I retired from personal blogging in July 2008.
But you can find me over at http://blog.xero.com.
I was thinking the other day why we still don’t use mobile data. It’s 2007 surely mobile access should have taken off by now.
Email is the No.1 mobile application. What would people use next? Well when I’m sitting around with my BlackBerry, after dealing with email, the next thing I want to do is catch up on news.
Some of the big publishing news sites have recently revised their websites but have not taken into account access for mobile devices. What you get on your mobile handset is the same whether you come through a browser or mobile phone.
So I looked at what the size of those pages are.
Stuff.co.nz was 764k, NZHerald.co.nz is 330k and the smh.com.au was a whopping 1.3MB. Seems amazing but front pages of news sites have banners, big navigation and lots of photo’s. (Lots of things you specifically don’t want to download if you are accessing through a mobile).
I then looked at what mobile data costs.
I assume that the bulk of the market does not have a data plan. So when they buy their new super-duper-data-phone, and get web curious and surf to stuff.co.nz, that first page has cost them $8.60! Ouch! If they think this is cool and go through a few different pages there could easily be several hundred bucks on their next bill.
I asked around the office as to what people expectations were of the cost of hitting 1 page. 10 cents was a common number (and thought to be a rip off).
So what is happening?
Consumers are terrified of mobile data. The publishers have been burned with low customer adoption of mobile services so they no longer invest in mobile specific delivery.
The ridiculously expensive cost of mobile data holds the whole industry up, for carriers, publishers and creatives. Who wins here?
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Rod, I use Mobile data from Vodafone; on the 1GB plan but the 3GB plan looks better value. I agree with your comments about accessing the web with BB etc.
One of the problems with all of these devices - BB, Nokia N95, iPhone etc is that we get the devices in NZ but we don’t get a cost effective online service so for most people they end up using the devices for phone calls and email. Anything else puts you in the poor house.
Voda mobile data is great when I am at home and Telecom drop the ADSL network and just as fast (old cable, too far from exchange) issue).
And it works great overseas. You just have to ignore the large big after the trip. Which is why I am going to get a UK Vodafone one as well, much cheaper if you visit even once a year.
The answer to this problem is in your previous email about the Vector Arena. Other than the issues with the sound which they need to fix, have you noticed how many music acts have been to perform there or are coming now it is built. This is proof that the build it and they will come principle sometimes works.
Do you think Wellington would have got the Sevens at Athletic Park?
Heard on Saturday speaking of Rugby that Eden Park trust board is going to now build the complete make over of Eden Park.
I’ve been talking to quite a few people about this. Amazingly enough the Telcos don’t seem to have made the connection between affordably priced mobile data and increased customers. From what I’ve heard they’re still saying the market isn’t there because no one is using it at the moment - ignoring the fact that it’s prohibitively expensive for anyone so why would we?
In europe I was using my mobile to access email and data/webpages all the time. Since arriving in NZ I haven’t touched it once. Who needs those kind of traffic bills?!
Also in this case (as in many others) the classic kiwi excuse of “our market is too small for the investment required” just doesn’t stack up.
I’ve been ranting on about mobile data, strike that all mobile prices for years. We have 3rd world mobile services available in NZ. I can do less on my mobile here than I could do in India in 2002. High prices are killing innovation and lots of services. IMHO mobile charging is more important than broadband. Broadband is now, mobile is the future and they’re killing it.
We have a mobile prototype for our maps, but $1 - $1.5 to get to a map is too much for mainstream customers. I can’t justify the development when I can’t justify the cost to the consumer.
Rod
I agree totally with your comment. I’ve been enviously watching our friends stateside as they emerge into “unlimited data access plans” over the past year and, yes, this has encouraged publishers to push through some pretty amazing mobile versions of their sites.
Though not technically a publisher, netvibes has just released a pretty robust version of their news aggregator specifically designed for the iphone:
http://www.techcrunch.com/2007/08/14/netvibes-for-iphone-available-now/
This great little page app allows you to chuck all of your rss feeds onto a single, easy flowing page, allowing you to catch up on the latest without opening 20 odd pages of (in our case excruciatingly) expensive data.
Now all we need is a network to support it back here in kiwiland!
There’s one for the xmas wishlist (Telecom? Vodafone? ANYONE!? maybe sprint or at&t could consider us as an extremely easy market to win over?).
James said…
netvibes has just released a pretty robust version of their news aggregator specifically designed for the iphone.
This is something that I am thinking of developing at some stage in the future, but instead of just straight news aggregation, the aim is to summarize document contents by extracting important concepts using text-mining algorithms, for application in financial market news surveillance. The summary is then automatically send to the user ( investors, fund managers, financial analysts, traders, etc…) via mobile devices to alert them about the latest developments in the market which are important, that might affect its performance. Text-mining is different from key-word extraction, as the former understands document concepts, while the latter knows nothing about it, so key-word extraction is pretty much useless in such application.
I think that some of the major finance vendors are already doing this. I believe that this sort of mobile application will be in widespread use in the next 4 years or so, but perhaps, not too expensive the same way as getting access to a news sites, since it is just pure text alert (no graphics, etc).
