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For those lucky enough to escape the grey mono­tony of Lon­don last week (I was not so lucky) and escape to Bar­celona for the Mobile World Con­gress, they were in for a rare treat. In recent years the world’s largest mobile event has des­cen­ded into a rather dreary almost bor­ing lit­any of the same ol’ same ol’. This year appears to have been any­thing but…

Microsoft’s ebul­li­ent Steve Balmer lit­er­ally char­ging back into the fray with MS phone 7 which, I’m kinda shocked to say, seems to be get­ting rave reviews. Android show­ing its mettle with some decent look­ing kit like the new Motorola CLIQ XT and the inev­it­ably slick UI we’ve come to expect. In addi­tion, Google CEO Eric Schmidt’s key­note on Google Goggles and the emer­ging aug­men­ted real­ityspace was great. Apple, in true brand fash­ion, deign­ing not to attend but still able to cause a monu­mental buzz with the run­away suc­cess of the AppStore. And Nokia? Des­pite the much-hyped but largely panned col­lab­or­a­tion with Intel on a new mobile OS called MeeGo, Nokia unveiled no new devices at all which is a first at MWC. Rather they chose to extol (or is that excuse?) the vir­tues of their Ovi store which seems unable to slow the gal­lop­ing suc­cess of AppStore. This piece of You­Tube bril­liance high­lights the com­mon perception.

As the mobile space seems, moment­ar­ily, to be fix­ated on applic­a­tions, MWC was awash with hun­dreds of com­pan­ies try­ing to muscle in. The recur­ring theme? A con­cern sur­round­ing the lack of stand­ards in the applic­a­tion space and the com­plex­ity that is caus­ing through­out the mobile eco­sys­tem. Man­u­fac­tur­ers, under­stand­ably, seem slow to adopt a com­mon stand­ard and all are try­ing to des­per­ately nur­ture a developer net­work to mimic Apple. How­ever, oper­at­ors and net­work pro­viders are try­ing to lasso developer com­munit­ies together (check out the Whole­sale Applic­a­tion Com­munity to see just how big that groundswell could become) in a dir­ect assault on Apple.

So des­pite the obvi­ous allure of Bar­celona at any time of the year, Mobile World Con­gress 2010 appears to have been a real barn­stormer. Two pre­dic­tions. MWC 2011 will def­in­itely be even more enga­ging as the mobile space con­tin­ues to evolve so fren­et­ic­ally. Lon­don weather in Feb­ru­ary 2011 will be just as shyte. I’ve begun beg­ging for my ticket already.

I con­fess. Mine is one of the anim­ated voices debat­ing the future of Apple in the mobile phone industry. But I’m the heretic deny­ing that we’re wit­ness­ing the birth of the Mobile Mes­siah. I have much love for Apple (even if sit typ­ing this on a Sony Vaio). They have a knack of dis­rupt­ing mar­kets through intel­li­gent and beau­ti­ful design. And the desirab­il­ity of their brand is second to none. So they should be well placed to thrive in the mobile phone busi­ness. Right?

At the risk of being burned at the stake, I believe not. There is noth­ing in the iPhone launch announce­ment to sug­gest it will cre­ate mar­ket dis­rup­tion. Sure, the iPhone looks beau­ti­ful. The user exper­i­ence looks prom­ising (unless you like tex­ting one handed). And yes, it can do clever things. But noth­ing dis­rupt­ive. Noth­ing to unsettle the status quo in the way iTunes unsettled the music industry. Noth­ing so dif­fer­ent that you can’t wait for the end of your con­tract before bin­ning your exist­ing hand­set. And noth­ing to war­rant the enorm­ous pri­cing bur­den the iPhone will have to carry.

