The navigation software market seemed to have been under heavy commodity pressure recently. With Google providing free navigation now for all Android phones, NOKIA felt they had to pull out something too also in light of Apple’s iPhone success. Of course the $8.1 billion they spent on Navteq needed to also put to work quickly. Unfortunately they did once more not get the end user requirements and decided to confuse people by offering free maps (for some of their handsets) and free turn-by-turn voice-directed navigation (again for only some of their handsets and confusingly different ones than the few who have free maps).

So where is this all leading and what can we expect in this market to happen?

In my opinion NOKIA will once more not be able to profit from this new development. They did not only enter this opportunity too late, spending also way to much money on Navteq but also screwed it then up with confusing licensing terms and announcing FREE in the headlines when in fact the small print shows that this is only true for a few handsets. Google will go its path and probably soon offer the best location based and real world viewing experience and that for free. With that move they will put a huge amount of pressure on the other navigation companies to innovate even more and faster. Navigon and TomTom have clearly seen this pressure and reacted with price cuts and many new developments such as 3D map views, voice activation, alternative route suggestions based on driving habits or real-time traffic situations. Both offer their products now on the iPhone with nice mounting cradles to use it in the car. TomTom even has one with a built-in GPS receiver chip to improve the navigation for the iPhone and enable the iPod Touch as well. But both vendors face a dilemma that is hard to fight: pricing drops drastically while at the same time more and more devices and features seem to be required to be able to offset this trend with more unit sales. They need to streamline their production costs and reduce hardware to very few platforms while putting all efforts into software development. Location based services is the way to go as well as combining it with social networking but while this is easy to say it requires a totally new approach and most importantly new business models where also online and mobile ads should be looked at. Both companies need new talent that are experts in online ads and social networking. I doubt though that they will be able to pull that off quickly enough which will make them acquisition targets maybe for other mobile phone vendors. Of course currently their navigation devices are still better than Google’s since they can clearly profit from years of experience in the car navigation market, but that gap will shrink quickly in the next 2-3 years if not even faster.

Garmin needs to be mentioned as well. The company did a smart move understanding the danger of commodity markets obviously very well and was branching out into all kinds of vertical markets with specialized products (flying, boating, trucking, hunting, hiking and all kinds of sports). It will be much harder to compete against them by Google and since they are established now in many of these vertical markets TomTom and Navigon are simply too late to copy that business model and most likely also don’t have the cash to do so. So I think Garmin looks fine while the rest will face tough times ahead.

Got a new gadget. My Samsung D600 which I purely used for making voice calls got a bit aged now and I was in the market for a new phone. Having an iPodTouch for emails and surfing via WLAN I again was looking for a non-smartphone phone and had in mind something similar to my old Samsung which was one of the best phones I ever had. (light-weight, for a slider super slim fitting into a shirt pocket, long battery life, very easy to use, gorgeous color display, some basic software on board that I - admittedly - hardly used though, apart from the soccer penalty Java game).

During these smartphone times it was very very difficult to find anything even close to my beloved Samsung and I nearly decided to continue with it. But then NOKIA announced free turn-by-turn navigation and I decided to go for a NOKIA 6700 hoping to use it as a GPS and phone. Here now my first few hours of partly OK and partly frustrating experience that show how far away NOKIA is from becoming a software company and from Apple:

• it becomes very quickly obvious that NOKIA is trying to tie in their app and music store with over the air downloads. While this is certainly in the interest of mobile operators for the end user it means long download times and higher costs. For me as I already have the iPod Touch with many great apps I won’t use the OVI store at all also due to this annoying setup. nice try guys but this is amateurish.
• since navigation is now for free I was eager of course to try it out. After installing a bunch of software applications such as the one for synchronizing the phone with a PC (Mac is not supported - aeh!?), a SW update program and then a Map uploader program. In between things were hanging when Microsoft’s framework had to be installed. Overall I did not understand why it is not possible to simply have it all in one package. The average user will be struggling with all these software installs. So now eager to finally get it going I realized that I needed to activate the navigation service first for then it said I could try it out for 30 days. I am a bit confused now and not sure if that is indeed a trial only or a wrong info and I can use it for free as long as I wish. If I cannot I will give the phone back for sure as it would be a complete rip off…
• Now OVI has not only apps (that I won’t use as mentioned) but also  offers online file storage, Contact, Calendar, Mail and a Music store. File storage I won’t need as I will do that with my iPod Touch and a nice app, Contact I am using and sync worked well (unfortunately over the air so I will watch my bill because paying for Contact syncing is again BS and so far I have not found a way to sync with my MacBook), Calendar I won’t use but would have loved to, unfortunately it does not seem to support any other calendars right now, so entirely worthless since I for sure won’t start keeping a second calendar just for the phone, Mail I don’t need either since it only supports ovi.com mail extensions and I hate to have to joggle between different emails. The music store offers one year free music downloads, whow I thought, but then I realized only three mobile phones are supported and of course mine is not.

