Posts about mobile

Geeks Bearing Gifts: Mobile=Local=Me: Context over Content

January 5, 2015 by Jeff Jarvis
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Back from the holidays, here’s the next chapter from Geeks Bearing Gifts, posted for free on Medium. Spoiler: I say this is a chapter about mobile but instead it ends up being about understanding different use cases for news, no matter the device or medium. I argue that thinking of mobile as just another content-delivery medium is short-sighted. Mobile is about context. Instead of organizing our services around platforms, we should be organizing them around people and their specific needs. A snippet:

Screenshot 2014-12-28 at 8.23.25 PM

Usage and traffic for mobile is fast outpacing the web. Many news sites see or are about to see a majority of their traffic from what is classified as mobile. I had a conversation with a Google executive in which I whined about functions I wanted to see added to their web services and he pshawed me, dismissing the old web as practically passé. Google is devoting itself monomaniacally to mobile, where it provides us with no end of useful and specifically built apps — mail, maps, documents, calendar, photos, entertainment, communication — that all know me as a single user. Mark Zuckerberg, meanwhile, told The New York Times that he is deconstructing his big, blue mobile Facebook application and buying or building a chain of specialized new apps — like WhatsApp, Instagram, and the beautiful Paper — to lay atop his relationships with users and his data about them. Facebook’s apps are built for specific uses — one for checking updates, another for instant messages and chat, another for sharing pictures, and so on. Facebook’s apps all offer connections. Google’s apps all offer services. Both companies’ apps are built atop their relationship databases. Google and Facebook are in the relationship business. We are not. 

Perhaps our problem in media is that we offer but one thing: content, or at least that is how we present what we offer. We make users come to single portals so crammed with our stuff it’s hard for them to find what they want, especially in cramped mobile screens. What Google and Facebook offer instead is context in the user’s terms: When you want to mail, you use the mail app; when you want to drive, you open maps; when you want to check in on friends, you open Facebook; and so on. Interestingly, both Google and Facebook have so far failed in their attempts to deliver news on web or mobile. Perhaps that was because they were trying to deliver our content without personal context. 

What happens if we rethink the value of news expansively in the contexts of its many uses?

Read on for my answers in the rest of the chapter here. If you can’t wait for the rest of the book, then you can buy it here.

Mobile’s not the next big thing, just a path to it

August 15, 2012 by Jeff Jarvis
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The Knight Foundation’s News Challenge just announced its next theme: mobile. And that’s a good thing because news organizations have been all-too pokey in figuring out how to serve people in this venue.

When Arthur Sulzberger announced his hiring of a new CEO, the BBC’s Mark Thompson, he said, “Our future is on to video, to social, to mobile.”

With respect, I’m not so sure. Saying that mobile is what comes next means, I fear, that we’re going to take what we do in media — making content, selling audiences — and figure out how to keep doing it on video, in social, and in mobile.

But that’s not what we really do.

Is Google just doing mobile next? Google has a mobile operating system. It has a Google-branded phone and tablet. It bought a phone manufacturer. It made apps for all its services for mobile. Even so, I don’t think Google is becoming a mobile company. For Google, mobile is a tool, a path to improve its real business.

What is its real business? The same as media’s business should be: Relationships — knowing people and serving them better because of what it knows about them.

With newspaper companies, I’ve been arguing that they should abandon page views as a metric because it has been a corrupting influence that carried on the old-media myth that the more “audience” you have the more you can charge advertisers and the more money you’ll make. The pursuit of page views has led news organizations to draw traffic — people — they cannot monetize (because they come from outside the market or come just once from search or Drudge). And the insistence that they remain in the content business has led news organizations to believe they must still sell that content; thus, pay walls.

Google views content — our content — as a tool that generates signals about their users, building relationships, data, and value. Google views mobile as a tool that also generates signals and provides opportunities to target content and services to the individual, where she is, and what she’s doing now (thus Android’s Google Now).

