The Next Digital Revolution
This paper reviews the growing medium of publishing digital content beyond the desktop. It looks at a few of the lessons of the past, the key industry trends – and helps to answer a key question: does your business want to be part of the next digital revolution?
The evolution of computing devices is well documented, from the early 1960s where mainframe computers were the only accessible computing devices – and even then for financially powerful companies. We have since witnessed the minicomputer, PC and the maturing of the desktop internet era – and now we are seeing the evolution of the small screen device as an information appliance.
You should read this paper if you are considering moving your business – your brand, your products or services – into the next publishing revolution. You might want to do this to better seek and address your audience, or you may simply wish to establish a presence with more visibility than you may have at present.
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Evolution of mobile handsets 1999 – 2010
1999 – Nokia 7100 – Nokia introduces the first phone with a WAP browser
2001 – t68 – Mass produced phone with colour
2002 – Blackberry 5810 – First Blackberry Smartphone
2003 – Nokia 7600 – first 3g Fashion Phone
2003 – Nokia 6600 – Fully featured Symbian Phone
2007 – Apple iPhone – iPhone Released
2008 – HTC Dream (G1) – First Android Phone
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A brief history of publishing to the small screen
The small screen is effectively led by the mobile industry – however, small screen information appliances are turning up in all sorts of devices. Motor cars, refrigerators, portable media players, navigation tools, games consoles are all examples of small screen devices – many of which are becoming connected through low cost internet access. The key technologies that enable this revolution are driven by the digital mobile industry: an industry which quests to add connectivity, interactivity and capability. The reduction in size and importantly, cost of devices, permits the delivery of many new products and services in the information space. The broad adoption of low-cost operating systems in combination with the manufacturing volumes and economies achieved by the mobile industry has fuelled new uses for new devices. These economies are especially visible in technology for screens, chips for wireless, display and connectivity, power supplies and so on.
At the end of the 1990s the mobile industry gathered its collective might to deploy ‘WAP services’. This era was characterised by a requirement for publishers to learn new languages, without good tools, with ‘moving target’ standards, a lack of data from networks on devices, the use of various forms of content transcoding, a general lack of active devices, poor connectivity and the poor availability of good billing models… The list seems retrospectively depressing! However, WAP was a brave stab at bringing some form of services – and where these were well deployed, they were used, such as in Japan with DoCoMo services.
As happens in many technology cycles, the industry took learning from the WAP experience. Following the license issuing and standardisation of the ‘third generation’ of digital mobile technology, a great deal of the component parts were overhauled, replaced and improved. Given a few years to deploy the new cellular networks, we’ve now experienced far easier and faster connectivity via packet data, with clear, mainly subscription data access models, and increasingly permanently connected devices in every day use. Many of these devices are also WiFi capable, and as such can access internet services and capabilities with some degree of intensity that is not associated with country-wide mobile networks.
The winners and losers of the mobile device industry are now becoming well-defined. Of those participating when GSM was in the early years of deployment, the global supply base has rationalised to the big mass market players (Nokia, Samsung), niche participants (Apple, RIM) and a number of vendors who are aligning their businesses to the Android operating system (Sony Ericsson, HTC, Motorola).
The diversity and fragmentation of the device industry – while never going to go away – is now much more controllable from a publishing perspective. Legacy devices are better understood than they have ever been, and the development cycles are moving very much to value in the software and capabilities it brings, rather than the hardware and features. The bill of materials on a mobile device is as low as it has ever been. The operating system is very likely to be open-source based (and therefore has low deployment cost). The growth of the industry is now in what devices can do: with networks deployed, and handsets cheap, the market opportunities move to software.
The software world is incredibly fast moving – especially when compared with the utility world of telephony. The storming entrance of Apple into the mobile phone marketplace – with an ecosystem permitting the end to end publishing of application content to Apple mobile devices – has created new ways of doing business. Many of the walls prohibiting participation have been broken down, especially access to paying channels of distribution. Apple have shown a path, and a large body of the industry is following. Despite a minority of devices amongst the 4 billion in use globally, Apple has seized the mindshare of people who want to publish to mobile – and marked a significant placeholder as small screen publishing becomes broadly adopted.
This defines the marketplace in mid 2010. It also sets the scene for how we progress to participation in the evolving small screen ecosystem.