Apple are facing stiff com­pet­i­tion this time. Nokia, Motorola, Sam­sung and Sony Eric­sson may not all have the cache of Apple, but they are much beefier brands than the rag bag of com­pet­it­ors Apple white­washed in the MP3 mar­ket. How­ever, my heretic view is not foun­ded on the rel­ev­ant strengths of phone brands (even though we do work for Nokia). It is based on the dynam­ics of the industry. Among Nokia’s many reas­ons for suc­cess are their rela­tion­ships with net­work oper­at­ors around the world, their supreme global logist­ics oper­a­tion, and their sheer eco­nomy of scale. Apple have none of these. Someone put me right here, but Apple are not exactly renowned for their part­ner­ship skills either? I can only ima­gine the scene when they real­ise the net­work oper­at­ors have a com­pul­sion for instruct­ing man­u­fac­tur­ers which fea­tures must go into their next product.

Of course, many of the faith­ful will queue overnight to sat­isfy their addic­tion to own all things shiny and Apple. At the launch, Mr Jobs proudly reminded devotees that there are 100 mil­lion iPods in the world. He omit­ted to men­tion the two bil­lion Nokia mobile devices in the world, with the Finns adding to them at a rate of 350 mil­lion in 2006 alone.

So if you guys in Cuper­tino aren’t real­ist­ic­ally expect­ing to take on Hel­sinki, what are you expect­ing to do? Is this a defens­ive manœuvre against MP3 play­ers in phones? If it is, you are one tardy bunch of Cali­for­ni­ans. Or is it the real­isa­tion that much of your future busi­ness will be wrapped up in mobile computing…of which voice com­mu­nic­a­tion is a crit­ical com­pon­ent? Or are you hid­ing an industry dis­rup­tion up your sleeve which will yet turn the entire mar­ket upside down?

I guess whatever your answer, it will be a reflec­tion of your faith.

Few top­ics have inspired as much anim­ated con­ver­sa­tion within the agency recently as the launch of the iPhone. There are even rumours – which I can neither con­firm nor deny – that two senior Ban­ner exec­ut­ives have staked a reas­on­ably hefty sum of money on whether or not Apple will still be in the mobile phone busi­ness in three years’ time.

Atti­tudes so far seem to fall into three main camps:

• Apple has a new shiny product and I want one. It’s a mobile phone? It doesn’t mat­ter, I want one anyway.

• The iPhone is offer­ing some rad­ic­ally new ideas (e.g. the touch-screen inter­face) that will shake up the industry.

• The iPhone is a niche offer­ing that isn’t going to keep Nokia awake at night.

I think there are ques­tions about the scale of Apple’s ulti­mate ambi­tion. And I sus­pect it will slowly dawn on the world through this year what a massively power­ful and resource­ful global dis­tri­bu­tion machine Nokia has built – with an con­com­it­ant acknow­ledge­ment of what an under-appreciated asset this machine is.

I also think there’ll be a rue­ful admis­sion from Apple that, yes, the mobile busi­ness has turned out to be alto­gether trick­ier than we anti­cip­ated. In the short term it’s going to be very inter­est­ing to see how the Apple-Cingular (or should that now be Apple-AT&T?) rela­tion­ship plays out.

In the long-term – in the unlikely event that any­one is inter­ested — my per­sonal hunch is that the iPhone is the last huzzah of the old order. It’s an old-fashioned way of doing things i.e. a walled garden hermetically-sealed black-box approach.

When the iPhone was announced, someone at Ban­ner sent an excit­able email sug­gest­ing that this should become the agency’s stand­ard mobile device. To which our esteemed Fin­an­cial Dir­ector sent a tart reply: “On your bike.”

In con­clu­sion, there­fore, I have to say, firstly, I think our Fin­an­cial Dir­ector is bang-on. Secondly, I’d be very inter­ested in see­ing the Apple iBike. Now that could really be some­thing and, as we all know, Apple is no longer just a com­puter company.

Tak­ing the long-term per­spect­ive, which is worse:

1. The news that North Korea has test-detonated a nuc­lear bomb, or

2. The real­isa­tion that, in the near future, people every­where will be watch­ing TV clips on their mobiles and annoy­ing the hell out of other people who are try­ing to get on with their lives?

