell phone and the toothbrush are now the world’s two most common personal devices, Cecilia Atterwall of the Ericsson Consumer Laboratories wryly illustrated the new status of mobile.

“Our research showed people would rather lend their toothbrush to their partner than lend them their cell phone.”

Address the phone and you address to the person.