We in news and media should bring those strands together to knit a mobile strategy around learning about people and serving them better as a result — not just serving content on smaller screens. Mobile=local=me now. We should build a strategy on people over content, on relationships.

That’s what mobile means to me: a path to get us to the real value in our business. For you folks cooking up ideas for the Knight News Challenge (and for you, my new neighbor, Mr. Thompson) I suggest starting there.

P.S. When I tweeted a link to this post, I said the lesson is, “Mobile is a path not a destination.” Felix Salmon thought a fake me — or Deepak Chopra — had taken over my account. No, I just want that on a bumpersticker. I’ll license rights to T-shirts and hats.

It’s not a mobile phone. So what is it?

July 5, 2012 by Jeff Jarvis
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“Mobile phone” is a misnomer that is leading industries — especially media — astray as they try to develop services and business for the next wave of connectivity. So what would a better name be? I’ll have a nominee in a second. On this, the fifth anniversary of the iPhone, it is appropriate and long overdue that we rename this disruptive wonder. But first, let’s dispose of these old descriptors.

“Phone” doesn’t work anymore, of course, because we — especially the younger among us — are using these devices to call people less and less. Note these stats in the UK from O2 via Shane Richmond in the Telegraph:

“Mobile” doesn’t work because that makes us envision a user on the road or on the sidewalk when, in fact, most of the use of tablets — which often fall into the mobile-device category — is at home. I use my “mobile” phone all the time in my office and even at home and certainly in boring meetings, when I’m quite sedentary.

Mobile = local = around me now. Mobile is my personal bubble. It is enhanced convenience, putting the device and the world in my hand. But next imagine no device: Cue the war between Siri and Google Glass to eliminate the last mediator, the thing.

I see companies assuming that mobile requires maps and geography or apps and closed worlds. But I think what we now mistakenly call mobile will instead be about getting each of us to what we want with fewer barriers and less effort because the service has gathered so many signals about us: who we are, where we are, what we like, whom we know, what we know, what we want to know, what we buy…. The power of what we now call mobile, I believe, is in signal generation and the extreme targeting and convenience that enables.

What we call “mobile” is disruptive in ways we can’t yet figure out. We call it “mobile” but we should call it “what’s next.”

But what do we call it, really? I asked for a new name on Google+ and at last count got 164 responses. None satisfied me. I also asked on Twitter and there I got an answer I like:

In Germany, they call this wondrous device the “handy.” Actually, it’s “Händy,” but to paraphrase Mark Twain, “we’ll bring the vowels, let the Germans bring the umlauts.”

“Handy” is wonderful because the device fits in the hand. But even when it won’t — when Siri or Glass replace it — the word still works because it is, indeed, handy. It is the ultimate in handy: convenient, personal, nice to have.

iHändy. Sounds like iCandy. It works, ja?

AT&T’s cynical act

June 2, 2010 by Jeff Jarvis
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AT&T’s service sucks. Just listen to our most trusted newsman on the topic. But AT&T response to this core business problem is not to improve its service, to invest in better ways to handle more customers.

No, AT&T’s response is to change its pricing to make us use its service less.

That’s cynical. It’s evil.

AT&T got rid of unlimited data (except for grandfathered accounts … else those changed accounts could all cancel without paying AT&T’s just-increased cancellation fee). They paint it as lowering the price but in truth they lowered the value.

The sick and stupid irony of this is that it was AT&T — in the person of Tom Evslin, then head of AT&T WorldNet (remember them? AT&T killed that golden goose, too) — that turned off the ticking clock on the internet when it established flat-rate pricing of $19.95 a month for unlimited use of the internet. That is what exploded use of the internet and enabled us all to browse without worry. That turned the internet into an industry.

