Ian M Rountree

Project Manager, Copywriter, Digital Marketer

Everything is Everything

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Have you noticed? Differentiation is diminishing in gadgets these days.

Everything is a music player.
Everything is a camera.
Everything is touch-screen controlled, internet accessing, Tweeting, Facebook status updating, connected electronic gold.

There are always pickles when it comes to defining new toys – but is this good or bad? After all, how good the camera is depends on the device. How the web browser operates has a big impact on the kinds of websites it’s useful to access through it. And while every device may have every feature, the how is not just key, it’s increasingly important.

Some people buy iPhones. Others refuse, and buy BlackBerry instead – sometimes for reasons they can’t explain. Who knows why anyone buys an LCD television over a plasma – sure, statistics and sales pitches can be compelling, but without an exit form (and why would we want one for simple purchases?) There’s no way to know.

Let’s move out from toys, and think about the platforms we connect to them. Why are some people still avoiding Facebook, but devouring Twitter? And the reverse? Is it an awareness of corporate paradigm, or a preference for features? Maybe just a love of feathered mascots or awkward CEOs. Who knows?

Don’t get annoyed with diversity – get specific about your selections.

Why Apple Is Winning The Mobile Game

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http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1063/698695902_cd1b9f4f01.jpgI want an iPhone. I’m probably going to wait until the next version, but it’ll happen eventually.

I’ve been a BlackBerry user for a couple years – the first of their devices I used was the old workhorse 7290, and I’ve owned a Bold and now a Curve 8520. My wife has an 8220. We spend a lot of time in Blackberry Messenger, rather than texting. It’s the name of BlackBerry’s game – full on communication.

I also do a lot with my berry all at once. I’ve got WordPress installed, I leave GoogleTalk and Live Messenger running all the time (feel free to flip me a message if we’re connected, I always respond), and have my Twitter client going as well. Multitasking is one thing that RIM certainly does far better than iPhone, but there’s a problem. The number of actual tasks a BlackBerry can DO is small, and it’s not growing very quickly.

So you’ve got Apps. Big whoop, so do I.

When AppWorld launched, I was pretty excited. Before then, there was no appreciable way of getting programs you could be sure to work onto a given model. However, even with AppWorld a year and more old, the app density is still very low. There’s not much for free aside from what I’ve got already, and finding specialized apps is a failing prospect. How long did it take me to find a decent Twitter client? Three weeks. Granted, I wasn’t searching hard, but I eventually did find SocialScope, which is wonderful, but still lacks support for some of the features I like in my PC-based clients. Guess what? The iPhone has massive amounts of support, both free and paid, for Twitter, Facebook, and other networks. And it has IM clients, even if the lack of multitasking is a pain. It’s an entirely different experience than BlackBerry.

Unfortunately, Research in Motion is not an experience business; they’re a production business.

The same gap is facing many device manufacturers these days. The game used to be develop, market, sell, warranty. But all that changes when someone breaks the process. When someone comes along and offers post-sale support and new features on an extending, nigh-infinite basis, businesses based in production start to fall very short. Especially when the new players begin to offer every possible feature a customer might want.

Oh, what? iPhone lacks a feature?

Oh. That Flash thing? I don’t care.

Cult of Mac reported that there’s no Flash on iPad because Apple is protecting content revenue. Duh! But seriously, I wonder how much this is actually going to matter to most people? Better still, will this be relevant to web developers and media designers? Flash is swiftly becoming a faux pas on high-end websites. HTML 5 is going to make a splash once adoption goes up. Tools like jQuery, AJAX and javascript-based text replacement are outgrowing Flash as a format. Want proof? My site uses all three, and the current theme took about a day’s work for me to hack together.

Flash may still be relevant for gaming, but I expect that game developers will eventually find it more useful to develop Apps for the iPhone OS that are paid, and encourage either ad-based revenue, or micro-transaction, modularized purchasing. When that gets bigger, Flash might die entirely.

Apple is interested in a never-ending transaction.

I owned an iPod Touch for almost a year before I gave it up for the sake of more storage space on an iPod Classic, because at the time I figured my BlackBerry would do everything I wanted. At the time it did.