Summary:

While NOKIA is obviously trying to catch up with Apple at the current state they are hopelessly far behind them that makes it often not only frustrating but gets funny or if you are sentimental makes you feel sorry for them. The software remains a patchwork with way too many different applications that at the end don’t even do what people want to do. If you are a Mac user then you simply cannot work with a NOKIA phone properly. And even if you have a PC (which I do and used here) frustration is big. Now remember though that I only wanted a phone for making calls and a free GPS built in. Assuming the navigation is indeed for free then the phone is a high quality audio machine that works very well with a BT headset, stores a bunch of contacts even in the OVI application so does the job I wanted it to do. So while I am fine with this phone, NOKIA is in trouble and if they want to remain a significant player then they have to fully focus on end-to-end total user experience and usability.

Update: as it turns out the NOKIA 6700 has no free navigation included. Only free map downloads. NOKIA is not clearly stating this on their website and therefore one better checks exactly if your model has free spoken navigation as well or if you need to buy a 90 USD license to do that.

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Also read the Skype blog post.

There are many voices out there that say that only a few mobile OSs would survive and among them Apple, Google (Android), RIM, and Microsoft (Windows Mobile). Nokia’s OSs are not mentioned. One of the major reasons brought up is that Nokia is not a SW company but a hardware manufacturer only. I am not sure though if that is correct. In particular if Nokia continue to make the right moves like this free SW GPS, and acquires SW companies, then they have their current market leadership behind them. Also, unlike both Google and Apple, Nokia have a very strong relationship with the mobile operators as their distribution partner. To change a working infrastructure is a tough thing to do and typically requires really big differentiation and benefits. Of course Apple is able to deliver them but also seems to be the only vendor out there with that capability. That would reduce the battle for Nokia to one company “only” which is Apple. And to do that they need to do more than provide SW. Nokia have known that for a while and that’s the reason why they launched their Ovi platform, offering free music downloads and now free GPS capability. Of course free is not a good business model for a CE vendor and that’s why they have to really integrate this all well so that they offer an alternative to the Apple platform (touch phones, iTunes store, music player, apps, ebook reader). Looking at their website that’s exactly what they are working on but you can also see their main deficiency: while maps are free, network download charges for synchronization are of course not, and depend on your operator and your mobile plan. Apple would have provided deals with the major operators offering a complete end-to-end user experience (and if it is only that you can conveniently buy/activate it through iTunes). So still some way to go for Nokia, but first steps look promising at least.

One additional question now is what will happen with GPS vendors when what they offer is essentially a freebee on mobile phones. Worth a new blog post I think…

I tried out this startup company’s service today and it worked very nicely. At first I was not sure what it might bring in addition to web presentation services such as GoToMeeting or Webex, but it soon became clear.

While GoToMeeting still has no smartphone app, which I consider as pretty weak, Webex has that too. MightyMeeting’s approach is to upload your presentations (the limit is 20 MBytes per presentation) and then run it from there. So it is the SaaS version of these two other web presentation tools.

What are the advantages of doing that? The biggest advantage I see is in being able to run an online presentation simply from your iPhone, iPod Touch, Android or other smartphone and not having to be at your laptop or PC. Of course you can run it from there, too. While it is also possible to run a presentation and advance the slides from your smartphone while your laptop is connected to an LCD beamer, I was not then able to select a full-screen view, which is not ideal of course as you always see the border of the program and the browser. The program is in beta so I hope they add full screen view as well in that operation. One can expect that they will add better usability and communication features such as VoIP (a basic chat function is already supported) over time too.

This tool is free right now. No idea how they plan to commercialize it. One approach could be to come out with an enterprise version that they charge for the same way the others do. MightyMeeting btw won the last event of Founders Showcase run by TheFunded in Silicon Valley where every 3 months about 200 entrepreneurs and VCs come together to listen to pitches from very early stage companies and then vote for the best one that evening.