And now it’s AT&T that turns the clock back on. Tick. Just as mobile is about to explode with new devices and new uses for us all to be ubiquitously and constantly connected doing all kinds of new things and creating new value along the way, AT&T says it wants nothing to do with that explosion (because it would have to work harder and invest more to do better). So it makes a business strategy out of imprisoning Apple fanboys as long as it can and making them use its service less. Tock.

AT&T also tries to push us off its network both with its pricing and with the promise of wi-fi. Its press release even makes it sound like an AT&T service that we can use unlimited wi-fi in our home! Thank you, AT&T.

Let’s note that AT&T’s action in relation to the iPad is nothing short of bait-and-switch as it was sold as using the magic of unlimited data with plenty of data-rich applications and now the price of that gadget only soars if you actually use it as it was designed: to consume media constantly.

I would hope that Apple is chagrinned about the door to which it has delivered its customers. But Apple sniffed the shark when it picked AT&T, making Apple’s control more important than its customers’ service and value and its partner’s quality and ethic.

Of course, this is all the more painful because AT&T’s competitors also suck. Verizon, which most say has good service, has data caps. T-Mobile, which I’m using on my Nexus One, has unlimited data but its network is about an inch worse than AT&T’s. When I was on Sprint, its service wasn’t great but at least they still have unlimited data. But with Verizon and Sprint, I can’t use their phones when I go abroad.

America’s mobile phone industry sucks! That’s more than a mere consumer kvetch. It is a strategic failing.

Hey FTC, if you really want to serve the future of media, why don’t you figure out how to instill real competition in the mobile industry? Right now, it’s a miserable quadopoly that has us by the balls and squeezes.

Can you hear me now?

: Oh, I meant to add: With GoogleVoice and Skype, I don’t even want your voice minutes, phone companies. All I want is your data. And I don’t even necessarily want data over your stupid caps. I don’t want to worry about it. Selling me a service I have to worry about is bad business.

Can you hear me now?

: Here’s Steve Jobs at D on AT&T. Nothing is said of AT&T’s moves to screw his customers the next day. Did he know about it? When asked what he’s going to do about AT&T, he essentially shrugs:

: LATER: Folks in comments and Twitter say that this is an open market and AT&T can set the prices it wants. Yes. And I can get pissed and leave. They say that some people use lots of bandwidth; the classic argument. OK. So AT&T says that only 2% of users exceed its limit. So they are making 98% of users now be nervous in hopes they will use less of the service they are paying for. That is what’s cynical and evil.

Mobile=local

April 2, 2010 by Jeff Jarvis
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At the Brite conference, I talked about mobile coming to be synonymous with local. Here are a few paragraphs I wrote on the topic for an essay in a German book about the future of the net:

The biggest battlefield is local and mobile (I combine them because soon, local will mean simply wherever you are now). That’s why Google is in the phone business and the mapping business and why it is working hard to let us search by speaking or even by taking pictures so we don’t have to type while walking or driving.

The winner in local will be the one that knows more about what’s around me right now. Using my smartphone’s GPS and maps—or using Google Googles to simply take a picture of, say, a club on the corner—I can ask the web what it knows about that place. Are any of my friends there now? (Foursquare or Gowalla or soon Facebook and Twitter and Google Buzz could tell me.) Do my friends like the place? (Facebook and Yelp have the answer.) Show me pictures and video from inside (that’s just geo-tagged content from Flickr and YouTube). Show me government data on the place (any health violations or arrests? Everyblock has that). What band is playing there tonight? Let me hear them. Let me buy their music. What’s on the menu? What’s the most popular dish? Give me coupons and bargains. OK, now I’ll tell my friends (on Twitter and Facebook) that I’m there and they’ll follow. This scenario—more than a newspaper story—will define local.

To do all this, Google—or the next Google—needs two things: First, it needs more data; it needs us to annotate the world with information (if Google can’t find this data elsewhere on the web, it will create the means for us to generate it). Second, Google needs to know more about us—it needs more signals such as location, usage history, and social networks—so it can make its services more relevant to us.