What I forgot to gauge, however, was the number of apps I downloaded and used on a casual basis. As much as the opposition can rattle on about the high percentage of apps abandoned after first use,this is actually part of the key brilliance of Apple’s app store strategy; the massive number of programs available, in their wide variety, creates an endless well to draw from. There are free trials for just about everything, and if you’ve got the impetus, you can find an app for just about anything you want.

Once you start downloading apps, it’s really difficult to stop. This might be a bad thing for some people, but I can’t help but see it as an awesome way to encourage innovation.

Turning Enthusiasm Into Incentive.

Apple attracts developers and customers the same way: an innovative platform that’s easy to use, with massive extensibility and a market that’s not just competitive in pricing and profitability, but in advancement and interest. It’s the technological equivalent of the network effect, using hype as fuel to expand the same way trees use carbon dioxide to grow.

Despite silly product names and the constant barrage of hate because its mobile devices lack Flash, Apple is still winning. This isn’t because their devices are any better than their competitors hardware. It’s because they’re better at providing ongoing support.

But I’m still not convinced about the iPad.

Photo by The Pug Father.

In re: Google's Synchronicity

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I had intended to post this as a comment on Jeff Jarvis’ BuzzMachine post about Google’s Synchronicity – but it got a bit long, so I thought I’d share here instead and, hopefully, invite the ghost of journalism’s future to comment – if he’s listening. Please, go read the original article if you’d like to know where this comes from.

I do wonder what you mean when you say “local and mobile (which will come to mean the same thing)”

I read this as a redefinition of locality to mean “whatever is swiftly accessible by reasonably affordable means.” This used to mean the store down the street. Soon it will mean getting in touch with just about anyone, just about anywhere – on the assumption that the pathway of connection (Twitter, IM, email, etc) already exists. If you’re in my contacts list, you’re local to me wherever I have my smartphone and an internet connection – which is everywhere I go, so far anyway.

Mobility is very different. By this I mean that perhaps mobility will come to mean not “what i can bring to me” as local does, but perhaps “Where I can get myself to” – telephony, video conferencing, webinars. Much of this exists in a static location, but addresses the idea of high-resolution transfer of -being- rather than simply information. None of this requires a BlackBerry or iPhone – nor is capable, yet, on these platforms in a reliable way.

Google is doing a good job of addressing the geography of information, diverting and mapping the rivers, plotting and surveying the land, finding ways to parse it back into human modes. They’re the map makers.

Local used to be your country, your city, your neighbourhood. Mobility used to mean your ability to travel, or do your work in more than one place. Since  both the advent of cellular technology and the accelerated wildfire growth of the internet, how we conceive of locality has shifted, and mobility has grown exponentially. But does this mean local  and mobile as defined above come to mean the same thing?

What Pay Walls have in common with Maginot's Line

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Photo by Dirk Gently
Photo by Dirk Gently

After the Great War, France erected a line of defence on its border with Italy and Germany, hoping that it would provide a funnel for attackers wishing to avoid the line itself, or that invaders would simply get made into hamburger by the many many guns. Unfortunately, like many reactionary measures, it was built to deal with the tactics of yesterday, and then advanced around by the thinkers of the time.

Instead of traipsing up to the line and getting cut down, the Germans who invaded in 1940 got smart. They set out decoys, picked a target carefully, even sent the Luftwaffe straight over the line (which was not intended to defend against aerial targets so much less common in the previous war). Within five days of their approach to the line, Germany was in France. Maginot’s Line failed. But not the way most people believe it did.

The common misconception is that the Germans just went around by going through Belgium. It’s a limited myth; the actual attack was surgical and presented a scenario the wall was not meant to deal with.

I hope you can see where I’m going with this.

Not just speaking of news, there’s been a big kerfuffle for the last little while about monetizing services on the internet. Subscription-only news sites, limiting traffic from non-direct sources, any number of tactics in defence of digital turf – all of this becomes inherently futile once people figure out, in critical mass, how to avoid he need for access to the turf itself. The erecting of these walls – even the really small, annoying ones lime between-page ads – is a tactic that assumes those coming your way have no other savvy, that they’ll hit the wall and behave exactly as you want them to. The trouble is, we content invaders have already found our Luftwaffe, and it’s flying over your head right now.

