Holidays are over, back to real life and soon-to-be Mobile World Congress, I’ll be booth AV38A (F-Secure) throughout the whole week, come say hello !

Despite the Foursquare / Gowalla hype, Mobile LBS really isn’t a new thing. But, it seems like this time are buying it ! Yet there’s nothing innovative in Foursquare’s service. The confidentiality issues remain, but apparently the fact that firing up the application lets you win mayorships or medals or points somewhat make things acceptable by those who have been criticizing previous LBS service.
Yet the market, fueled by local ads, is a completely new territory to address which may be as big as Google’s Adwords. As usual it’s chicken and egg, nobody really invested in building up local ad networks while there were no real source of traffic for such ads, apparently this is starting to change. It may be the time to start reconsidering the viability of Local Advertisements, which will have special needs in terms of salesforce and sales mechanism that are very different from legacy Internet-based advertisements.
In France, “PagesJaunes” may be on of the few ready for this challenge, with an ability to list and upsale services to local business.

is limited to 500Mb… and I keep breaking the limit faster and faster !

Was quite happy with this blitz game, seems like I’m getting it again!

GigaOM is running today a story called Yahoo’s Big Plan for the Social Web in 2010: Aggregate It . Aggregating the Social Web is definitely something big for 2010, and obviously Yahoo is not going to be the only one trying this.

Obviously, we all are part of various social networks: some professional, some personals, some where we are active, some where we barely show up, all in the spirit of keeping in touch with our friends and following the real-time web. As such, the social networks websites are not the only place anymore where end-user are willing to check on their social activities. Better user experience, convergent activity view… all those themes open up opportunities for third parties such as software developers (Seesmic) or web portals (Yahoo) to stay in the game without the hassle of actually creating a social network.

Just like with the search, the user experience is a strong factor of adoption for a service thus opening opportunities to create value on top of those services.

An amazin piece of geek tech : a wifi flying drone that you can control with your iphone accelerometers while watching the embedded camera stream on the display.
One can wonder what Parrot is doing on those geek grounds since their core business is bluetooth hands-free systems for cars.
Another connected device “Made in France”.

Let’s face it, since Windows XP, everything consumer from Microsoft (apart from the XBOX) has been lame.

Windows Vista, Windows Mobile, MSN/Hotmail have been performing really badly and can be totally regarded as failures.

Yet it seems this time may be over.

For the first time in a long while, Microsoft is releasing exciting products one after another. Short development cycles, convergence and innovation has enabled them to release an excellent Windows 7, a challenging Bing, improved XBOX 360 experience and insights let us hope for the best with the upcoming Windows Mobile.

It seems that Microsoft managed to make massive changes in their R&D process to be able to regain that flexibility and ability to innovate aiming at shorter production cycles and more iterations, sounds like an interesting case I would love insights on.

WaveStorm since 2003. I’ve been a very strong advocate of the connected devices space through

2008 and 2009 have been such exciting times with amazing new devices being released (Chumby, Spykee, Rovio, Nabaztag…) yet when you look at the big picture none of those devices really turned into a mass market success (my definition of a success in consumer electronics starts somewhere between 250k/500k units shipped – usually CE projects try to be break even at 100k units).

All those devices are amazing, their internals are beauty, the level of complexity to come up with such a level of integration is amazing, and those babies can really do anything and go way beyond what they were initially aimed at. And this basically is the key concern : what are they aimed at and who needs this ?
Disregarding the fact that setting up a connected devices is a real pain (WiFi pairing really isn’t a one-step process) few strong use cases have really emerged in the market as of today.

The main ideas that have been kinda working are:

• Home surveillance (WiFi cams, Spykee…) : probably the most realistic use case of the connected devices but still nothing really exciting
• Widget screen (Chumby, Ki’i Frame, Tabbee…) : nice gizmo but quite useless at the end of the day
• Interactive toy (Nabaztag) : annoying after a few hours….
• Home automation : been around for a few decades, and it’s taking forever to take off – market super fragmented
• Sensors (RFID reader, weight scales…) : seducing potential but weak gain in your daily life

So let’s face it, creating a connected devices is still quite expensive and at a 150/300 USD price range the use cases of connected devices are far from obvious and the value of those functions v.s. price point seem a non-match thus leaving this gadgets to be aimed only at the geek community.

The mistake everyone is currently making is to try and make “universal” connected devices thus buying expensive hardware to ensure some future potential. And even the customer gets fooled buying a device while projecting himself into potential use-cases he imagines but that will probably never happen.
The consequence of this universal design is naturally a higher price point.
Marketers should really try and do their job defining the core features, and narrowing as much as possible the product around those so this price point gets within the 50-100USD range and the use case gets more clear to the end user.
Also the software on those devices has always been the week side. A lot of effort is put into building the device to put in a box, but the software being kinda intangible gets often left behind or not polished enough.

If we can see cheaper hardware, more focused devices aimed at niche markets and better software in 2010, we may see this Internet of Things coming true.
To be honest I don’t think 2010 will be the year, we probably need another 5 years for the market and the technologies to mature so that connected devices could really be used by my mom at a price she would be willing to pay.

The Mobile world has been forever a very fragmented space. Nevertheless, now you can start making some real bucks there : Mobile Ads is taking off, Mobile apps can be sold in one-click app-stores and delivered to a big mass of user in a glimpse… The mobile world is getting mature enough so that we can safely say that 2010 is going to be the year of all brands and generally all software getting mobile.
Innovative brands and solutions providers have already invested (a lot) to get in the mobile, often taking expensive and unproven approaches to get into the mobile.
I still remember Fauchon’s gold and silver eclairs being sold in 2005 (!!) from the mobile and that we built at Kamayo (that was really ahead of the curve but it was an impressive achievement for 2005 o have a big brand such as Fauchon go that road)!

The decision process on how to build mobile application isn’t much easier now than it was in 2005 but a few ground rules have become clearer now :

• When working with a major brand, a communication agency or an operator in most cases you will be compelled in supporting a very large number of handsets. Those guys usually don’t like to push a message to their customers that only a fraction would be able to benefit from. At a proof of concept phase you may be able to limit to one or two platforms but you will need to should you’re able to scale and support all platforms.
• If you’re an indie developer or a startup, you should focus on making money. Today making money happens in those platforms in that order :
  iPhone, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Windows Mobile, Java, Palm Pre
  You should address each platform one after another trying to do the best job you can so end-users see you care. More important than just developing a great app, you should spend time marketing it on the dedicated channels. You do *not* need to cover all platforms, actually it’s really a 80/20 strategy, most you money will probably come from the iphone or maybe android. So you should rather focus on one platform and do it perfectly than spend time on developing all platforms and not having the means to market them. From that prospective, Evernote is a perfect case to watch, they first did a cool iPhone app, then moved in a 1year time to android and blackberry and finally Symbian.

When it comes to massifying your production, it’s always the same story, either you use a tool to address all platforms or you use manpower. Both have pros and cons. Tools such as Streamezzo or J2MEPolish have become great over time but going for them binds your product to their IP and impacts your business model. This may not be acceptable in all cases and sometimes you may want to go in hidden areas where the tool may not go (yet).
In my opinion, manpower is a real option. There are lots of experienced developers and mobile companies out there that can help you reach all platforms at once at a relatively low cost. It all comes down to your ability of managing projects to make sure everything is on track in terms of time, cost and quality.