We have two great speakers to fill us in on the latest in mobile news.

Serge Jespers, Platform evangelist for Adobe Systems

Serge Jespers is an Adobe Platform Evangelist and longtime Flash enthusiast. For more than 10 years he has been working with Flash to develop award-winning online experiences. He became an Adobe certified freelance Flash designer/developer in 2004 and joined Adobe in 2007. Serge believes you can do virtually anything with Flash, and is eager to prove it. Born and raised in Belgium, he now lives near Antwerp when he is not traveling all over Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) to spread the word about AIR, Flash, and Flex.

Blog: http://sergejespers.com | Twitter: http://twitter.com/sjespers

Liran Golan from Delta Electronics

Speech title: Innovative Services- Growth in Future e-Paper Markets

Speech description: Advances in e-paper technologies are constantly being made over the years, and there is a growing demand for products which offer completed services to cater to individual customer. More and more products and services are offered as a package. Innovative services now play a key role for product differentiations and path-breaking competition.

http://www.delta.com.tw/

Come out and beat the heat on August 2nd!

Event Program

When: Monday, August 2nd, 2010

Where: Mary’s Bistro 2nd. Floor, No.89, Sec 2 Ren-Ai Rd., Taipei City

Admission: 250 NTD (includes 吃到飽 buffet and 2 alcoholic drinks)

Check-in: Starting 6:45 PM

Presentations & Discussion: 7:30 PM

Networking Time: 8:00 PM

Please go to http://www.mobilemonday-taipei.com or Click here to sign-up

We have lined up two great speakers and look forward to seeing everyone at our Summer Bash!

Speaker and sign-up info will be posted shortly.

We are excited to announce that MoMo Taipei will be back with another great event on 31 May 2010.

Speakers: Rolf Assev, CSO at Opera Software
John Williamson, CTO at Puno Systems

When: Monday May 31 (645-10pm)

Where: Mary’s Bistro 2nd. Floor, No.89, Sec 2 Ren-Ai Rd., Taipei City

Admission: 250NT (food + 2 drinks)

Check-in: 6:45 PM

Presentations & Discussion: 7:30 PM

Networking Time: 8:00 PM

Click here to sign-up

]]> http://www.toro-asia.com/momotpe/2010/05/mobilemonday-taipei-may-31st-marys-bistro/feed/ 0 http://www.toro-asia.com/momotpe/2010/05/may-31st-is-our-next-event-come-out-and-join-the-excitement/ http://www.toro-asia.com/momotpe/2010/05/may-31st-is-our-next-event-come-out-and-join-the-excitement/#comments Thu, 20 May 2010 07:32:34 +0000 admin http://www.toro-asia.com/momotpe/?p=344 We have just confirmed that the next Mobile Monday Taipei event will be on May 31st @ Mary’s Bistro.

We have lined up another great set of speakers and look forward to seeing everyone at the upcoming event.

Speaker and sign-up info will be posted shortly.

We are excited to announce that MoMo Taipei will be back with another great event on 12 April 2010.

We have lined up some dynamic speakers and an energizing topic, which is sure to draw your attention.

Check back for further updates, including registration, as we re-launch MobileMonday Taipei! And make sure to add us on Facebook to stay informed of the latest MoMo Taipei developments.

Looking forward to April 12!

Steve Follmer consulted in Silicon Valley for many years, where he co-founded live365.com. He is currently between startups and analyzing opportunities in the mobile space. Steve holds a BSE degree from Princeton University.

“Get your head in the clouds : Are Netbooks quietly driving us toward Cloud Computing? ?”

Taipei MobileMonday 23, at Mary’s Bistro Cafe, featured a dynamic presentation from Sascha Pallenberg and Nicole Scott of Netbook News, on netbooks, the cloud, and their mutual synergy.

Sascha began with a fascinating review of the history and future of netbook hardware. Milestones included the first eeePC, which sold 3.5mm units. And more recently, ASUS has a netbook for kids, using Disney branding and distribution, with a 8.9″ display at $350. The Dell Latitude 2100 is also breaking ground at schools, its light, ruggedized, and straps right on to your little scholar. For teachers, Dell offers a 32 port docking station that recharges both the battery and the homework. Another exciting development is the eeePC T91, a “netvertible” that pirouettes into a tablet.