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So why would I want to participate in this?
The evolution of the industry trends discussed so far forms the basis of the new publishing medium. This medium is the natural and logical consequence of the use of small screen information appliances: when you are short of time but need to know something – contents of a message, the location of something, the answer to a question, the detail of events just added to your online diary, and so on – it’s now natural to look to the closest device to hand. Generally speaking this might be a mobile phone, but could also be the in-car display, your portable navigation device, gaming console, and so on. With the prevalence of wireless connectivity and a form of access beyond the desktop internet experience, it can be easy and quick to get to or move information. Simply put, with these sorts of trends in communication, why would you not want to participate?
There are of course some firmer reasons for being part of the small screen publishing revolution. Firstly, it offers a means to reach an audience in order that they can interact with your brand. Given the changes in the consumption of media we have witnessed, with the sheer range of channels available on television, and the prevalence of accessible internet, the need to consume is now driven by the user – and not the publisher. The choice of means to access content, overlaid with the ability to include recently missed material such as tv programmes, news articles and sporting events, empowers the consumer to choose what, when and how they access their content. If they are choosing the small screen and your brand isn’t represented, you might be denying an opportunity to have your customer interact with you.
A second reason that might be a consideration is down to whether you see the small screen user actually transacting with your brand. That means turning your brand’s retail presence onto the small screen device – and using that as a means to promote, sell, and fulfil goods and services. This opens up a whole new area of commerce – which to a cash rich, time poor audience might be the difference between staying in business or opening up an entirely new revenue stream for your brand.
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Sounds good… But is there a business model yet?
For the business model of the mobile internet, compared to (say) the fixed internet, we need to delve back into the 1990s for a quick look at what happened then. Basically, history repeats itself sometimes – and this isn’t yet proving to be much different for the small screen.
The internet provided a basis to create a diversity of technology, often still awaiting some solutions. The underlying connectivity allowed the delivery of some sorts of services, and once the scientists in the middle of Europe who had some real problems to solve got to work, the world-wide-web was born. That in itself was actually another collection of protocols and technology to help make order of a data problem, but what finally came out of the underlying technology was the ability to publish content to this new medium. Desktop software matured to allow people who were somewhat tech savvy – but not programmers – to create and publish their own content to this new medium. This kick-started a cycle of ordinary people who wanted to participate in the new medium through publishing, reading, reviewing, commenting, blogging, interacting and generally spending time with the internet. They created huge amounts of content especially for it, businesses got involved once the final restrictions on commercial use were lifted in 1995, and activity grew at a remarkable pace. This heralded a life cycle of internet activity which might be briefly represented as a chain of events.
This represents an overview of the cycle of publishing, searching, amalgamating, packaging, buying – and all the iterations that make a marketplace function. The successful internet businesses that are household names today have all exploited this cycle in one or more areas (e.g. Amazon, eBay, Google, PayPal). This to some degree establishes the business premise for choosing to participate in publishing to the small screen – which may be regarded as an extension to the existing business approaches of the internet.
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Challenges in publishing to the small screen
This can be summarised in two words: diversity and fragmentation. In comparison, publishing to fixed internet requires a few very basic variables to be covered: the screen size of the target device is likely to be XGA, comprising 800×600 but more likely 1024×768 screen dimensions. The browser is likely to be a variant of the major browser types, whereby common variants of Internet Explorer, Firefox, and Chrome make up more than 90% of all desktop browsers. This reduces the support matrix to around a dozen permutations to get good coverage.
The mobile case is somewhat different – with common screen sizes for browsing devices coming in at 128×160, 176×220, 240×320, 320×240, 320×480, 480×360, 640×360, and 800×480. Thereafter, browsers are varied from one maker to another, it’s safe to assume that there are dozens of variants of browser: overlay this with the screen dimensions and the problem is rather complex already. Then factor in that even basic image support varies from device to device, and the publishing problem becomes extremely complex. Intohand has data on more than 10,000 different small screen devices – this problem is effectively only manageable through software.
