Jason Ball's TechBytes

Just to qualify the title, the desktop is dead if you’re under 20 years old.

Screens are migrating from living room to desktop to tablet to mobile. Depending on which generation you belong to, one of those screens is your home screen.

I made a heretical statement 2 years ago in this post - “Facebook is going to be irrelevant in 10 years”, which was true, but the unspoken part which was omitted was “Facebook ON THE DESKTOP is going to be irrelevant”. FB positions itself as a mobile company – they are doing their best to remain relevant in a post PC world. They bought Beluga – one of the companies I predicted to overtake them. Instagram was another good choice- so smart acquisitions by FB. (Although you could argue that FB will be irrelevant irrespective of anything it tries to do to change it’s fate- but that’s a separate post).

Another stat that I tweeted last fall was that Qualcomm’s market cap had passed Intel’s – another sign that the desktop was dead/dying. The two firms are at parity right now – but over the next few years term, mobile wins…

The key take away here is that we’re in the middle of a major transition (no real surprise) but most people out are still thinking web – in design terms, product terms and functionality terms. There are more third wave of mobile companies being launched, and they will be the ones to succeed. They aren’t written for the web, and aren’t written by or for generation web.

I realize some of this is stating the obvious- but if you’re reading this on your desktop/laptop “go directly to jail; do not pass go, do not collect $200“

Filed under: Mobile

I joined Qualcomm Ventures 5 years ago because I thought the newly released iPhone would herald in an era where the web met wireless – and what a 5 years it’s been…

The first wave of companies, when I first started, were “mobile only” plays – they were remnants of the dumbphone age. I couldn’t have cared less – I was only interested the next wave: web services where the handset was the window into the service. One investment based on this thesis was we7 – a cloud based music service which became “a personal DJ in your pocket” a la Pandora for the UK market (we exited last year). Spotify is an excellent example of this type of business that more of you will be familiar with. We didn’t make many investments here, but lots of good companies came out of this space.

The following wave was mobile-only or mobile-first companies. Foursquare springs to mind immediately- and is an example I’ve used many times. They launched with a mobile-only offering, and have only recently added a website. We’ve made quite a few investments in this space – Viddy is probably our best known, launching on iOS only, growing to 25M+ users and then opening up content on the web to continue to develop the product and expand reach.

Things have continued to evolve, and I’ve basically stopped looking at apps and started looking at services – delivered via an app. A great example of this category is Citymapper – a London based company that crunches data in the background to optimize your journey using a combination of bus, train, tube, overground etc through London. I use the app every single day to navigate London. One of our better known companies is also in this space- Waze, which helps users “outsmart traffic, together”. And it really, really works. It’s saved my neck in San Francisco, L.A., San Diego and London as well – I wouldn’t think about driving in L.A without it. Waze takes all active users (drivers) at any given moment in time, and optimizes their route based on that data. It’s a lot of crunching. It’s an awesome service that’s made possible by millions of mobile devices. 34M users and still rocketing up. More users = more data = better service. I love it. Google Now is the last example that I’ll highlight – if you haven’t had a chance to experience it, have a look at this Google Now video.

And this is where we are now, smart, predictive services. They are what’s next in mobile- we’ll be seeing more and more of them.

Filed under: Mobile

I was lucky enough to unbox a G1 yesterday. Pretty neat phone, it doesn't outshine the iPhone in my opinion, but it's a great device. Definitely 100x better than any other phone out there (minus the iPhone).

But what makes the G1 great is the apps that take full advantage of *everything* the handset has to offer. Wikitude (worst name ever for the coolest app I've seen to date). Just watch the video.

It doesn't really give the same effect as standing on the 9th floor in a Qualcomm building looking out over the mountains towards Phoenix – seeing your field of view populate with POIs in the area for miles around, but it gives you a pretty good idea… More info/background on Wikitude is available here.

What's clear is that Android is going to be a serious contender- and is a fully functional Battleship.

Filed under: Mobile

Right after the mobile world congress this year, I posted that this was definitely the Year of the Browser. Opera have just released some pretty interesting stats on mobile web usage for Q1 2008 through the Opera mini browser:

Filed under: Mobile

One of the areas I’ve been spending a lot of time looking at is All Things Geo. Three headlines caught my eye today:

Eye-fi Explore -auto geotags your photos before uploading automagically via wifi.

Sony Ericsson- have patented geotagging songs “Proposed technology for a “location dependent music search” would use
GPS or a similar mapping method to determine the phone’s location and
promptly find music associated with the area, whether on the device or
on an Internet server. The feature would let users cue songs they
associate with favorite areas or download songs from local artists.”

MIT Android Demos- a list of recent apps developed on Android- all of which incorporate geo/contextual awareness. My favorite was the last one: snap

It’s kind of like Digg on a map. People can tag certain places and then other users can vote that particular attraction up or down.

So if you’re in a new city, you can pull up your current location and find things around you that other people think are interesting.

If there’s a particular user that’s uploaded a bunch of cool stuff, you can subscribe to his or her stuff. Arrows on the map change color the more popular they get. Very cool

Any other cool geo-related apps out there you’ve seen? (btw, if anyone has a fire eagle invite, pls ping me)

Filed under: Mobile

[Update, April 9] Just had a call from the guys at Jajah. They were very apologetic and stressed that they had not begun spamming their user base. Some background investigation is currently underway to determine how/where this message got sent…(watch it be my fault)

Even if it did come from Jajah, a call to rectify definitely things puts it right in my book….Jajah is again my favorite voip service.

–

What is it with tech companies these days? First Bebo go and spam everyone and now Jajah (my now ex-favorite voip service) goes spamming my contacts WITHOUT my consent:

Hi!

Do you want to talk to jason@emailaddressremoved for FREE?

Initiate a regular phone-to-phone call with JAJAH at www.jajah.com.
Between registered JAJAH users telephone calls are free of charge. I am
already registered, so effectively we can talk for FREE. Even before
you register you get 5 free minutes. No download, no installation, no
headset. Try it out now!

jason@emailaddressremoved also left this message for you:

Initiate a regular phone-to-phone call with JAJAH at www.jajah.com.
Between registered JAJAH users telephone calls are free of charge. I am
already registered, so effectively we can talk for FREE. Even before
you register you get 5 free minutes. No download, no installation, no
headset. Try it out now!

Curious? Check out www.jajah.com, get 5 free minutes and register to talk JAJAH too!

Note: Your Email address was only used for this message.

Talk JAJAH! http://www.jajah.com/

WHAT?! I was floored when I got a response to this email. Very naughty Jajah…

Filed under: Mobile

Google has announced Google Gears for Windows Mobile 5 and 6 devices.

Google Gears works in exactly the same way on a Windows Mobile 5 or
6 device as it does on a desktop PC. If you’ve already written an application
that uses Google Gears, your application will also work on a Windows Mobile
5 or 6 device. Except, of course, only within the limitations of that
device. This means you need to consider things such as small screen
and limited ability to input text as well as the limitations of the Document
Object Model and CSS APIs present on mobile devices.

If Google Gears is expanded to work on Safari (Desktop and iPhone), then Gears might provide an easier way to develop for an iPhone than even Apple’s own SDK.

Filed under: Mobile