Commercialization
challenges of software
development in a
fragmented mobile
ecosystem
WiTec Connections Stephen King, CEO
Mob4Hire Inc.
Banff, Canada April, 2009 stephen@mob4hire.com
(with stern-looking Paul Poutanen, President & Founder :)

We broker crowd-sourced relationships to make mobile software better
Our testing community includes more than 8,600 handsets in 100 countries on 277 operators
1 “Mob4Hire.com”
Testers bid on projects
uploaded by mobile
developers and provide
both functional and
usability testing in-market.
Real people on real
handsets with real
opinions on live networks.
2 “Mob4Hire as a Platform” lets developer networks and
app stores create their own branded crowd-sourced
customer feedback communities
http://www.o2litmus.co.uk
“O2 Litmus ground breaking partnership
with multi-award winning Mob4hire”
O2 Litmus press release:
http://www.ixplora.com/?p=3593
“O2 Litmus is Better than Apple AppStore!”
http://www.telco2.net/blog/2009/02/getting_developer_communities.html

The Big Picture
i.e. Macro-Economic Environment
“Much Ado About Something”

3.3B mobile
handset users
• 6 out of every 10 people in the
world have a mobile handset
• 4B subscriptions; 18% of people
(700M) have two subscriptions.
http://www.tomiahonen.com/

Where is everybody?
http://www.tomiahonen.com/
• North American adoption and usage is distinctly different than other continents
• European handsets and subscriptions are often separate purchases; SIMs interchangeable, much
more operator competition

Where are new subscriptions coming from?
• Many markets saturated (top 5: Italy:153%, Greece, Hong Kong, Portugal, Israel): new subs slowing
• U.S. at 84%, Canada at 61% (the only country < 80% that’s NOT a developing nation)
• Still lots of growth for new users in developing nations http://www.tomiahonen.com/

From “no phone” to “cell phone.”
Of the 280M people with phones in
Africa, 260M of them use mobile
handsets.

A Trillion Dollar Industry http://www.tomiahonen.com/
• $800M is services; Voice is still the “killer app”
• SMS message revenue is 25 times bigger than ALL PC messaging (IM, email, etc...)
• At $71B, Content partners (applications, movies, ringtones) is bigger than all paid content on internet

Mobile is the “7th Mass Media”: Scope + Content
• The only media generation that can replicate all the benefits of the other six
• The first personal media channel, permanently carried and always on: “Intimate”
• Built-in payment channel
• Point of creativity “eyewitness,” enabling user-generated content
• Special thanks to Tomi Ahonen:
Near-perfect audience data
http://www.tomiahonen.com/
• Social and location context of media consumption

Fragmented Mobile Ecosystem
How does fragmentation affect the customer?

Yikes!
The Frankenstein Effect of Fragmentation
• This happened to me the week Blackberry App World launched. http://www.blackberry.com/appworld
• My Carrier is Rogers Wireless in Canada.
• My handset is a Blackberry Bold. The above picture is what it usually looks like.
• I downloaded a few apps including Google Talk
• The free Google Talk downloaded ok. But when it rebooted my system, my Bold started spewing error
messages like “java exception.” Lots of them! See next slide.

This is not a good user experience ... where’s the [Not OK] button?
After I downloaded/installed Google Talk, my Bold had errors & reset to default Rogers O/S footprint.
Background is gone as are all my photos. Icons are moved (some programs are missing). The
keyboard #’s wouldn’t work, only the QWERTY letters. The “airplane” mode icon is missing. SMS’s
and Emails in both inbox and sent items are gone. Email config is gone. Kept my contacts, WiFi and
weather settings intact, though. WARNING!!! PAINFUL!!! Who should I blame?

Buy from Buy something
Company / Product Business Price Recommend? Why?
you again? else from you?
It’s actually awesome. But, now I don’t
Blackberry App World App Store Free Yes, but ... Yes Yes trust it quite as much after the crash.
Love my Bold (Pearl before that)... more
Blackberry Bold $$ Evangelize Yes Yes productive (keyboard) & less data costs
than iPhone. There’s an app store now.
Not related to Bold crash, so I don’t
Rogers Operator $$$$ Neutral Probably Probably blame them; consumers will, though
OMG!!!
Google Talk (IM) Free NONONO Yes Yes Reset my whole system.
Recognizes songs from your stereo or
www.shazam.com Shazam Free Evangelize Yes Yes radio. Love it!!!
Incomplete: Doesn’t list the same events
Ticketmaster Event sales Free No Maybe Maybe and concerts as web.
It’s ok. There’s better RSS readers that
News ‘n
Information Week Free Neutral No Maybe do the trick (Viigo)
stuff
Ugh. Bad port. Graphics, gameplay and
Gameloft’s Puzzle
$7 No No No navigation don’t take advantage of the
Brain Challenge Game platform. It’s not really that fun.
Travel Great for traveling, and also for doing
Worldmate Live Free Evangelize Yes Yes international business
assistance
Games oad fast & good gameplay.
www.magmic.com Games $7 Sure Yes Yes Bought “Chizzles” and “Hold’em 3.0”
Texas Hold ‘em
What are your customers saying about you?
Evangelize? Neutral? Criticize?
Make Better Software = Customer Advocacy = Reduced Churn + More Customers = $$$
Customer Advocacy of brand and product is directly related to company growth and profit.
With thanks to Dr. Bob Hayes, Ph.D. http://www.businessoverbroadway.com