Netbooks are really hitting their stride, settling in on proper sized keyboards and screens, while retaining their svelte form factor. Users are waking up to the fact that they are fully capable for for our quotidian computing: email, surfing, IM, youtube, and office tasks. And they are breaking into vertical markets such as hospital and emergency workers, now that they are turning into tablets, complete with touch screens and multi-touch hardware and OS support.

Nicole does all her work for netbooknews using her netbook, with the exception of video editing. She argued that netbooks and smartphones are not exclusive, that there are valid reasons to carry both, and that the press is trumping up any “battle” between the two. Indeed carriers are now bundling free netbooks if you commit to their 3G data plan contract.

The 3G data network links smartphones and netbooks alike into the cloud. Sascha demonstrated for us a very advanced example: jolicloud, which lets you follow other users and the hot new apps, games, and services they are using (hosted on Jolicloud and sold through their app store). Jolicloud will soon operate purely in html, thus automatically syncing your service ecosystem across most every machine and platform. While also not fully released, Google’s Chrome OS will compete.

The cloud has technical advantages for many home, SMB, and even enterprise users. Less proven, but as Sascha discussed, equally vital, are business models leveraging this new paradigm. Carriers distributing free 3G netbooks with data plan subscriptions is one. Google’s targeted ad support is another; their Chrome OS speaks softly but carries a big stick. A more service oriented model such as e.g. $25/yr flickr pro acct. may also prove viable.

The cloud is the future, and the future is now. The client computer is too fat for most tasks; do most users really enjoy fretting about backups, disk crashes, viruses, and syncing? Tonight’s talk brought this vision into focus. The cloud enables a thinner desktop, which can take the form of a netbook, or a smart phone. Netbooks and the cloud are synergistic. Netbook unit volume in Taiwan now rivals conventional notebooks. Even meagre CPUs are adequate to launch linux and run a browser. CPU’s and operating systems are becoming commodities, and the Wintel model is under assault.

How are the big players affected by the netbook-cloud juggernaut? The obvious winner is Google, and the losers include Intel and Microsoft. Amazon has been selling cloud services for years. Taiwanese manufacturers invented netbooks, and they are profiting, though margins can be low. Apple both wins and loses; their notebook sales are being hurt by netbooks, they must release their own netbook tablet; their iPhones and iPods benefit from the cloud but their back end lags Google’s. And in the end, the biggest winner is the end user.

Resources

Netbook News http://www.netbooknews.com/ (Video, English)
Netbook News http://www.netbooknews.de/ (Text, German)
Mary’s Cafe http://www.maryscafe.com.tw/ Taipei’s Fine Dining Top Steak Pasta House

It’s fascinating to watch laptops getting smaller and turning into “netbooks” while mobile phones are getting bigger to accommodate full keyboards and better Web browsing and application support. The pundits think these low-cost portable devices offer so many attractive features that they’ll soon displace smart phones. Intel CEO Paul Otellini even called Netbooks the “only bright spot of growth in the PC industry ”. As netbooks continue to spread and become a common option for entry-level users, road warriors, and users who primarily need just e-mail and the Web, netbooks are going to inevitably change the computing world. As a result, the limited local processing and limited local storage available on netbooks are likely to become catalysts for transferring more processing and storage to the data center, where companies such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon are currently building up large reservoirs of computing resources.

Those three companies will certainly be beneficiaries of this trend – especially in terms of their cloud storage initiatives – but so will many other companies that host Software-as-a-Service applications, hosted storage, and cloud computing services. Enterprises will also exploit this trend to gain efficiency and manageability improvements by being able to centralize more applications, and in some cases even migrating to more of a thin client architecture. Corporate users have often resisted this scenario because it took away some of the flexibility they were used to on their PCs. However with netbooks, this type of centralization would actually help speed up and simplify storage and applications for users on their netbooks, and so it’s much more likely to be accepted.

For 23rd MobileMonday Taipei Event, we invite Nicole Scott and Sascha Pallenberg from Netbooknews.com to talk about one of the latest trends in mobile world, netbook, since more and more operators are offering free netbook to encourage their customers to sign up for 3G serives. Netbooknews.com is the source for the latest and greatest content about netbooks, MID’s and thin and light notebooks and it brings you all the information in an easy going, easily digestable video format. The netbooknews.com team is Sascha Pallenberg, Nicole Scott and Lars-Göran “LG” Nilsson. Along with netbook, we will also discuss the development of cloud computing in today’s hi-tech market. And we will also demo a brand new operating system specially designed for netbooks, called Jolicloud. This OS provides a beautiful interface, an application directory and a set of social features that makes it easy and fun to use.