Jeff Jarvis talks a lot about hyperlocal news. To an extent I agree with him. The idea that anyone, anywhere near an event can riff on it and get the word out to a place where it’s ready and waiting for an audience is a big deal. It won’t always be blogging or twitter, something else will eventually evolve in addition to the tools we have now, but the behaviour is already there.

You – as a content producer – are no longer defined by what you’re trained in, or what you’ve exposed yourself to in the past. Now, you can easily redefine your knowledge and gain new perspective with nothing more than thirty seconds and an internet connection. Like the scene from The Matrix, when Trinity needed training to fly a helicopter, and all she did was hit up the operator, hold her phone to her ear for a few seconds and download. Ok, so that’s an extreme example, but the analogue is there, isn’t it? I haven’t failed to answer a question in probably a year and a half since I got my first BlackBerry, mostly because I was already search-savvy, and suddenly had fairly universal access to snackable information.

Using monetization schemes as a barrier (even if the barrier is click-it-away like with interstitial ads) is a failing prospect from the get go, for the same reason as the Maginot Line was broken. Tactics never remain the same; that’s why they’re tactics and not practices.

Why We All Win – Cellular Edition

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Platform wars are stupid but necessary, because homogeneous doesn’t work in the market place. Simple as that.

There’s a lot of kerfuffle lately about the Droid, and Android in general, competing with the iPhone and its platform. Rightly so, but I think some people are missing the point of differentiation with this. At the end of the day, there are four platforms worth mentioning: iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian and Windows Mobile. Everything else is dumbphones masquerading as productivity tools.

We’ll start with Apple, because they wouldn’t have it any other way. Most of what you hear about the iPhone is how awesome it is, how many apps there are. This is a key to its success, but it also tends to blind people. So many choices makes decisions tougher, after all. But spend an hour in the app store, and what are you likely to find? A lot of communication toys, multimedia tools, games, virtual beer and assorted hodge podge. What does this make the iPhone, once you dig in? A toy. It’s a multimedia device, which is exactly what Apple wants. Thing is, not many people pay attention to this, or consider whether anything other than total malleability is what they need.

Enter Android. On any device, Android is a killer operating system; it’s light weight, handles well for the most part, and makes your phone feel like a small computer. The market has apps, granted, and lots of them, the number growing sometimes faster than Apple’s AppStore because of differences in developers and approval processes. Android is also open source, which means anyone with the chops can dig in and do whatever they feel like for it with no hindrances past their own skills. This is a big deal! It’s a bridge product, halfway between high computing power and the fun of the iPhone’s platform. There’s fun, but there’s also a smattering of productivity and communication.

Productivity. Something a lot of phones lack, which is only partly bad. Not many people want to type out a thousand-word blog post or a two thousand word article on a phone’s keyboard. Applications for this are, rightly so, limited. It would be nice to see one of the platforms stand up and address this in a straight-forward manner. Windows Mobile sort of tries, but with Microsoft’s lackadaisical attitude to development for WinMo, it’s no wonder no one gives a second thought to it. Device selection failure as well helps the slow execution of WinMo by the iPhone and Android. It’s barely a competitor.

What is? BlackBerry and Symbian. Nokia hasn’t done a lot with Symbian lately – we’ll see what comes up – but RIM has made some decidedly choice moves in the last year. AppWorld is great, there’s a decent suite of applications, but they’re heavily weighted in two directions: Communication and aggregation. Readers and messengers. This is, I think, a decent move for RIM to make because BlackBerry has always been about keeping in touch. I use a Berry myself, so I may be biased here, but it does everything I need it do – I usually have four instant messenger programs running, plus BBMessenger, UberTwitter (until Seesmic works – you’re on notice, Loic) and WordPress for on the fly blogging. RIM may be pushing themselves in toward a niche with pragmatists in mind, but that’s ok. It’s what they’ve proven they’re good at.

So where does this leave us? Winners. The communicators will have their BlackBerry phones. The developers and power users will filter to Android. Everyone who wants the internet in all its multimedia glory at their beck and call will find an iPhone waiting. Someone, somewhere, will love a Windows Mobile handset just enough to give it a happy home. I like having choice. Better still, I like having choices that are becoming increasingly clear.