Is Samsung developing phone in agile method?

I ended up watching about 25 minutes of Samsung Galaxy S4 launch event at NYC Radio City.  While I was watching, multiple thoughts ran through my head.  I wanted to share some of them.

Technological changes are closer than they appear

Yesterday I had a chance to chat with a couple of fellow product managers at SVPMA.  We talked about fast changing mobile technologies, social media and digital privacy.  It was interesting to share stories on how we work and play using the latest technologies that we take it so granted.  Being able to pinpoint our location using GPS system, looking up friend's phone number at moment's notice without ever having to memorize the number, and keeping up with profile changes among professional contacts at all time are some examples of what technologies enable us to do.

When I look back at my own technology purchases, it looks something like this:

Thanks to mobile, we have accelerated disruption

Garry Tan of YCombinator shared a post showing the survey data of little over thousand teenagers.  He asked them to pick social networks that they used more than several hours per week.  On his top 5 chart, there were Tumblr, Facebook and Twitter.  But there were also Instagram and Snapchat.  They showed up 21% and 19% of the answers respectively.

Social network usage among 13-18 and 19-25 yr olds.
Surprise! Say hello to Snapchat.
Source: http://blog.garrytan.com/tenth-grade-tech-trends-my-survey-data-says-s

My day on mobile

For the last two days, I have been at offsite away from my desk.  It's times like that when I realize how much more I have become dependent on mobile phone.  Now I have been so used to getting access to information on my fingertip, it is to the point where I cannot imagine walking around without my iPhone.  It almost feels like when I first started to realize computer is useless unless it's connected to Internet.

Connected devices are allowing me to respond to requests at any time.  It also keeps me online so that anyone can reach me at any time.

Let me share the several use cases of my iPhone just today:

Mobile app user retention is hard. Why?

With Fred Wilson's post titled What Has Changed today there have been lot of discussions around shifting landscape of VC funds to enterprise from consumer space.  Wilson's points were 1) that consumer space has matured over last several years with well established platforms, such as Amazon, Facebook, Twitter, Google, Apple, etc., therefore it's difficult to find a service that is not provided by the platforms and 2) that it is very challenging to have active user base who continue to use the service on the mobile environment.  These two points are causing VC funds to shift to enterprise.

After reading the post, I saw Cristina Cordova's post highlighting the difficulties in building and sustaining monthly active users (MAU) on mobile.  She sited SocialCam, Viddy, Draw Something and Path as the examples of difficulties for startups to sustain the growth while maintaining the active user base.

Mobile app user retention seems really hard.  Why?

It's because of two reasons in my view: 

Explosion of mobile devices

I've been talking about how internet-connected mobile devices will become ubiquitous around us.  By 2016, number of connected devices will exceed the world population.  As mobile devices becomes mainstream, there is explosion of consumer options for mobile devices.

This week has been a good example.  Amazon announced 3 new models of Kindle Fire along with Kindle reader with back-lit screen; Motorola announced Droid Razr HD, Droid Razr Maxx HD, and the Droid Razr M running Android; and Nokia also hurried up and announced Lumia 920 and 820 running Windows 8.  Oh yeah, and there will be iPhone 5 announcement happening next week along with mini iPad.

How many connected devices do you have?

Bloomberg ran an article about average U.S. household having five internet-connected devices.  That got me wondering about how many devices that I have in my family.  I have a young family with 3 year old and a month old.  My kids are not exactly at internet ready age (although my 3-year-old boy has proved to me that he's ready for e-commerce).  Yet our connected device count is nine.

Whoa, what sign do I look first?
Information overload is just as bad as
lack of information.

We have two iPads, one Kindle Touch, one iPhone, three laptops, one mini PC and one desktop.  I actually think that we are below the Silicon Valley average because I'm the only one with smartphone.  I would guess most households would have each family member having one smartphone device and a laptop computer, and possibly one or two Wi-Fi-enabled tablets.  That would make 3-4 connected devices per adult, which would make 12 - 16 devices for a family of four.

What is surprising is how fast we got here.  A couple of years ago, the number of connected devices in my household was four.  We just had three laptops and one desktop.  Phones were simple feature phones or email-only Blackberry.  iPad and Kindle were not available on the market yet.

As I have posted earlier, we are at the cusp of transitioning to truly ubiquitous computing power and staying connected at all time.  We no longer wait for status of others.  We expect people to be available at all time.  We are expected to be available at all time.  This shift to constant connected-ness is creating not only technology paradigm shift, but also driving the shift of our perspectives of what it means to be reachable at all time.

No longer do we think about not having data.  It's about having relevant data at the right time to make decisions.  Delivering the right data at the right time and discovering new data are becoming more important than ever before.

How many connected devices do you have?  How do you keep up with deluge of information flooding your timeline everyday?