(He’s just being honest ... and all
vendors face the same issue)
“Expect more bugs”
Companies of all shapes, sizes,
Paraphrased from RIM co-CEO: talent and resources are are
Jim Balsillie, Jan 2009 struggling with fragmentation;
this is a hard problem to solve.
http://www.engadget.com/2009/01/26/
rim-ceo-buggy-smartphone-software-is-
But customers don’t care!
the-new-reality/
They just want it to work.

Fragmentation is the inability to
“write once and run anywhere.”
More formally, it is the inability to develop an application
against a reference operating context (OC) and achieve the
intended behavior in all OCs suitable for the application.
http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~damithch/df/device-fragmentation.htm

All Operating Contexts? That’s a lot.
• Games publisher, GLU.com, made 25,000 different builds for their Transformers mobile game. There were
21,000 different builds for Europe alone.
• On average, mobile developers are creating 400 different builds
• Google Maps targeted 10 mobile platforms, created 100 different builds, and the boss wanted it yesterday.
http://www.pocketgamer.co.uk/r/Mobile/Glu/news.asp?c=5086
http://developers.sun.com/mobility/reference/techart/design_guidelines/overview.html

Fragmentation is a result of the
permutations and combinations of:
Mobile Ecosystem
• Handset diversity
• Software diversity:
• O/S diversity (platforms, middleware, widgets)
• Standards implementation diversity
(“According to the standard, this should work ...”)
• Mobile 2.0 browser diversity
(internet websites optimized for mobile phones)
• Operator / Environmental diversity
Developer or Regional
• Feature variations, such as light version vs full version (related to
business model)
• User-preference diversity, in aspects such as in language, style, etc., or
accessibility requirements
http://www.comp.nus.edu.sg/~damithch/df/device-fragmentation.htm

http://www.tomiahonen.com/
Handset manufacturer market share
• 1B handsets sold in 2008
• Nokia sells 1M handsets a day (well ... not in Q1, 2009)
• Most desired feature driving new phone sales is the built-in camera and it’s resolution
• 30 companies in the next tier (RIM, Apple, ZTE, Kyocera, Sharp, Palm, etc...) each have a share of <2%

About 20,000 different handsets worldwide

Each handset
can have up to
1,500 different
specifications
• screen size & video resolution
• processor performance, memory
size, accessibility
• firmware versions
• SMS/MMS handling
• network (2G, 2.5G, 3G)
• keyboard layouts / functions
• additional interface components
(e.g. trackballs, wheels,
joysticks, directional keys,
stylus, touchscreens)
• slots
• accelerometers
• battery performance
• bluetooth enabled
• camera
• GPS enabled
• WiFi enabled
• language support
• ... and ...
http://www.wurfl.com/

Over 25 O/S’s platforms, middleware, and frameworks
• Differences in platform/OS (Symbian, Nokia OS, RIM OS, Apple OS X, Palm WebOS, Windows Mobile,
Mobile Linux, Google Android, BREW,etc.), API standards (MIDP 1.0, MIDP 2.0, etc.), optional APIs,
proprietary APIs, variations in access to hardware (e.g., fullscreen support, access to local storage), and
differences in multimedia support (e.g., codecs), maximum binary size allowed, etc.
• Middleware like Flash, Yahoo Blueprint
• Backwards compatibility big issue

http://www.slideshare.net/lis186/smartphone-market-trends

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mobile_network_operators
Over 750+ Operators Worldwide
• Operator’s environmental diversity from deployment infrastructure
(handset&OS branding by carrier, compatibility requirements of
carrier backend APIs, gateway characteristics, opened ports,
restrictions on access to outside the network etc.), local standards.
• GSMA OneAPI initiative is trying to standardize common API calls

What about Mobile 2.0?
It’s not Web 2.0, but it is browser based,
just like your PC internet surfing. Sort of.
And, it’s not going to fix fragmentation.
Just change it a bit.

