WirelessMoves

Mobile network operators are always pointing to the fact that they don’t want to be mere bitpipes but would rather prefer to remain a network + service provider as they are with voice telephony today. Most have recognized some time ago that this is a rather unrealistic goal and are opening their walled gardens. But maybe this bitpipe disgust could be remedied with a different perspective on things!?

Apart from the few killer apps born out of web 2.0 (Google search, maps, Flickr, Amazon, eBay, Facebook, …) most people today use quite a number of services in the Long Tail of the web. In case you are not familiar with Long Tail economics, take a look the original article by Chris Anderson published on Wired magazine which focused on goods on the long tail but is in my opinion applicable to services as well. It is these startup or niche segment services that might give the final incentive for users to consider going online from their mobile. The "problem" for network operators is that they can’t be the provider of the killer apps, since they are already out there and they also can’t be the provider of those niche apps, since there is not a lot of money to be made in the long tail as this article by Alex Isold on ReadWriteWeb aptly points out.

What Alex also points out, however, that while you can not make a lot of money in the Long Tail but you can actually make a lot of money WITH the Long Tail as aptly demonstrated by Amazon or eBay. So now look at mobile operators: Selling bandwidth is nothing but making money with the Long Tail of the web. Sounds a lot better than ‘bitpipe’, no?

Comments as always welcome!

I’ve been thinking a bit about the recent history of mobile Internet access lately because I was wondering why it had such a teribble start. In the mobile world, the web had a much more difficult start compared to the fixed line world for a number of reasons. First attempts by mobile phone manufacturers to mobilize the web were a big disappointment for quite a number of reasons. In the fixed line world the web got an incubation time of at least a decade to grow, to be refined and to be fostered by researchers and students at universities before being used by the public who already had sufficiently capable notebooks, PCs and a reasonably priced connection to the Internet. In the mobile world, things were a lot different when first web browsers appeared on mobile phones around the year 2001:

• Mobile Internet access was intended straight for the public instead of first attracting researchers and students to use and refine the services. Unlike at universities where the web was free for users, companies wanted to monetize the service from day one.

• It was believed the web could be mobilized by only adapting successful services to the limitations of mobile devices rather than looking at the benefits of mobility. To put it into the words of Tomi Ahonen, that is like taking a radio play, bringing the actors and their microphones, and showing them when they read a radio play on TV.

• Few if any appealing content for the targeted audience was available in an adapted version for mobile phones.

• Mobile access to the Internet was very expensive so only few were willing to use it.

• Circuit switched bearers were used at the beginning which were slow and not suitable for packet switched traffic.

• The mobile phone hardware was not yet powerful enough for mobile web browsers. Display sizes were small, screen resolutions not suited for graphics, no color, not enough processing power and not enough memory for rendering pages.

• Use of a dedicated protocol stack (the Wireless Application Protocol, WAP) instead of HTML required special tools for web page creation and at the same time limited the possibilities to design mobile and user friendly web pages.

Each of the points mentioned above would have been enough on its own to stop the mobile web in its tracks. Consequently many roadblocks needed to be overcome before the Internet on mobile devices started to become interesting to a wider audience. This fortunately coincided with the emergence of the web 2.0 and its evolution into the mobile domain. But that’s another story.

As always, comments are welcome!

Sometimes it’s almost unbelievable how well ideas spreed within web 2.0: Exactly two weeks ago, Charlie Schick wrote on his blog that he would like to have services that create short URLs out of long URLs for easy referencing in blogs, instant messengers, social networks, etc. to become mobile savy, i.e. that they should detect that the URL is requested from a mobile device and thus send the page in a mobile friendly way.

Filipe Boldo of esyURL reads Charlie’s blog and gets in contact with Russell Beattie who works on Mowser, a web page mobilizer service that reformats web pages for smaller screens, to see if and how Mowser could be integrated with esyURL. Russ gives a couple of tips and Filipe goes to work.

And today, Bernard Tyres sends on note around on Jaiku, a mobile social networking service, that the task has been accomplished. So when people now send interesting links around via esyURL on Jaiku or other web services that I use on my N93 I no longer have to remember to check it out when I get back to the PC but I can take a look immediately with my mobile web browser.

And the best: Based on the browser type given to the web server of esyURL with the request, it is either redirected to the full version of the web page or piped into Mowser for mobile optimization.

Great! Now everybody who sends short URLs around please go over to esyURL and check them out!