There has been a Financial News Surveillance system developed at CMU (Carnegie Mellon University) about 3 years ago, for Portfolio Management which they called Warren. It wasn’t developed to target mobile application, however it is quite logical to assume that the next step in the development, they might do is to make it mobile. Warren could try and extract important concepts automatically as news become available from different websites of those companies of interest to investors, since the investors can’t keep up to date with info from these companies as there are too many of them to keep track of or read from, such as the followings:
GOOD - News articles which explicitly show evidence of the company’s healthy financial status.
e.g.) … Shares of ABC Company rose 1=2 or 2 percent on the Nasdaq to $24-
15/16. …
GOOD, UNCERTAIN - News articles which refer to predictions of future profitability, and forecasts.
e.g.) … ABC Company predicts fourth-quarter earnings will be high. …
NEUTRAL - News articles which mention financial facts but do not provide good or
bad aspects.
e.g.) … ABC contributes $ 700 million in stock to its pension plan …
BAD, UNCERTAIN - News articles which refer to predictions of future losses, or no profitability.
e.g.) … ABC (Nasdaq: ABC) warned on Tuesday that Fourth-quarter results
could fall short of expectations. …
BAD - News articles which explicitly show evidence of the company’s bad financial status.
e.g.) … Shares of ABC (ABC: down $0.54 to $49.37) fell in early New York
trading. …
So, I think that investors of the future would want to keep an eye on market developments in realtime via mobile devices where ever they are.
You are absolutely right. The data charges when you are overseas are even more absurd. $10 per MB. Not GB, per MB. If you’re not on a preferred Vodafone partner, it is $30 per MB. So based on your example you could pay $30 bucks to read some stories on the Herald site or download one email attachment. The Blackberry service does have a slightly more competitive deal but you can still get charged if you exceed a certain data cap.
Forget the iPhone, you can get a Blackberry from T-Mobile in the US for $50 per month UNLIMITED international data. I think I could live with having this for data and a second simpler phone for calls. I’m going to try and get one before I next go away. It would pay for itself with one month’s worth of global roaming charges on Vodafone.
Many of us in the local Mobile Industry have been battling the ‘duopoly’ of NZ carriers for reasonable mobile data rates without any success. As usual, claims of ‘lack of a market for investment’ are thrown up. But in reality - and I feel the answer to your question, the carriers win by making their WAP portals (Live! and Xtra) the only choice for consumers who want to use the mobile internet in NZ.
These portals (that are free to users to surf) generate the strong revenues from games, ringtones, wallpapers etc. With the advent of mobile advertising they will soon also generate hefty advertising revenues. Mobile advertising ’should’ at least allow the consumer to view/play/interact with these carrier services for no cost BUT forcing the public to stay within a walled garden is not gong to work in the long run.
Globally over 30% of premium content revenues are now generated off carrier decks and via the greater mobile web.
Even a situation where the carriers acted as ISPs and organisations could pay a reduced rate for the wholesale data used by visitors to their mobile web sites would be a start.
Clearly, as usual, these absurd carrier data rates will not change until someone steps in and forces the play… but with major players like Nokia, Google, Yahoo and Microsoft stepping into the mobile advertising arena, that might not be too far away.
One of the issues for the mobile operators (Vodafone I know) is their backhaul infrastructure is still (mostly) architected as a voice network. So the backhaul bandwidth to each cell site (a few Mbps on average) is small and can only handle a few concurrent data users per site. High $/byte is a good way to constrain demand as they slowly expand backhaul. A more sceptical view would say they don’t yet believe data use will explode…
Having just got back from the UK it really drums home how backwards this place sometimes is.
Mobile plans (both voice and data) border extorsion, not to mention the cost of handsets. In the UK I could pick up the latest Blackberry (unlocked) for 220 quid! Take off the 17.5% VAT on the way out, and that makes it 182 quid (about $480)!! The latest Blackberry you get here is the Pearl, and that’ll set you back $899 from Voda. That’s almost TWICE as expensive as the later version in the UK. Read TWICE.
Another lil’ tip. Be careful if you use Google Maps on your mobile. After just two minutes I’d chomped up 700k!! Ouch!
Drives you mad.
Yeah i gotta say, just got back from Oz, and now in CHCH. I worked for an Aussie telco (three.com.au) company that has been breaking ground in Mobile Broadband (MBB) and internet browsing from you phone, i am now researching MBB options in NZ. But what a joke!! How backwards is New Zealand? We dont even have cap plans, and Australia is pushing through Next G (high speed internet connection from your mobile), in Oz you can pay $29 and get 2GB and a free modem, in new zealand you pay $49 and get 1GB and pay an extra $99 for the modem. No wonder approx 600 kiwis are immigrating to Oz a week!! not for cheaper broadband but the principle- that our country steals from its citizens.
TECLO COMPETITION IN NZ
Scene Setter: Our two main mobile competitors vodafone and telecom…are like two friends sparring in a ring, exchanging nervous blows, too scared to throw any blows that are ‘too’ damaging, and excitedly exclaiming when they tap each other ‘oh, i gotcha that time huh?’, ‘betcha that hurt!’. and all the while the New Zealand public sits in the stands dumbfounded that they brought tickets to see this shameful spectacle.