If, like me, you think the answer is 2, then the news com­ing out of this week’s Las Vegas Con­sumer Elec­tron­ics Show (CES) won’t make you feel much bet­ter. The show appears obsessed with TV. Last year, yet again, it was HDTV; this year, it’s the many dif­fer­ent ways to get TV onto your mobile, not to men­tion IP-enabled TV sets.

“He had as much ima­gin­a­tion as a pint-pot,” Shel­ley once said of his fellow-poet Wordsworth, and he wasn’t being com­pli­ment­ary. Sift­ing through the announce­ments from CES, I’m start­ing to think a sim­ilar lack of ima­gin­a­tion must apply to lead­ers of tech­no­logy companies.

Is this obses­sion with TV the best the con­sumer tech industry can come up with? Why are all these com­pan­ies work­ing so hard to turn us into a planet of brain-addled pass­ive con­sumers, agog for whatever digital enter­tain­ment dull media com­pan­ies con­des­cend to pipe through to us?

The mes­sage appears to be this. We are going to hell in a hand-cart but, luck­ily, the hand-cart is now fit­ted with a Sling­Box. And we’re meant to be grateful?

OK, so WAP was a dog. Des­pite the hype and prom­ises of the inter­net on your mobile, the real­ity was so far behind to make most users (all 3 of them) give up in des­pair. But that was OK because 3G came along to solve all that. Make video calls. Watch TV clips. And get the inter­net on your mobile (again – no really).

The take up of 3G ser­vices has been slow to say the least. As Kim Ki-ho, Samsung’s senior VP told del­eg­ates to the Sam­sung 4G forum,

“3G was a fail­ure. The mar­ket did not respond, and it is already becom­ing an old-fashioned technology.”

The solu­tion is, of course, more band­width. The new tech­no­logy, ima­gin­at­ively named 4G, will offer 100 mega­bits per second for users on the move and a pretty pokey 1 gig­abit per second when they are stationary.

But is the prob­lem really in the tech­no­logy or is it in the marketing?

3G has largely failed to cap­ture the ima­gin­a­tion of cus­tom­ers out­side of Japan (where it accounts for some 50% of the mar­ket). In some areas it suf­fers from the net­work effects prin­ciple (it’s not much use if you can make video calls but none of your friends can). In oth­ers it suf­fers from mobile form factors that don’t deliver a reward­ing view­ing exper­i­ence – the people who are expec­ted to watch TV on their micro­scopic mobiles are the same people who are rush­ing out to buy 42″ plasma TVs. And the abil­ity to watch clips and shows is being dir­ec­ted at an audi­ence that is quickly retreat­ing from tra­di­tional push media.

It’s as if the SMS les­son hasn’t been learnt. SMS suc­ceeded because it enabled pre­dom­in­ently young users to com­mu­nic­ate quickly, cheaply and in a way that dif­fer­en­ti­ated them from the grown up world around them. It was fast and two way – and even bet­ter, cre­ated its own language.

3G, as it is cur­rently sold, is typ­ic­ally pass­ive. Watch this. Listen to that. Play this game (by your­self). If 3G (or 4G for that mat­ter) is to cap­ture the ima­gin­a­tion of non-business cus­tom­ers then it needs to find applic­a­tions that help people make con­nec­tions, rein­force bonds, and com­mu­nic­ate with oth­ers in new and inter­est­ing ways. Without this, no amount of addi­tional band­width will make a difference.

Source: Reu­ters

Singa­pore will have wall-to-wall WiFi by the end of the year. No more look­ing for a friendly Star­bucks or try­ing to leech off an unpro­tec­ted wire­less router, simply boot and go (well that’s the plan). This ini­ti­at­ive is part of a wider effort (the Intel­li­gent Nation pro­gramme) which extends into many gov­ern­ment ser­vices and which is look­ing to line Singa­pore up with the world’s tech élite nations.

