Google says: Go Mobile, Follow the Mobile

Google CEO, Eric Schmidt says: the future is Mobile

If you have not watched Google CEO's interview on Charlie Rose yet, this is a must watch.


In the interview, Schmidt keeps driving home the point mobile is the future. "Fast forward a few years from now, with the content and capability of sophisticated mobile phones, and with a new generation of applications. We expect eventually the majority of the uses of the internet will be on the mobile phones. Mobile phone usage is growing faster than personal computers. There are many more of them on the order of 4B in the world. In our lifetime, at least 5B or 5.5B of the population will have mobile phones. Emerging markets like China and India are growing phenomenally." After a series of questions from Charlie Rose ranging from topics in content publishing, advertising, privacy, social networks, micro payment, Google Earth, Google Latitude, digital divide, etc... Eric Schmidt continues, "The real story is going to be the mobile phone."


Hong Kong mobile data plans, my pathetic story!

O.K. I am cheap! Well, may be not! I do own an iPhone. However, it is in California with my trusted engineering friend who often help me test all things mobile internet from the US. It has cost me USD 2000 for the entire contract with AT&T so I am reluctant to buy another iPhone in HK just yet. Finally, I bought my netbook few days ago, determined to subscribe or get a mobile internet data plan to go with the netbook. After in Timesquare's Fortress for over an hour, three other people had bought the iPhone come and gone, and I am still trying to figure out the best and most affordable mobile data plan for my netbook and my Ericsson 3G phone. Bottom line is there are so many different plans, some prepaid and some monthly plan with contract. Some works for computer only, some works for both computer and mobile handset. Some daily cap, some monthly cap. Some need to buy a separate HSDPA modem, some rebate the cost of the modem when sign a 12 month contract. I am not afraid of numbers in general but I was exhausted after comparing all the plans in 3 and Smartone. Proudly holding my new netbook, but sadly I went home without a 3G data plan, feeling something is just not right.


Follow the mobile and everything else will follow

And next day Tomi incidentally send me this article from a Google guy who speaks to my heart! Thank you, thank you, Vic Gundotra. To all 3G operators in Hong Kong, I dedicate this article, Follow the Mobile, to you from the bottom of my heart!

Flat is the new phat

Flat rate data plan (I add afforable, HKD 400/month is NOT quite afforable), encourages data usage and leads to customer satisfaction.

"Consider MetroPCS, a regional carrier in the United States with just over 5 million subscribers on their 2.5G CDMA network. Over the past year, their Google search volume grew over 2.5x more quickly than another global carrier with 10 times as many users, and a 3G network."

Metro’s “secret” is a free month of web access at signup, with the option of flat-rate, unlimited data thereafter. As a result nearly half of Metro’s subscribers use the web on a regular basis. (It’s also worth mentioning that MetroPCS was recently recognized for excellence in customer satisfaction.

In contrast, many operators subject users to a labyrinthine set of data options, from pay-as-you-go to daily caps with significant overage charges. Now, can you imagine paying your at-home internet provider for every page load? Or needing to know the size of a website before visiting it? Or managing your monthly download quota across your entire household? It’s simply not practical, and it’s all the same internet, so why do we treat mobile users as second-class citizens? Case and point: my colleague’s January phone bill contained 27 pages of itemized data charges, spelled out in excruciating detail.

A mobile gadget for you lucky mo-surfers: Bolt mobile browser

If you are one of the lucky ones who has a cool 3G phone and unlimited data plan, here's a great gadget, Bolt mobile browser, that can handle mobile video streaming smoothly. New users climb past 300,000 for the first month of beta is worth checking out.

Made in Hong Kong, Happenings in Hong Kong

Kanchoo, a Simple and Elegant iPhone app for premium news publishing

Today, I met with Kanchoo, a Hong Kong base startup, and got a life demo of their content management system and the Kanchoo native iPhone application. The web based Content Management System is very easy to use. A news media person will take no time to learn how to enter news categories and articles into the CMS. Within minutes of "Publishing" the newly added articles, the content shows up beautifully on the iPhone. The Kanchoo application has all the nice reader features one expects from reading news on the iPhone. Their web site has a good summary and video demo. The product is scheduled to launch in May. Please wish them the best of success! It is made in Hong Kong!!

Who can use Kanchoo? If you are a news media, government agencies, academic institutions who have a steady volume of news publication and wish to delivered on the iPhone without worrying about the technical know how, Kanchoo can be your answer!


Google CEO, Eric Schmidt, on Charlie Rose Mar 06, 2009 tip #1

The interview has so much good information that I had taken 4 hours to watch the video in many pauses and written almost a full transcript of the interview. Over the next few weeks, I will take apart Schmidt's insight and views on various topics from this interview and apply to the topics discussed in this blog.

#1 How to decide the approach to monetize user generated content?

