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TechMom from Silicon Valley
via gigaom.com
I was thinking all the way along that Rubenstein was brought in to dress up, shape up and put cosmetics on Palm for the potential buyer. It was destined to be acquired anyway, so nothing is new at this moment, but unfortunately the dress up process was not enough.
It is really too bad, as an early fan of "Handspring Visor" myself.
Michi
So Microsoft is coming up with a sort of a new version of "Sidekick", this time with Verizon. Sharp is producing the stuff.
The device is supposed to target young crowd with SNS and texting zealot.
It caught my eyes for two reasons.
(1) "Sidekick VZ version" is a fine and dandy concept, but then why are they all BLACK? From my everyday life observation of my teenage son, the main drive of this crowd must be "teenage girls". Don't they have different colors? If I were them, I would make PEARL WHITE as the basic color, just like iPhone. As a girl (albeit older age group), I am tired of US phone industry's design sense that totally ignores female users.
(2) Japanese vendors are totally behind in global smartphone race. Japanese domestic market has been dominated by feature phones (non-smartphone) and vendors cannot afford to develop smartphones, particularly for outside of Japan, where they have very little presence. Sharp has been the only major vendor that has declared to do smartphone for international market, and there you have it. They have become "HTC for Microsoft", through their long standing relationship with Danger. It is only logical that they took this route, although I still believe that Windows Phone 7 will not become a factor in the smartphone market, and that Sharp seems to be betting to a losing horse. I am curious how it develops in the near future.
Michi
Report: Palm searching for a smartphone suitor - FierceWireless
The report, citing three unnamed sources familiar with the matter, said Palm is working with Goldman Sachs and another investment bank, Qatalyst Partners, to find a buyer. According the report, both HTC and Lenovo have expressed interest in the company, and might make a bid.
Read more: http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/report-palm-searching-smartphone-suitor/2010-04-12?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal#ixzz0kuFb4S5J
This has been talked about a lot already, nothing new, but interesting that HTC and Lenovo are mentioned this time. True, it makes sense.
Acquisition of Palm will not only bring about the bunch of engineers and patents, but also the genuine "local developers" along with it, albeit it has shrunk quite a bit lately.
If anyone understands that power and economics of the developer community, particularly HTC would be the one. It is totally natural expansion for them.
So.. would they buy Access as "buy one, get one free" deal??
Michi
Beyond simply explaining what 4G is and the benefits it will bring, carriers will have to answer the question: What can I do with 4G that I can't do with a 3G smartphone?
Read more: http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/4g-phones-promise-and-peril/2010-04-09?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal#ixzz0kuDFJeVX
This is exactly why I think VZ will do iPhone at the launch of LTE, if any. Historically, it is evident that either the shiny new gadget or the dramatic pricing plan is the only way to successfully move subscribers to the new spectrum or network. People don't care about the network technology - all they care about is what you can do with the phone.
Michi
via sv4u.net
iPad is in the air. People are debating Kindle or iPad, but here is one app that is definitely beneficial on iPad.
I have been helping this start-up providing an iPhone/iPodTouch app for communication of autistic people. It is developed by an actual mom of autistic son.
It is currently used on iPhone/iPodTouch, and can work on iPad as well.
For more information, please visit their website.
http://voice4uaac.com/
via www.worldautismawarenessday.org
Today, April 2, is World Autism Awareness Day. Please take a moment to look at the official Website, and learn about Autism. There are many ways to get involved, if you are interested, starting from becoming a fan on Facebook!
I am supporting "Voicd4u", iPhone/iPod Touch application for autistic people, provided by a small start-up that my friend runs. It is a simple graphic communication tool, with attentions to the details to fit to the needs of autistic kids and people. If you know anyone who may benefit from this tool, please take a look a their Website. My friend who started this company is actually a mother of an autistic son, and she came up with the idea of the real-life needs. She spent a lot of time incorporating the idea of the specialist and professional caregivers to make this application, so it is easy to use and attractive even for young people.
Michi
videonews.com on USTREAM: ニュース専門のインターネット放送局 ビデオニュース・ドットコム http://www.videonews.com . Other ...
Hatoyama cabinet just opened their official press conference to non-traditional media, such as net news and bloggers, for the first time. Videonews is currently U-streaming Hatoyama's speech.
Michi
Twitter is totally "in" in Japan. Everybody who matters are doing it, except for a few "old media types" who still have not figured out how to stick that blue-and-black "t" button on their web-version newspaper articles.
Japanese twitter-stars, such as @chikawatanabe and @hisamioh, have mentioned that the Japanese language has lots of advantage in this short-form style. Just one Kanji, the Chinese character, signifies a concept, so you can easily express a concept with just a few letters. As a result, Various characters used in Japanese, including two forms of phonetic characters (hiragana and katakana), kanji and alphabets, the mere 140 character can turn into a rich, funny or serious piece of art, freely transform from a petty personal mumble to a intellectual political or philosophical discussion.
Haiku is globally known as the shortest form poem in the world, and I often compare Twitter with less known older cousins, "renga", or "continuous poem". In an ancient noble world, people gather in a room and one person starts a short haiku-like short poem, the next person adds another few lines, then the next person continues on adding to the second person, and the play keeps on going.
In Japanese twitter-sphere, this type of continuous conversation often happens, with sometimes 4-5 people mentioned like a chain and each person adding his/her say. It is made possible by the kanji's rich expression power that saves number of characters, as @tokuriki, one of the top Twitter-stars, points out. If I try to do the same in English, I quickly run out the 140 characters limit.