Now, all they need is a sub­scrip­tion music ser­vice and some WiFi-enabled play­ers.

Source: news.com

Another day, another work:life study.

Accord­ing to some research for headhunters Korn/Ferry Inter­na­tional, 80% of exec­ut­ives are always con­nec­ted to their work – whether through mobiles, PDAs, laptops or whatever. And 77% of these believe that the tech­no­logy behind all this enhances their work:life bal­ance. The study covered 2,300 exec­ut­ives in 75 coun­tries (which when you do the maths is just over 30 per coun­try – so not the most robust sample ever).

Sadly I don’t have the break­downs per coun­try but our exper­i­ence at Ban­ner has shown that these atti­tudes vary rad­ic­ally by geo­graphy. In research we’ve done over the last couple of years, we’ve seen a vast range of res­ults from enthu­si­asm in the US and UK through to out­right rejec­tion of the idea in Ger­many (and Itali­ans simply find the devices too ugly to contemplate).

In a related piece of news, Rut­gers Uni­ver­sity has ques­tioned whether employ­ers may be leg­ally liable for their employ­ees’ crack­berry addic­tions. Gayle Porter, asso­ci­ate pro­fessor of man­age­ment at Rut­gers has been work­ing on a study that exam­ines the impact of this tech­no­logy on work­ers’ lives and which looks at the employer’s respons­ib­il­it­ies for pro­tect­ing them. A flavour:

“There are costs attached to excess­ive work due to tech­no­logy,” says Porter. “Inform­a­tion and com­mu­nic­a­tion tech­no­logy (ICT) addic­tion has been treated by policy makers as a kind of ele­phant in the room – every­one sees it, but no one wants to acknow­ledge it dir­ectly. Owing to ves­ted interests of the employ­ers and the ICT industry, signs of pos­sible addic­tion – excess use of ICT and related stress ill­nesses – are often ignored.”

On a basic level, I’d ques­tion whether this is some kind of jum­bling of cause and effect – the employee works too much so it must be the tech­no­logy that’s caus­ing it. Porter goes on:

“Employ­ers right­fully provide pro­grams to help work­ers with chem­ical or sub­stance addictions…Addiction to tech­no­logy can be equally dam­aging to the men­tal health of the worker.”

Are employ­ees really addicted to the tech­no­logy? I’m not so sure. They may be addicted to the exper­i­ence of being in con­trol. They may covet the feel­ing of elev­ated self-esteem (look Ma, I’ve made it, I’ve got a Black­Berry!). But equat­ing this with a sub­stance addic­tion feels wrong-headed.

Over the years, I’ve sat behind the glass of many focus groups and have talked to the kinds of people both these stud­ies are refer­ring to. For the most part, they are not the air-punching go-getters of the first study, nor the hope­less addicts of the second. They are by and large prag­matic people who use the tech­no­logy at hand (quite lit­er­ally) to nav­ig­ate the world around them. They often see using these devices as a way of using dead time bet­ter, get­ting out of the office earlier, see­ing more of their kids.

Of course there are some toxic com­pan­ies who are happy to over­work their employ­ees. And yes, crack­ber­ries (of all makes) are one more way of doing this. But the symp­tom is not the cause.

Work:life bal­ance, I believe, is largely a fal­lacy. It sets up a way of think­ing that’s at odds with how many of us in inform­a­tion work exper­i­ence our days. Work is life. Like­wise, life is work. Today, it’s less about bal­an­cing and more about blend­ing. Pro­gress­ive com­pan­ies real­ise this and hand over the tools for employ­ees to blend it the best they can.

I’m writ­ing this at home on a Sat­urday night. But the same tech­no­logy allows me to take my daugh­ter to school at least once a week, it means I can respond to my team when they need me and, of course, I can always find the off button.

Good night.

Sources: Reu­ters, Rut­gers (via CrunchGear)