Event program:

Time: 7PM, Monday, August 3rd, 2009
Place: Mary’s Bistro 2nd. Floor, No.89, Sec 2 Ren-Ai Rd., Taipei City.

Check-in: 7 PM

Presentations & Discussion: 7:30 PM

Presentation from Netbooknews.com:
– Sascha Pallenberg : Netbook Overview and Cloud Computing
– Nicole Scott : From smartphone and mobile computing to netbooks

Special presentation of Cloud Computing from a world famous cloud computing service provider

And live demo of Jolicloud, a brand new OS specially designed for Netbooks

Networking Time: 8:00 PM

Steve Follmer consulted in Silicon Valley for many years, where he co-founded live365.com. He is currently between startups and analyzing opportunities in the mobile space. Steve holds a BSE degree from Princeton University.

iPhone Gold Rush – New Business Opportunity driven by iPhone.

Our 22nd event convened with a healthy crowd at Mary’s Bistro Cafe for some hearty Australian fare.

Other Steves (Jobs, Wozniak, Jurveston, McGarrett, Ballmer…) were unavailable, and I was pleased to accept an invitation from Scott Lo (Business Development Manager at Toro) to make the first presentation: How and why you can get a free iPhone, and other predictions about the future of the mobile industry. I’m creating a small startup involved in LBS, which will target the US market partly because of its size and also because I don’t want to compete with my colleagues here in Taipei. I’ve been analyzing the iPhone, and Scott asked me to share my findings with you.

Wikipedia has a decent table summarizing the three different generations of iPhones http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone_models. The latest model, the 3GS can be pre-ordered from CHT and should be available in August, probably the 19th.

But I begin with two primary criticisms of the iPhone. First, it lacks support for background apps. How can you run a chat client without background apps? Well, they’ll fix it, but give them a year or two. I suspect this is related the second criticism: the battery barely lasts a day. Indeed in the 3GS, they had to underclock the CPU. Apple is rumored to have built a team of custom chip designers; I suspect this is to both cost reduce the iPhone and increase its battery life.

So, the iPhone is not perfect, but on balance its more than good enough. Its on time enough and its on budget enough. They’ve built a huge lead on Google’s Android phone. They’ve sold over 20 million and are well on their way to overtaking the 50 million Windows Mobile devices early next year.

Now, as important as the hardware and software, is the App Store. It really bulldozed the barriers facing small creative developers. I know some of these developers and they have been unhappy with the carriers. Well, lets just look at the record. The first cell phone call was made in April 1973. The iPhone was first sold in June of 2007. So the carriers have had decades, during which approved and released, I will guess, a few hundred applications. And in two years, Apple released 50,000 applications. Take a look at the App Store Wall from Apple’s developer conference last month.

So if the iPhone is so successful, why would they make it free? Apple is never eager to lower prices. Well, there are three reasons I’m predicting this. The first is funny math. What does the iPhone actually cost, to apple and to the consumer. Lets’ do some rough calculations using USA numbers. Everyone is going around talking about the $99, $199, $299 iPhone. But the reality is you also sign a 2 year contract at over $70 a month. What actually happens is Apple makes the iPhone for less than $200, and when you sign up with their carrier partner AT&T, you agree to pay AT&T nearly $2000 over those 2 years. And AT&T gives Apple $500 out of that revenue stream. So at the first level, Apple makes a device for $200 and sells it for $700. And these numbers are borne out, approximately, in Hong Kong, one of the countries where you can simply buy an iPhone for cash, with no contract, and there the new models cost HKD 5500 and 6500. Last year Apple made a big splash by reducing the price of the iPhone by $200… while at the same time increasing the cost of the 2 year contract by $10 a month. So they actually raised the cost, but many buyers don’t analyze the purchase and in packaging the cost in this way is clearly effective.