What is important here is the communication itself, more than the contents. People tweets to have conversation for conversation purposes, not because the content is important. Of course, for some people - like me, sometimes, to broadcast my contents such as my blog entry is the main purpose. But more often I do it for conversation purposes.
You have to have some contents to communicate. As a telecom industry person, I often think of the contents as the highest layer thing on top of the communication tools such as mails and phones, but I think these days I should think it as a reverse, in many cases - contents as a vehicle of communication.
Twitter is rather a "naked" form of communication, with each participants giving out his/her idea with it, although the 140-character limit is giving some sense of structure. But in "renga", for example, the poem - the art of words - were more the vehicle of communication for participants than the art itself as a purpose. You can think of many games and other excuses for gatherings - card games, hobby groups, book clubs, backyard barbecue and so on. In a broader sense, many "high-brow" art, such as fine art, theater and literature, can be considered the "vehicle of conversation" for the people in the high society. The providers of the art certainly do it for the sake of art itself, but for consumers, the art piece is the mixture of the value itself and the tool for the communications with the people in the same class.
In that context, Facebook is an interesting mix of the "naked" communication form and various "vehicles" such as network games and silly social apps. My son's timeline is full of meaningless "surveys" or "riddles", and that is what the communication is. The youngsters are more enjoying the communication, less the contents. The right mix is the key for success here.
The telecom industry has been providing the tools for "naked" communication for more than 100 years. We in the industry often think the contents is king and is more important than telecom. But I suggest to reverse it, from time to time, and consider "contents" as the vehicle of communication and people value the communication the most. Person-to-person communication, over the human history, is the king.
Michi
The heated debate about Japan's spectrum policy has erupted among the industry experts lately. We call it "spectrum seclusion(Sakoku)".
Just as in the U.S., Japanese broadcasters are vacating 700MHz spectrum in July 2011, and the regulatory body is currently considering how to allocate this precious 700MHz band. Luckily, 700MHz is the same as the U.S. and other parts of the world for next gen spectrum band. 700MHz has also very desirable technical features for mobile service, so it is designated as the next gen spectrum by APT Wireless Forum, the wireless standard body in Asia/Pacific.
In Japan, however, the available spectrum is "not enough" to be shared by 3 major mobile carriers, so the government is proposing to pair 700MHz and 900MHz, instead of the standard up/down link in 700Mhz.
I believe that it is insane to use such "orphan" spectrum, at this time in the 21st century. True, until 3G migration, Japan allocated up and down link in reverse manner from the international standard. 10 years ago, another orphan spectrum 1.5GHz was put to use in Japan. They could get away with it because the things were different in the past. The global wireless market was much more fragmented back then, and Japan was relatively big market among them. Japanese domestic vendors were much more powerful, as well. Carriers could somehow manage to procure chips and equipments at reasonable price levels for the orphan spectrum.
Now, the global air interface standard is contracting into LTE. The big divide between GSM/W-CDMA and CDMA camps are fading away. Huge emerging markets are now the biggest customers for chips and equipments. And Japanese vendors are now weakening, as they could not get hold of the global market due to the Japanese market's isolation.
If they go ahead with this orphan spectrum paring, there is no guarantee that international vendors such as Qualcomm and Huawei would provide the "special" products for Japan timely and reasonably. Japanese vendors who are forced to produce them would lose the opportunity to sell the same products globally, again. Without the scale, Japanese consumers will be left with more expensive, less innovative products.
I particularly am concerned because it would deter the advancement of M2M or embedded devices, which I believe will be the next frontier of the mobile service. I was hoping that Japanese consumer electronics vendors would tackle on this opportunity, but so far, I don't see too many movement on this front. M2M (machine to machine) has been on the market for some time, mostly in automotive telematics and utility telemetering area, but now the usage has just started to expand to other products. The best example is Amazon Kindle. Radio is embedded in the device, and the users don't have to pay subscription fees - the underlining wireless is hidden in the e-book prices. For the next gen spectrum, I believe that there many such products pop up. For such products, the chip/equipment prices have to be very low, and to make it happen, the vendor has to scale. To catch up with this trend, the vendors HAS to mass-produce the products.
The Ministry of General Affairs, Japanese regulatory body, has been quite sensitive about the competitiveness issues and have been implementing different measures to push Japanese vendors to globalize, so I don't understand their line of thinking in this spectrum issue.
They claim that other uses, namely temporary broadcast and ITS (car-to-car communication), already occupy the rest of 700MHz. Uh..hello? Moshi moshi?? Can you hear me? Economist Prof. Nobuo Ikeda writes in his several articles that the broadcast spectrum is only used for live cast of marathon races, and ITS usage is still in laboratory, after so many years. I suspect the real reason is the political power struggle with broadcasters and automotive companies.
I can probably calculate and compare the present value of the current use and possible M2M/future mobile market, taking consideration of the cost of migration for the current owners and probability of ITS service really happening. But even without taking pains to do so, it is a common sense that the potential M2M and mobile service has a LOT more values.
It is just a TOTAL INSANITY. Japanese mobile industry is heading to suicide. We should fight against it.
Michi
via keizai.org
Thanks folks for coming to last night's talk! Thank you also for those who watched the live cast.
It turns out that the recording is also on the website right now. If you missed the live cast, please watch this anytime. I am not sure how long it will be up there, so enjoy while you can. Other info, such as speakers' bio and presentation materials are also on this site.
Michi
