Google launches free mobile voice service (original posted on March 1, 2009)

We would expect Google to announce this soon, wouldn’t we?

Well, it was not announced at this year’s Mobile World Congress. Instead, another giant, Nokia, communicated that it would embed Skype in its N-Series phone, including the upcoming N97.

The 2009 edition of this conference was a tremendous demonstration of the importance of mobile in today’s technology business.

Virtually all players are now becoming mobile:
- from Asus launching the Nuvifone with Garmin
- …Acer launching its own smartphone to
- …Wayfinder being acquired by Vodafone
- to ZTE and Huawei announcing their own LTE-compliant systems

Only two major players were in everybody’s mind but nowhere to see. Apple and Google. Maybe because they are the only 2 companies who do not have customers! Apple has… fans and Google has… well… advertisers.

For example, Apple was not part of the group of operators and device manufacturers who announced with GSMA the launch of a Universal Charging Solution (3 Group, AT&T, KTF, LG, mobilkom austria, Motorola, Nokia, Orange, Qualcomm, Samsung, Sony Ericsson, Telecom Italia, Telefónica, Telenor, Telstra, T-Mobile and Vodafone).

Obviously, Apple was very much present thanks to all imitations of its iPhone UI!

And Google, which had a “representation office” was showing its muscles via the Android OS on 2 HTC phones and the Latitude service, launched in 27 countries.

Generally speaking, the show was in a way a demonstration of the renewed trust of the mobile operator community, which achieved the historical breakthrough of a worldwide agreement around the LTE standard. Also interesting was the announcement of the RCS (Rich Communication Suite) initiative (See below).

At the same time, mobile operators know that my subject title “Google launches free mobile service” could become true.

Of course, Google announcing this would be slightly more important than “Blyk launches free mobile service”. Google has shown with Google Maps that they could completely shortcut the operator middleman to obtain the user’s location information. They are showing it again with Latitude. Google will hold the live location and presence information of its users (in addition to their social graphs).

So it will probably become Latitude against RCS. However, RCS does not include location as part of its “rich communication”. This is probably the next step?

So far, mobile operators have been – very – shy about location. They may want to change their mind… fast.

The more obvious, the better (original posted on 9 February 2009)

I was just traveling back to Paris from Amsterdam yesterday. Thanks to the Rotterdam station, the Thalys was 2 hours late and arrived at 1AM…

In the Parisian cab, I was astonished at the number of electronic devices in the car.

That included the car radio, the company’s taxi system, a TomTom One XL, a Sony Ericsson Bluetooth headset and… a mobile phone (HTC Touch) supporting a service I had never seen before.

It is called Taxilibre.fr (free taxi) and it just allows taxi drivers to report their live location on the web and… to indicate when they are available.

By going to www.taxilibre.fr, you can see the location of registered taxis and call the taxi you want to hire.

It is also free of charge for the user and the taxi driver, entirely financed by advertising. Amazing! As for all fantastic inventions, you ask yourself why nobody had thought about it before. In that case, the phone application was developed on Windows Mobile.

I will add this splendid taxi availability service to my 61-long list of location-based applications.

Conclusion: there will be dozens of ground-level innovations that will revolutionize entire professions. Look around…

War is declared (Original posted on 12 December 2008)

Hello to all readers of my first blog post.

One says that the war starts when all contenders have declared war.

Well, it seems that the war for the conquest of our brains and hearts has started.

There are 4 main fighters
- Google, which openly declares that they want to organize the world’s information,
- Microsoft, which wants to rule the world or so it seems…
- Apple, which always had to take a revenge against the previous one,

And finally, Nokia. With the official launch of N97 at Nokia World, its EVP Anssi Vanjoki has officially declared that “Nokia wants to coordinate the world“.

What does Nokia mean by that?

Well, it wants to not only locate us on the map, as Google Maps does, but create a dynamic network of relationships around it.

For example, locate dynamically your Facebook friends or your LinkedIn contact or your Messenger contacts. But also interact, communicate.

How? Well, for sure, Nokia controls the “mobile computer”, the OS with Symbian, the map and dynamic content, with Navteq. Although it does not have Vodafone’s customer base, it has an estimated 15 million registered users and can increase it fast because Nokia sells 500 million handsets a year…

So this is Nokia’s first real response to the iPhone and to Android. Given the fact that Nokia’s previous star high end phone, the N95 sold 15 million units, this has to be taken seriously.

Because there are over 3.5 billion mobile phones in the world vs. 500 million PCs connected to the Internet, Nokia’s strategy may well be the right one. We’ll have to see the phone, the N97, to check how Nokia executes on its plans. It is scheduled for the first half of 2009.

It will also be interesting to observe how others are reacting. There are rumours that Microsoft is preparing its own phone.

Will the biggest mobile phone operators such as Vodafone or Orange remain passive? We would expect some consolidation. But that’s for another time.

Stay tuned.

Please do not hesitate to send your comments (always very welcome) to fbruneteau@ptolemus.com.

Frederic Bruneteau