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Report: Altimeter Investigates Mobile Strategy for Retailers

The Altimeter Group has produced a new report, "Make an App for That: Mobile Strategies for Retailers" that focuses on Mobile Application strategy. Don't worry, this isn't an HTML 5 vs. Native app discussion. Chris Silva (@802dotchris) spearheads this research with Alan Weber and Jessica Groopman. The report focuses on three stages of mobile maturity in retail organizations which are: On the Ground, Hitting Turbulence and Flying High. 

Understanding the maturity of an organization is central so that change can be managed. In an effort to better asses where an organization fits the team developed and assessment can help identify pain points organizationally. On the Ground is not necessarily a bad thing since there is great opportunities to improve with reduced impact on the customer. I would argue that when an organization is hitting turbulence it can be more challenging than getting 'in the air'. For an organization to be "flying high" the mobile strategy must focus on solving customer pain but as the name implies a continual refinement and optimization is necessary to avoid turbulence. 

The report mentions the need to identify the goals of the mobile solution to "Enrich" or "Engage". This is what really makes a difference for the customer perception and engagement with the organization. Fortunately there are some examples of how the others have executed against the the enrich or engage model. Four sub-categories provide additional clarification for making sense of these concepts. 

This report from Altimeter will provide a good framework for an organizational strategy on mobile. I appreciate that Chris and team point out the need to solve customer pain points. Developing a strategy or plan that satisfies organizational goals is important but it must be aligned with customer needs. The reason we do what we do on websites is to make the lives of our customers as easy as we can. We'll never solve every pain point, but there are certainly many things we can do to make mobile a key tool for our customers use to interact with our organizations.

Disclaimer: I was a participant in this report.

Facebook and Mobile

There are no shortage of opinions and analysis on the impending Facebook IPO. The great thing about the S-1 is that people with a much higher tolerance for BS can sift through document and find the real stories. One of the stories that is found in the S-1 is the risk of mobile users.

In Altimeter analyst Chris Silva’s post, he points out that 425 Million Monthly Active Users (MAU) of Facebook are accessing Facebook primarily through mobile. For a company that generates revenue from display ads and games like Farmville that represents roughly half of the users and a significant challenge.

The growth on mobile could be faster than the web. This means that more and more people might choose mobile as their primary access point for Facebook rather than the full site. I suspect many of you would agree with this. My wife accesses the full site only when she has to modify a privacy setting that can’t be easily modified on mobile. I suspect many of you are the same way.

So what does this mean? It means if you are going to engage with your customers on social channels like Facebook you need to make certain those initiatives are mobile friendly inside the Facebook ecosphere and that traffic going to your site from Facebook has a mobile friendly view.

What do you think?

What travel company is putting mobile first?

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If you guessed Kayak then you'd be right. They are utilizing the lessons learned on their iOS and Android applications to build a better web experience, see article. They are just the latest company to move to a "mobile first" approach. The idea is simple as it uses a focused user experience to deliver across multiple screens. Even if the primary consumption of the site is done on the desktop "mobile first" is a simplification of core services that offer users a better experience across different screens. ESPN is another company that is taking this approach with some of their recent design decisions. You can see the mobile view directly on your desktop and compare that to the full site view.

Props to @lukew for the articles. He's also the author of "Mobile First".

Amazon is about to blow-up the web

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Most of the world will be fixated on the new hardware released by Amazon today. Sure a $79 Kindle is almost too cheap to ignore and the $200 Fire is an interesting media consumption device but the real news is Amazon making a move on the web.

In a nutshell Amazon is going to release a two part web browser for the Fire tablet. Rather than use the web browser on the device to handle all of the code from a website, Amazon will use their EC2 cloud system to offload the more intensive tasks and deliver content to the device more quickly. They are going to do some magic in the cloud too. They will cache the content which will make it much faster to deliver commonly requested content. Amazon will also use machine learning to prepare the next predicted page(s) for the device before the user even asks for it.

On the surface this sounds really amazing. The device would no longer have to "crunch" a very heavy page since the Amazon EC2 cloud will take care of it and then optimize it for the device. It is important to note that Fire is the initial device but Amazon is going to find a way to get this delivery model on as many devices as it in short order. 