If *Last Name is mandatory,
shouldn’t I see a field so I can
enter the data?
Mobile 2.0 experience differs wrt browser, platform and handset
• Just like PC web, browsers have their “idiosyncrasies”; in mobile it’s worse
• Mobile 2.0 sites need to be “thin” ... light on graphics, no heavy bandwidth usage, minimal fields
• “30 second tasks vs. 30 minute tasks”: Corporations need both mobile sites and PC websites
• Many (most) corporations are unprepared

http://www.tomiahonen.com/
More people access the internet
through mobile handsets
(1.02B) than PC’s (940M).
Within 2 years, 71% of U.S.
mobile users will access the
mobile internet vs. 28% in 2008*
* Nielson research http://www.slideshare.net/clisco/the-mobile-web-is-awesome

http://quirksmode.org/m/table.html
Significant differences in HTML handling between browsers

Fragmented Mobile Ecosystem
(The Shape of Things to Come)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tg4c8f0XmoM
“Greed still exists in the world, and every company is going to try and shape things
in the way that most interests them. This will lead to more fragmentation, not less.”
Steve Morley, Former VP, Qualcomm, Pacific Northwest Summit, Jan 2009

Commercialization
Industry Trends
i.e. Herein lies opportunity

Handset manufacturers
are feeling pinched
• Slowing handset sales due
to recession and market
saturation; feature phones
down to 6% growth YOY
2008; more decline in 2009
• Motorola being hit
particularly hard
• Carriers have maintained
good margins (AT&T = 34%),
handset vendors need to get
a bigger piece of pie =
TENSION
“Frenemies”
http://www.tomiahonen.com/

However, in Q4 2008, there was a ray of sunshine
While feature phones declined by 6% YOY, smartphones, data and applications grew 37% YOY

With apps, Apple has shown the way. But it’s still V0.9
• Released July, 2008
• In less than one year, 1 Billion downloads.
• 10,000 apps downloaded every 2.2 minutes. 50M apps downloaded in one week. Per week. Every week.
• Total of 25,000 apps ... our prediction: 100,000 apps by end of 2009
• Plenty of room in the pool for other handset manufacturers, carriers and web off-deck app stores.

How much can a developer make?
• Perhaps very little. First 30 days on Apple App Store is crucial.
• Or, a lot. After 10 days, #1 iFart was making $35K per day
• But, only 10% of apps are still in use after 3 months; not sticky
• Avg. cost per app is $2.64 (based on top 100 apps); price elastic!
• Other business models: freemium, advertising (ugh), % transaction
• Problem is discoverability ... getting lost in the 25,000 apps

2009 is
“The Year of Mobile”
• Mobile Handsets vs. PC’s
• Hurry ... release analog TV spectrum! The
Gold Rush for 4G (LTE or WiMax)
• Device convergence: Acer moves into
smartphones, Nokia moves into netbooks
• Eric Schmidt, CEO Google: “Mobile search
will eclipse PC search in a few years.”
• Chris DeWolfe, CEO MySpace: “Mobile will
drive 50% of visits by 2012”
• Henri Moistinac, Director, Mobile,
Facebook: “We’re starting to think that
Mobile isn’t just an extension of Facebook;
it’s becoming the main platform.”
• Application Stores Explode
“We need developers”
Growing from 250K firms to 1M by 2013
• Nokia’s Ovi Store
• BlackBerry App World
• Windows Marketplace
• App Store for Symbian, PocketGear
• Android Market
• Palm Software Store
• O2 Litmus (Mob4Hire)
• 3rd party off-deck (GetJar, Handmark)

The global demand for mobile
apps is just starting; and it’s
not just about iFart.
i.e. Developers’ Dream of Gold
http://148apps.com/10000/

http://www.cellular-news.com/story/35940.php
http://www.abiresearch.com/eblasts/archives/analystinsider_template.jsp?id=157
http://www.marketingcharts.com/direct/half-of-us-mobile-phone-application-
revenue-from-location-based-services-2203/
Mobile Application Revenue
is anticipated to reach
$6 Billion by 2013
http://techblips.dailyradar.com/story/
(U.S.A. in 2008 was $118M, global 2008 was $240M)
isuppli_smartphone_sales_could_grow_11_in_2009/

First Monday of every Month
at Metropolitan Grill in
Mount Royal
6:00 to 8:00 pm
Just show up!
Sponsored by:
71st chapter in the
world started in
Dec, 2008
http://mobilemondaycalgary.ning.com

Thank you!
Stephen King
Want to know more about Mob4Hire?
stephen@mob4hire.com View a 10 minute corporate overview
www.mob4hire.com available from bnetTV.com coverage of
www.mob4hire.blogspot.com GSMA Barcelona 2009:
www.twitter.com/mob4hire http://www.bnettv.com/player.php?
id=2252&title=Mob4Hire:%20CrowdSourced
%20Mobile%20Testing

Attributions
Teemu Kurppa
Jason Grigsby Tomi Ahonen
http://www.slideshare.net/
http://www.slideshare.net/grigs/ http://www.slideshare.net/phk189/
teemukurppa/platform-stage-how-
native-vs-web-vs-hybrid-mobile- the-7th-media
to-choose-a-mobile-development-
development-choices
platform
Rudy de Waele
http://www.slideshare.net/rudydw/
Widely respected mobile guru, Tomi Ahonen
Dr. Bob Hayes, Ph.D.
future-of-mobile-presentation
http://www.tomiahonen.com/
http://www.businessoverbroadway.com