On my trip to the US I could not resist the saving potential buying a MacBook. I got the lowest cost model as I did not see any real difference to a MacBook Pro and I looked into all the details. All in all with some software I saved about 500 USD compared with what I would pay in Switzerland. Not bad when the total amount was only 1500 USD.

Now after I set up all my SaaS links, imported my contacts, synced the calendar with the Mac iCal and put all my PC data onto a 2.5″ super small portable hard disk from where I will use it in the next few weeks whenever needed, I was ready to go. I did not think a VMware installation would be necessary to make the switch from Windows.

My first working experience was awesome. The screen is a beauty and so are every other detail. Hard to understand why it took me so long to switch.

The Safari browser is quite fast which is important for me since I have lots of software in the cloud. I don’t see the need for any other browser - sorry Chrome and Mozilla. Now I am thinking to maybe get MobileMe so my iPod Touch and MacBook stay automatically synced and data is stored in the cloud as well. The only thing I did linking me back to the MSFT world was to buy Office for Mac as I don’t think Apple’s office suite will guarantee 100% backwards compatibility to my long list of MSFT Office files. So that’s it. I think Apple will make life for MSFT, PC vendors and mostly mobile phone vendors a tough one in the coming years.

To give you my opinion right away: I can’t imagine that Motorola and Verizon will by addressing some of the possible shortcomings of the iPhone ecosystem make their own Droid launch a success. Product management is more complicated than looking at  the market leader, writing down all its product specs and then simply bringing out a product that shows better features. This strategy succeeds only in a commodity market. But Apple and the iPhone, app store, iTunes ecosystem is NOT a simple product only but a thought-through end-to-end user experience product & service offering. The Motorola and Verizon folks have obviously still not understood this otherwise they would not have launched such a desperate campaign merely addressing - mostly - features. The strongest point was the openness of Google’s Android platform but also here they did a quick-and-dirty job. Not surprising knowing how desperate Motorola is these days to finally get back on track with a successful mobile phone after its long-time-ago success of the Razr.

But if you want to tackle Apple then you must take them on in a completely different way. And I think they are vulnerable because any company who is arrogant will miss opportunities or simply not do the best job possible. History has shown that over and over again. Unfortunately the Indian or Chinese style of product management, comparing spec sheet features one by one is not enough to make an impact. This has to be done differently…

I have been using Evernote now for quite a while, primarily to organize the weekly and daily tasks. Also whenever I have a new idea I write it down as a note and sync it when there is WLAN access available, like at my home or in the office. Evernote has evolved form a simple note taking tool to an archiving system and how this looks has been described by Guy Kawasaki at length. I don’t think I will use all of these things but perhaps you will find some of them useful? Forwarding e-mails to my Evernote e-mail address and with that archiving them is something I have decided to do now.  Here’s a summary of all the things you can do:

• Forward email to your unique Evernote email address.
• Upload text, photo, or voice recordings via an iPhone, Palm Pre, or Windows Mobile phone.
• Drag-and-drop audio, images, PDFs, and files into Evernote on the desktop.
• Attach Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and PDF documents to an email and send them to your Evernote email address.
• “Save PDF to Evernote” from the printing dialog box.
• Clip websites and blogs.
• Send documents directly from a scanner.
• Tweet text with the string “@myEN”.
• Upload from cameras directly to Evernote using the wireless EyeFi card.

Who would have forecast only a few years ago that Dell would drive the innovation of laptop technology forward? Dell was well known for me-too, high-powered professional laptops for a relatively good price. Up until they ran into support problems and the “Dell is hell” story made its round, hurting the company quite a bit. Now that Michael Dell is back he seems to be doing a lot of great things. Firstly they started using social communities for innovation as well as for tech support, which also appears to have had a great effect on the culture of the company. And now they have announced the Latitude Z, which is full of great innovation. It is pricey still, but in a short amount of time I am sure this will all become more affordable as always.

Watch this:

What else could people do on 9/9/2009, other than get married? That’s probably what Dell’s PR folks were thinking. In December 2008 they unveiled the original Adamo laptop but without much media buzz at the time. Now this week on September 9, a new Adamo was shown that measures 9.99mm in height, making it the thinnest laptop. Compare this with Apple’s MacBook Air which is 19.3mm high and you see that it must be unbelievably thin. Some folks who had their hands on a it were amazed about it. see here

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