You may be thinking to yourself, "What's the big deal? Faster web, less for me to think about, awesome!" Consider the fact that ALL content is going to be routed through the EC2 cloud. That means every website accessed through the device will be visible to Amazon. They say they won't track individual user behavior but the usage patterns they will get from this approach are huge. The potential is there to learn some very detailed information about user behavior that will give Amazon a huge advantage over Google, Microsoft, Apple, etc. 

In a way Amazon has put their cards on the table. How will Google respond to Amazon using their Android platform while they are full throttle on Google +? Will Apple respond with a similar model for Mobile Safari? You do know about that data center Apple has built in North Carolina don't you? Will Microsoft have a response despite the focus on Windows Phone 7, Windows 8 and any number of other distractions? How will content publishers respond if preferential treatment is given to EC2 customers?

Amazon has the infrastructure to monetize the data. If there is one thing they do right is compile data in a meaningful way for their customers. This has huge potential for them but it all hinges on massive adoption of Fire and ultimately other devices and platforms. The currency on the web is converting to Data. So when Mark Zuckerberg says, "All your stories, all your life." it is clear personal data is what they are after. Facebook is another post for another day. I don't blame Amazon for their decision but the ramifications of walled off data connections could cause more problems than it solves for consumers. 

"This is the first shot in the new war for replacing the Internet with a privatized merchant data-aggregation network." - Chris Espinosa

Wishing for a better plan

I can't say that I have much faith in our politicians anyway but I can't for the life of me figure out how or why these guys are qualified to present a plan to fix our debt issues. I would have more confidence in Joe the used car dealer figuring out a solution than politicians. I'm sure these guys are smart and probably even have some chops when it comes to economics. I don't see how a self serving group of people can really ever strip out the political agenda from the equation. 

Would it not make more sense to get brilliant academic minds in finance, economics data analysis, tax specialists, savvy business leaders, etc. to write the proposal? I can imagine the proposal then going to a broader review before going to congress. The next problem would be that congress would take any brilliant proposal and water it down with trade-offs affecting the potential outcome. So the recommendation body would need to have some authority to lockdown certain parts of the proposal. 

It's a pipe dream and I fear the only way this is going to truly resolve itself is when we reach the bottom. Unfortunately I fear it will be too late. My generation has no concept of sacrifice for the greater good like the generations before us. We have never been through anything like the Great Depression. We have no idea the sacrifices made during the Wold Wars both in lives and resources. We have never had to wait in gas lines. If our country has proven anything in the last 200 years it is that we will meet a challenge head on. This debt problem is no different.

I'm confident that we are strong enough to handle it but our government has led us down a path where a shared sacrifice is not an option they want to consider. The fear that a decision to cut or eliminate programs will send us into a downward spiral is a self fulfilling policy only if you let it. Don't doubt our resolve.

Why Microsoft isn't going to buy RIM

I have no idea if Microsoft is even remotely interested in buying RIM. I don't claim to know any insider sources that would tell me and if I did I wouldn't blabber about it on a blog. The idea was proposed in this article from Hugo Miller and Dianielle Kucera on Bloomberg. Not to be left out of the noise and hedge their bets an article by Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry suggests that the bargain is too sweet to pass on. 

Why is there all this fuss over Microsoft? Where is the pressure on other technology companies? This isn't just my opinion, when you look at the comments on Gobry's story you see plenty of knowledgable people suggesting that this isn't a good idea for Microsoft. There are a number of reasons why but the commenter "reason" points out that there is a poor track record for some acquisitions. I do have one good reason that might be worth it for Microsoft. If they buy RIM, they can effectively kill the company and replace Blackberry with WP7 moving forward. 

But what about some other companies. HP is a good example. They bought Palm and are no doubt going to give WebOS a big push with their Enterprise clients. They could take the same approach in an acquisition and push WebOS as the replacement to Blackberry. This sounds like a heavy lifting job and the transition might be too complicated to really make it worthwhile since Blackberry is loosing market share. Important point to note is market share doesn't necessarily mean they are loosing number of devices in the hands of users.

There is another computer company that might make sense, Dell. One could argue that they don't really have a serious play in mobile and would need to get serious if they want to keep up. Like HP their clients would likely welcome the acquisition. It would also get them back in the game to compete with HP.