Another problem of reaching the small screen is also evidenced in mobile. You cannot rely on a given network to pass data, either at all, or without some form of transformation. Compared with fixed networks, mobile networks are fragile when it comes to data volume and as such they are often configured to limit content types or transform data to suit the requirements of the particular data path. Generally, this sort of challenge is no longer observed on the fixed internet where capacity and traffic management are less visible to the end user, and the data path is generally clean.
Given the complexity of this scenario for mobile, one could be forgiven for just assuming that the challenges are too great to contemplate. However, this may once have been present in times gone by but is certainly not the case now: publishing to the small screen is accessible and viable given the tools now available. Essentially, the diversity and fragmentation are now ‘coded out’, which allows us to reflect on what can be published – and how a brand can reach the new medium.
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Challenges in publishing to the small screen
The key to all forms of marketing – and having a brand presence on the small screen should start with a marketing approach – is knowing the message you are trying to send, and matching the communication to support the message.
At an initial level, you can have a mobile presence which can graft on to your existing web presence. A simple script can determine which visiting devices are mobile and present a suitably formatted landing page, which might for instance contain the key details of your business. Incoming browsers have now found your brand, and can see enough to maybe initiate a call or complete a request for data through an e-mail form.
Intohand’s Sitetaga allows you to make a simple site to do exactly this: it is an easy to use tool that allows you to secure your place on the small screen device. Sitetaga lets you capture the essence of your company within a few, easily communicated pages.
For more information refer to: www.sitetaga.com
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Putting your brand onto the device
If the user finds your small screen site valuable, you might want to provide them with an easy way to get to it. It is often the case that portable and mobile devices have convoluted menus, where access to content and services is more than a click or two from the home screen. Some of the difficulties in navigating through these structures can be overcome by placing a shortcut to your brand on the device. Intohand’s Linktaga allows you the ability to simply, easily and cheaply make a shortcut: with your brand’s imagery and name, the user is then one click away from your presence.
Linktaga makes it incredibly easy for users of small screen devices to return to your brand. This is especially true if your site is providing ‘snack-size’, time-based information that your users will want to access in the fastest means possible.
Having done these relatively simple things, you can now track some usage of your small screen presence which might be used to inform the extent to which you engage in future. Perhaps more importantly, you are now establishing a track record of usage of your site – something that will soon be picked up by search engines which measure the quality of sites. Search engines do this in order to boost the value of the links that they subsequently advertise – a high quality site will reduce the amount of money you need to bid if you decide to advertise through search providers in future. There are a number of ways that the quality of the site is measured by, but the principle of providing something of value to an audience will correlate with the extent of quality of a site.
To create your own shortcuts, and make launchers for today’s popular devices – Linktaga is coming very soon…
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Applications
Customised applications offer a route by which you can have greater flexibility over the presence of your brand on small screen devices. The recent success of the iTunes store in delivering to iPod and iPhone devices is indicative of the sort of applications that can help to realise your brand, as well as the maturity of the end-user market in adopting such applications.
A deeper form of engagement can arise from the use of one or more dedicated applications, coded for the small screen device. The mobile industry pioneered Java Mobile technology which permitted the coding of applications, many of them games, around 10 years ago. Since then, this market has matured and Java mobile offers a route to get brand interaction on the small screen. With significant industry interest in Google’s Android platform and a variety of handsets gaining market share, the delivery of applications through the Android Marketplace presents a viable route.
The problems with application coding often relate to the underlying technology and ability to code for various platforms. The technology used by, for instance, the iTunes store applications is unique to Apple devices. Generally, mobile devices support Java Mobile, which is prevalent but in very fragmented forms. The dominant smartphone application platform in terms of installed units is Symbian, which offers yet another method to prepare applications, although this technology is declining as a native option. Then there are popular devices from RIM: many BlackBerry devices support Java Mobile but coding for these is regarded as something of an art form. The latest entrant to the platform space comes with the introduction of Android: which is yet another platform that can be coded for.
One of the really valuable features now available in the application space concerns the ability to notify the recipient device of an event that might be of interest. The event might be as basic as the existence of a new message, or perhaps there is an update concerning information that the user has registered an interest in. One of the key drivers of event notifications now is that these can be delivered at essentially zero charge to the sender: such notifications use listener channels which carry very small amounts of data, and with many device users accessing the internet with flat rate plans there is no need to alert devices using convoluted, paid channels such as SMS to interact with the customer.