Since I just met with Kanchoo today, I thought I'll mention a few related comments from Schmidt on the topic of content publishing. Schmidt echoed many content publishers struggle in the challenge in monetizing user generated content. Schmidt categorize user generated content into three groups. If content has a massive audience, well he uses a really massive number: 20 Billion, then advertising is the way to go. If audience is "smaller", say 20 millions, he suggests using micro payment. The micro payment can be in the form of 1 cent, 3 cents, 5 cents for a viewing. If the content is of high premium value, such as research report contents. They have a very small audience but content is of high value to them, and those businesses or individuals likely can afford to pay for the specialized content. This third category is best to use subscription charge.

Well, the beauty of democracy and freedom of speech is it allows varying views to be expressed and heard. Wired Magazine 16.03 has an interesting and yet somewhat extreme view of the future of business, not constrained to content publishing. FREE! Why $0.00 is the future of business.



Web Wednesday, a social mixer for digerati of Hong Kong

Also learned today that Web Wednesday Hong Kong's next social is next Tuesday, April 7! Matt Mullenweg, the founding developer of WordPress will be speaking about "The Bare, Naked Realities of Blogging". Click here for more information on Web Wednesday.

Why this blog? DIY Mobile University in Hong Kong

The journey to discover and share mobile information in Hong Kong

Have you had an experience when you have a great passion on an idea and find that there was hardly any information available in print or online media? I must say I have taken for granted that anything I am interested to learn about, there's always more information on the web than I can manage to study. However this is not so true about mobile technology and businesses in Hong Kong. Having a great deal of interest in mobile work and living in Hong Kong, it seems starting this blog can benefit many like myself. Here's a journey that focus on mobile information in Hong Kong, but will undoubtedly touch on regional mobile stories for a more comprehensive view of Hong Kong mobile industry.

A note of thanks to Tomi Ahonen

The last time I had a mentor is when I started working for Sun Microsystems in 1988. I knew how having a mentor can make a huge difference in shaping the path and growth both in our personal as well as professional domains.
Tomi is known by many in the world as a visionary in mobile industry. As a debut of this blog, it is only fair for me to say my thanks publicly to Tomi who has been so generous in offering his insights, knowledge and most importantly, encouragement to anyone who has a passion on any idea domain to be free to explore and experiment the world of blogging. "It's the people whom you'll meet and their comments and sharing that result from your blogging that makes it rewarding."

Where does technology belong in media in Hong Kong?

It was an unexpected place but I am happy all the same to find out about the major local media companies in Hong Kong from this BBC page on Hong Kong dated Dec 2008.

Having come back to Hong Kong from Silicon Valley, it's a habit to look for the technology section in the newspaper. Having looked through all the local newspapers listed at this BBC page, I found SCMP has a weekly Technology section. The Standard online technology section has two articles both dated early March. The Chinese papers do not have a separate technology section. The 20 minutes research tells me that this journey is going to be fun and exciting because it'll be challenging!

Talking mobile

There is an iPhone Application Development training class, April 20-22, 2009, in Hong Kong offered by JadeTower, a Hong Kong base technology startup. Disclaimer: I have not met the folks in this company nor taken this training before. But I will be meeting up with them soon and having a look at some of the iPhone technologies they are launching.

Better be late than never.
We just missed the 2nd Mobile Film Festival in Hong Kong last week. Here's the site to watch all the award winning mobile films this year.
Note that these productions are not meant to be generated using the mobile. Rather, these are either short films (3 min) or movie trailers formatted for viewing on the mobile handsets. I hope in the future, the festival will shift towards more mobile generated films.

"Empowering 100 youths to join the fastest growing industry in the world: mobile"

This week, I am start a multi months research to interview students and practitioners in Hong Kong's academic world hoping to learn a few things.

1. What are young people's interest and what motivates them to explore and learn new things
2. What are their views in using mobile to "express" themselves.
3. What tools do they know and what experience do they have to do mobile contents?

I encourage young people to think of the mobile as a utility that influence their everyday way of life. They can expand their relationship to the mobile handset to not limit themselves to be just users. Rather, the mobile is a creative tool which they can both express themselves personally, engage with the industry commercially, and their future work place will see large number of jobs requiring mobile technology skills.

DIY Mobile University, build by the community, use by the community

There are plenty of tools for those with creativity to build user generated content on the web already. The mobile application development industry is growing fast and they too will have many tools to create user generated content for the mobile.

Drop us a comment to share with us any mobile tools and stories that you have.
There is no mobile focus university program today that gives a comprehensive curriculum to train our young minds to become a mobile professional. The Generation-C, a concept well elaborated in Communities Dominate Brands, grow up acquiring much of their knowledge from the internet and mobile services. Why not let the community take the first step in helping to build a DIY Mobile University so Generation-C can have a place to start preparing themselves for the fast growing mobile industry which is in great shortage of mobile skilled workers. We'll do our bit here in this blog to contribute pieces of learning we gathered by taking a close look at HK as well as Asia Pacific mobile industry developments.