That leads me to another thought. While some might be saying it somewhere it would seem other likely candidates would include Motorola, Samsung or HTC. Why not, they don't have to only support Blackberry since they support multiple OS's today. This would give one of these guys more control to dictate the path of a smartphone OS that isn't dictated by Google or Microsoft and already has an installed user base around the world. It also depends on how much they will cater to carriers demands too since the carriers can put some pressure on a hardware company to make changes that might not be the best for users.

Another potential scenario, and more likely in my estimation, is a private equity firm will jump all over the potential to trim the company and attempt to gain more traction before unloading them. This make sense and I suspect nobody would be surprised if this is what ultimately happens. 

There is a long shot in the retail space. Consider retailers like Best Buy and Amazon.com. Neither are opposed to working on their own hardware. I suspect a recurring revenue stream coming from the services would be attractive too. Amazon has an app store and their Kindle is already a 'mobile' device in most respects. The downside for these guys is the OS is more of a corporate resource so they would need to shift to a more consumer and developer friendly version that will take time to build. It could hold more risk for them than hardware companies. 

This is going to be an interesting thing to watch. Personally I don't think the market can support all of the players long term. Things are changing so fast that it is hard to keep up and consolidation seems likely sooner or later.

Review: Samsung Fascinate

I've been playing with the Samsung Fascinate on Verizon. The phone is running Android and just before sending it back I got the update for version 2.2 of the OS. In short this is one of the better Android phones I've played with. It makes the HTC Evo look tired and dated. Even the Motorola Atrix, which is a fine phone, seemed a bit bloated. The battery life was off the charts during my time with the phone. At a full charge I left the phone alone for a week and there was still juice left to make a call or browse a bit. I've yet to have a smartphone go so long between charges. This isn't a sacrifice made in weight either. The Fascinate is thinner than my iPhone 3G S and is noticeably lighter than any other smartphone I've test recently with the exception of the Aria. 

To be fair I did tinker with the phone a bit. I removed all of the widgets and I did not download a bunch of applications. I did leave wifi on and kept most everything else at the default settings. Next up was using the phone during a conference. I started day one with a full charge and frequently used the phone during the day to check the conference application and occasionally my personal email. By the end of the day the battery was a 50% and still chugging along. Meanwhile others at the conference were juicing up. Image via Mashable.
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As Android phones go this is one was hard to send back. I didn't test the phone capabilities which is to say I didn't really care about making phone calls and there are plenty of other people that provide in-depth reviews of the full capabilities of the phone. In a sense I'm going to assume that since this is a Verizon phone the voice part of the phone is fine. I've been using the data on these things way more than voice anyway. 

Some of the complaints the reviewers above reference didn't affect me or weren't a deal breaker. However, they are valid points to consider. It should also ben mentioned that when flipping between smartphones reviewers often forget that if this is your first experience it is light years better than your old feature phone. I suspect most people that are just coming to Android would not find the issues above to be irritating in the same way.

Android for the Enterprise #io2011 #Android #enterprise

Android in the workplace

Multiple devices
CIO perspective
- security
- management
- apps

Security
- protect against loss/theft
- protect against interception
- employees are the weak link
- corporate data

Device management
- onboard users
- setup security/usage policies
- supporting users
- keep tabs on deployed devices

Deployment
- determine key mobile apps
- buy/build
- distribute apps to the devices
- manage updates
- setup usage policies

Android's Approach
Users come first
Enterprise money is real
Unlock dual use devices for our users
Keep it open and let the ecosystem run

More Android Enterprise Support
Honeycomb more security
Exchange policy supports

Device Policy Management
Account-Based fleet management
Apps that manage or present secure data
Apps that provide device security services

Policy Management
Android framework defines a set of policies around device security features
Android apps use the policy to monitor and control device security
Apps do this via Device Policy Manager

Policies always increase security
You must have:
- Policy controller
- DeviceAdmin Receiver 
- Policy declarations

User intervention is required to 'bootstrap' a device into a fully-configured, secure configuration
Consider your business logic/security rules when there are setbacks such as password expiration
If mixing policies from multiple sources, apply principle of increasing security

Distributing private apps
Side-loading 
- host the .apk on your own servers
- Unknown sources setting must be checked
Internal app directory
- app directory server
- package manager api
more...