The second reason I think the iPhone will be free is that Apple is sometimes willing to sacrifice margins for long term gains, as we can tell from their Mac Mini. As we can estimate from a tear-down by iSuppli, the mac mini costs $376 to manufacture, but sells for a mere $599. http://www.isuppli.com/NewsDetail.aspx?ID=20432 By contrast, the iPhone 3GS costs $179 and bring in a revenue stream of $700 or up. http://www.isuppli.com/NewsDetail.aspx?ID=20398 I don’t have Apple’s exact spreadsheets but what is clear is that Apple is wiling to cut margins on a product if it serves their big-picture long-term strategy. The Mac Mini is strategic as a box that can slide in and convert a Windows user to a lifetime mac customer. The iPhone is strategic for capturing phone users and a long term revenue stream of carrier fees, and music, video, and software sales, and even Mac computer purchases.

I really have to give respect to Apple: first they kick the music industry in the ass, then they kick the mobile industry in the ass, and to top off these ass-kickings are strategically related. Breathtaking strategy at the highest level.

The third reason is competitive pressure. Google has said there will be 20 different Android handsets this year. You can bet there will be a lot of diversity of features and prices. And Google will harness the marketing budgets of those 6 or 8 manufacturers, and hundreds of carriers, all promoting their Android handsets. And I further suspect some carriers may be a bit unhappy with Apple’s new world order and would like to use Android handsets to try to hold Apple in check.

So for these three reasons: hidden charges, long term big picture flexibility, and competitive pressure, I predict Apple will make the iPhone free. Now they may charge an extra $10 a month. And it may be the old low end model at first. But its going to be free, for anyone who signs a contract for $80 a month. This is Apple’s “ace in the hole” against Google, possibly as early as September. Of course they’re not completely free, and its only a $99 price reduction, but as Apple teaches us day after day, the psychological impact is paramount.

What are the broader implications of this for the mobile industry? First, the handset is no longer a handset. At a deeper level, the phone is not just a phone, not just a handset. For Apple is a channel for selling software, music, videos and computers. For Google a handset is rather, a platform for delivering ads (which can be location based). Eric Schmidt has said its mobile is going to be bigger than internet. And for Toro, it is a platform for mobile marketing, a 24×7 channel to the customer.

Apple and Google want to carpet bomb the planet with hardware and software. They are not in the business of selling widgets. They are in the business of capturing users and their long term revenue streams. And I submit that Microsoft, Sony-Ericsson, RIM, Nokia, are tied to outmoded business models that can no longer compete with the new models, and they will be hemorrhaging market share.

A second, related implication is that smartphones are going to accelerate their push downmarket into feature phone territory. Set top boxes for cable TV in the USA are also expensive, but they find a way to give them away or rent them out cheaply, because they enable far larger revenue streams, with high NPVs. Throw in the competition between Google and Apple and I only see prices falling.

The big picture involves 2 billion handsets in the world, with 1 billion more being sold this year, primarily as replacements. Perhaps up to 20% of these phones can be defined as smartphones. Sales figures from Q408 showed OS distribution as Symbian with 47%, RIM with 19.5%, Windows Mobile with 12.4%, Apple with 10.7%, and Google hardly on the chart. However, it is clear that things are changing quickly. I expect smartphones to push down market to beyond 30% in the next several years. And I predict Apple and Google to shoot to the top of that league table, with Nokia getting hurt the worst. Nokia, RIM, and Microsoft are more or less simply selling widgets and despite having slapped up app stores their business models are not built for the 21st century. They’re not positioned to pump ads and music through the handset to the consumer like Apple and Google are, and they will soon find themselves replaced at the top of the league table. Google have up to 20 handsets running Android within about 6 months, and in response Apple will drop their prices $99 thus making their low end model nominally free. You can download the presentation here.

Resources:
http://mashable.com/2009/03/21/iphone-economy/
http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/05/06/just-how-much-money-can-free-iphone-apps-make-quite-a-bit/
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/06/11/why_apple_keeps_iphone_specifications_quiet.html
http://www.businessweek.com/technology/content/jun2009/tc20090612_492771_page_2.htm
http://moconews.net/article/419-report-smartphones-to-be-29-percent-of-total-market-in-2014/
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T2IMHuZXfl0 AppStore
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8To-6VIJZRE Ballmer

Having whet everyone’s appetite for the iPhone (and yes, I did just buy one), we greeted the presenters from Ayaris 9. This firm outsources iPhone development to their skilled team in India. Todd Enger learned to spec out products at Hewlett Packard; he and his team work with you to define your spec, and then they oversee its completion via their offshore team.

Included in their portfolio, they presented a GPS based coupon application, software to present medical videos, and even a karaoke application, among others. Further information is available via their website.