Intohand has extensive experience in preparing applications for all of these platforms. Ranging from games to highly interactive clients, there is considerable expertise which you could consider for custom application builds. Click here for more information.
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Application Discovery
Given one or more applications, potentially running on different platforms, the choice of distribution means is integral to the communication. There are a number of application stores, and the whole area of ‘App Stores’ is subject to much discussion – but actually the whole area is in the relatively formative stages of evolution. There are a number of global stores that offer distribution routes, and they all have pros and cons.
Once an application is published to a store, very often the publisher is at the mercy of the processes and usage of that store in terms of the exposure and likely success of the application. If chosen for promotion, some of the effects may be mitigated, but very often the appearance of applications is transient and exposure diminishes once they have left the ‘What’s New’ or ‘Best Selling’ categories. Furthermore, review processes often are weighted to negative assessments of what may be quite highly rated applications: this creates a counter-intuitive mechanism by which influential reviews are skewed to be deterrents against further downloads. New applications are published all the time, meaning that there is a very fast cycle of release, initial success and then diminishing sales.
in order to assist with application discovery, it is worth considering activities that are external to the existing application stores. By treating such stores as essentially fulfilment mechanisms, you can use web marketing to steer users to your product – putting the ability to successfully distribute your applications into your own hands.
Intohand’s AppTaga provides you with the tools to do exactly this. AppTaga is essentially a digital billboard upon which you can articulate your application, its value, features and benefits – without constraints on the format of the message as would be imposed by the application stores. With this freedom to articulate your proposition, you put the criteria for success into your own control, including the metrics needed to permit informed decision making for future activites.
With these basics covered, AppTaga becomes an intelligent link which directs small screen devices to the correct store for the application. The need to send someone to an application store, with the suggestion of which terms to search for, has been obsoleted. AppTaga powers the distribution of your application, irrespective of the store that fulfils it… Apptaga is Coming Soon!
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Full engagement with the small screen device
With the basic and arguably simpler work done, there are a few more options you can look at for engaging with the small screen users. A deeper site, with say more pages, information, product and service details can only extend your brand further – and provide more information for customers and potential customers. Depending on the values of your brand offering, such a deeper site may also carry advertising, providing a means by which you can directly get a return from a third party just from having that small screen presence. In this instance, the more focused and targeted your site becomes, the more valuable the advertising space you can provide. However, the purpose of a deeper site might be to provide a destination whereby users can perhaps not only interact with your products and services, but also consume them.
One of the considerations that has limited mobile commerce concerns the ability to charge customers who have small screen, and particularly portable, devices. Many charging mechanisms are confined to regional networks, and have a disproportionately high cost of entry at connection, diverse regulatory requirements, and typically very poor payout rates. These factors are major contributors to why mobile commerce has not expanded at the rate it otherwise could have, in turn holding back the entire industry from fuller use of the value delivery through search and discovery, advertising and of course transacting.
This lack of payment options for the small screen is likely to change as time progresses though – browsers are becoming as capable as desktop browsers, and users will increasingly choose to use internet payments such as card or PayPal from their non-fixed devices. Once again, the internet models for one-off payments, time based passes and distance purchasing will bring lower cost, trusted and accessible payment means for all concerned to the small screen. Evidence of payment volumes made through mobile devices is already apparent with the iTunes store and the trust relationship established between Apple and users of its devices. It is reasonable to infer that these sorts of business models will evolve in the small screen space giving the user to interact and also transact with your brand, irrespective of their location or context.
This latter aspect requires that publishing tools are readied to meet the anticipated requirements of the growing medium. Intohand has built and proven the software tool Mobile Site Producer to do exactly that: for organisations who wish to publish to the small screen and have broad interaction with multiple devices, Mobile Site Producer is the tool of choice to enable the medium. More information on this powerful publishing suite is at www.intohand.com/msp
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Summary
This paper has reviewed a number of aspects of the approach you might take to put your brand on the small screen device. It has also discussed a suite of tools and approaches that can enable any brand to participate in this space. If you require more details on the individual solutions adopted, or perhaps advice on how your brand may be represented on the small screen, please feel free to contact Intohand and we will be happy to work with you.
Intohand Ltd
sales@intohand.com
www.intohand.com