Mobile phone radiation: take precaution until we know better

FCC (Federal Communications Commission) plans to re-investigate whether mobile phone's low frequency radio wave causes adverse health affect.  It originally launched earlier probe 15 years ago, and reached conclusion of no adverse health effect after its chief investigator got let go (I wrote about this topic back in November 2010).

Mobile phone is so much more than just a phone;
it's a communication device.
Its long term effect must be studied and understood.

It is great to see FCC taking initiatives to investigate this.  Until I hear overwhelming evidence that it's safe to use cellphone without worrying about health effect, I would recommend everyone to take caution in holding up your cellphone to your ear.  Especially I won't be allowing my children to use cellphone.

Mobile: the new frontier

Today Facebook launched its Facebook Camera app for iPhone.  It's a photo sharing app much like Instagram except that it allows you to share photo on Facebook only.  It is an app that was built to share, view and comment on photos shared by friends around you.  As its name suggests, it does nothing but making photo sharing easy.

Facebook Camera app:
it definitely made it easier to share photos on Facebook
with its laser focus on photo sharing.

Two things that keep compliance team awake at night

"What is the thing that keeps you awake at night?"

That was the question posed to panel of compliance team members from regulated industries at Symantec eDiscovery User Conference 2012.

"Social media and BYOD."

That was a response from one of the panelists.  It sums up the challenges with dealing with rapidly changing communication environment.

Mobile phone + social media;
they are feeding each other's growth.

Mobile and social media combination is creating perfect storm scenario for all enterprise IT department and compliance team.  Traditional IT policy and management are no longer applicable to today's environment where people buys their own mobile devices, signs up for their own services and blends work and personal life on their social media accounts.

And all these changes are accelerating.  850,000 Android devices are getting activated each day (and probably just as many iPhones), and we are fast approaching the point where mobile devices will be considered as default choice of computing platform.

They are enough to keep any IT and compliance team awake at night.

Web 2.0 to Mobile

Just as Facebook is about to go IPO, there are already talks about how Facebook's over $100 billion valuation might not last too long.  Eric Jackson wrote an article yesterday on Forbes yesterday about how he sees Facebook and Google might not be around in next 5 years.

Eric makes an argument that large companies are slow to adapt to fast changing environment, and this will likely lead to big companies like Facebook and Google to miss the fundamental shift in the technology that's already happening.  That shift he talks about is moving from Web 2.0 to Mobile.

Guess there are more smartphones than iPhone and Samsung;
let's see whether we'll have room for Windows phone.

It is no surprise to anyone that mobile is literally changing how we live our lives.  Things that we would only read about from a science fiction are common occurrences.  We take pictures of things and instantly share them with friends.  Within a few minutes we can talk about what we posted online with friends from all over the world.  We don't talk about dial tone or presence anymore.  We just post, and people respond.  We look up product information instantly and compare prices while standing in a checkout line.

When I look around, all signs point to huge disruption.  With all computing powers and instant access to information, we are entering extremely volatile time in technology.  And all of them converge on single point, which is people are carrying mobile devices.

It is what allows Big Data companies to collect massive amount of location data, it is what we use to access information and connect with one another, and it is what we carry to augment our reality with virtual network.  It's all mobile.

And it's happening fast.

Reading through Eric's article and his comments, no one disputed the fact that mobile is creating a big change in the current technology landscape.  It will take about 4-5 years until number of mobile devices exceed the number of population.

We all know these changes are coming.  It's just that we don't know what they look like yet.  It's time to start making some bets.

Smartphone is the new majority

Yesterday Nielsenwire released an article about surging smartphones in U.S.  Close to half of all mobile phones in U.S. are smartphones.  Since that was February data, there could be more smartphones than feature phones now.  Trend is clear.  Smartphones will be the new majority as number of feature phones dwindles down.

We are at singularity point; feature phone is new VHS cassette

Business Insider: Future of Mobile

Business Insider released slides regarding Future of Mobile last Thursday.  Everyone knows that mobile is changing the personal computing landscape.  Yet it's eye-opening to see all data presented in a single slide deck.  Kudos to Business Insider for putting it together in the context.

Some key takeaways for me were following:

What Would 2011 Have For Us?

After 3 week long hiatus I'm about to restart my blogging. During the break I visited India and South Korea for about ten days each, and was reminded that how much I grew addicted to constant Twitter feeds and Facebook status updates. The moment I regained my free wifi connection at Seoul International Airport, I was back at catching up all the news bits from my social media curators.

One theme that I noticed from all tweets and articles was the year 2011 prediction. Whether Facebook will go IPO or not, whether Google will successfully launch its social network site or not, what the next Groupon or Zynga will be in year 2011, and such. After reading a few of them, I realized I had a few overarching trends that I saw from my perspective. I wanted to outline a few notable trends that I anticipate in year 2011.