Supernatural Agency: Online business tales

I still don’t own an iPhone but today I’m a lot closer to making the move. I’ll be waiting for the 3G version because with today’s announcement of the Software Development Kit (SDK) and Exchange compatibility iPhone will really be able to benefit from the faster network.

So what does all this mean to a non-techie? It means that Apple just reinvented the way we use the web and devices. Completely reinvented it. They’ve set up a system, with huge incentives (70% revenue share, $100 million VC fund for developers), easy as pie software distribution model, and a very complete kit for building applications fast. That means that the users of iPhones are going to see a flood of cool stuff you can do with the phone including business tools like CRM access, games, VOIP calling capability (free calls on your mobile phone anyone?) and a lot of stuff we can’t even imagine.

The Safari mobile browser has an incredible 70% of all mobile browsing after less than a year of existence and with a fraction of the installed market for mobile browsers. They just blew by the competition because the competition was awful crap. As others have noted, this should kill off .mobi. You simply don’t need it with Safari.

There are a couple of cool new technologies in iPhone that have been underutilized because developers could not access their capabilities without an SDK. These include multi-touch and the accelerator that ‘knows’ which way your phone is oriented. It turns out that this accelerator is a 3D sensor so it can be used as a controller for games and other applications. We’re going to see some wild stuff being developed that uses this. I’m imagining people walking down the street making Wii-like moves with their iPhones or being able to ‘aim’ their iPhone at an ad or building and receive info wirelessly based on geotargeting and motion detection. Multi-touch is a new interface that developers have had a year to think about and now they can get in there and make stuff that uses this UI.

But the big news is Exchange compatibility and a leap past RIM/Blackberry’s server-based sync mode. Corporate IT types now have no reason to object to their people using iPhone in their corporate networks and they may, in fact, have good new reasons for wanting them to. As any Crackberry user knows, you are dependent on RIM’s server farms in Canada to be up and running. If they go down, you go down. Microsoft and Apple worked together (!) to create a system that doesn’t require messaging to go through a dedicated central server which should greatly cut down on downtime while increasing speed.

The other corporate plus with the iPhone is that this thing is a major productivity tool that is just going to get cooler and cooler and more and more powerful as new apps start appearing almost daily.

Finally, anyone with programming skills, an idea and $99 can now start an iPhone software company. The 99 bucks gets you into the Apple AppsStore which automatically gives you a global distribution channel directly targeted at every iPhone user on the planet. And Apple deals with the money, takes a fair 30% cut and you get the rest which, because it’s software, is pure profit. You better believe that a lot of sixteen year-old geniuses are already writing code as I write these words.

Apple is amazingly adept at designing whole systems. The announcements today covered practically every concern the rumor mills were generating in the past few weeks. They will even allow developers of free applications to use the AppStore without incurring any charges. The brilliant thing about this is that there is no reason not to use their channel unless you are doing something underhanded or dirty (they won’t allow porn applications, however the porn business will simply optimise their websites for iPhone content delivery). Like iTunes, which will soon be the largest distributor of music in the US, AppStore will be the conduit that makes owning an iPhone as necessary as owning an iPod a few years ago.

One more thing, then I’ll stop. The same functionality is going to be available for the iPod Touch which is basically an iPhone without the cellular phone. Those who want to make calls without paying cell plan bills may have an option with a VOIP enabled Touch…

Cool stuff.

Techcrunch reports that even though mobile Safari has a tiny fraction of the browser market it has already exceeded Windows mobile in actual usage:

” According to figures from Net Applications, the iPhone now holds a 0.09% browser market share; a small figure perhaps but remarkable when compared to the market share of Windows CE on 0.06%; this despite at least 20 million Windows Mobile devices having been sold. Simply put, iPhone users are using their iPhone to surf the web far more often than users of Windows powered mobile phones. Symbian phone users (S60) rank at a lowly 0.01%, despite Nokia having sold hundreds of millions of phones worldwide.”

With only 1.4 million iPhones sold so far, they’ve taken browser market share from a competitor with nearly 20x users. For .mobi this is a death knell because Safari browsers don’t surf .mobi sites, they surf the entire web.

Dot mobi is looking like one of those interim technologies that we will look back upon as an oddity at best.

While I typically agree with those who find Business Week to be a great contrarian indicator (get lauded on the cover, watch your your stock go down), this article on the impact of applications on iPhone and the Google Phone OS gets it.

Basically, software developers don’t like to develop for mobile because the phone industry is too greedy and too fragmented. Every carriers wants their own piece of the pie, a big one, and they want the apps customized so they only work in their network. In my own experience working for a web-based email provider we found that the telecoms we sold private label versions to would only pay a few cents per user. For the average developer this simply isn’t worth the hassle.

Now, with an SDK (software development kit) coming for iPhone and the rumored Google phone operating system, we’ll have environments on phones to run apps that are not associated with the networks. This will re-engage those software developers who walked away from phone apps. The key to this, as anyone who reads this blog knows I am obsessed about, is the full browser on the phone.

Bye bye .mobi.

Hello web 3.0 on a mobile device.

And cheers for not requiring a laptop just to check my mail and the web while traveling… Next year everything changes again.

Anyone who reads this knows that I don’t believe in buying .mobi domains, primarily because the browser in iPhone is a full web browser that displays real websites rather than tiny .mobi sites. The other phone providers are scrambling to offer similar browsers along with hi-res larger displays to keep up. This transition means .mobi will not have much shelf life.

Now Andrew at Domain Name Wire accurately points out a major flaw in .mobi monetization: Most ads won’t convert. He uses mortgage ads as an example. If you click the ad on your phone and it takes you to a landing page with a form or calculator, it is highly unlikely that you will be able to use these services on a phone, meaning no possibility of a conversion. D’oh!

For .mobi to be viable, the ad serving experience must be completely revamped to work in a .mobi browser and the markets are limited to subjects that are related to mobility such as mapping, yellow page lookups, restaurants, etc. This leaves out a lot of advertisers and makes relevance very difficult to achieve.

He closes with two oddities. Overhearing some experienced domainers laughing at the price mortgage.mobi brought at an auction ($25,000) and closing this damning story with the observation that:

“And this isn’t a knock on .mobi domains — this is the one new domain extension that makes sense”

Andrew, this is a very big knock on .mobi, IMHO.