Interesting developments in the mobile space as reported by Tech Crunch

http://www.techcrunch.com/2009/08/12/nokia-and-microsoft-make-an-unholy-alliance-to-bring-office-mobile-to-more-phones/

Microsoft and Nokia announced a broad ranging alliance this morning which will bring Microsoft Office and other productivity software to a Nokia phones. The agreement marks “the first time Microsoft will make Office for non windows mobile phones,” says Microsoft Business Division President Stephen Elop. There are 200 million Nokia smart phones out there, and Microsoft wants its software on all of them eventually.

But initially, the alliance is targeting enterprise customers and will be integrated into Nokia’s E Series business phones. The Microsoft software and features that will be ported to Nokia phones include:

The ability to view, edit, create and share Office documents on more devices in more places with mobile-optimized versions of Microsoft Word, Microsoft PowerPoint, Microsoft Excel and Microsoft OneNote

Enterprise instant messaging and presence, and optimized conferencing and collaboration experience with Microsoft Office Communicator Mobile

Mobile access to intranet and extranet portals built on Microsoft SharePoint Server

Enterprise device management with Microsoft System Center

But the alliance aims to go “way beyond email and Office,” says Nokia’s Executive Vice President for Devices Kai Öistämö. Microsoft and Nokia are focusing on communication and productivity apps (Office, IM, Sharepoint, OneNote), but the alliance opens up those 200 million Nokia smart phones to future Mobile apps from Microsoft, perhaps including Mesh (which will sync all apps across all devices).

The alliance is an acknowledgment that Windows Mobile is not going to take over the world, and smartly extends the reach of Microsoft’s mobile apps to a huge new audience of mobile professionals. It also positions Microsoft and Nokia in an unholy alliance against the encroachments of the more modern iPhone and Android smart phones. It allows Microsoft to deeply integrate its mobile apps into Nokia phones in a way that might make them more appealing to corporate customers.

“This is not a browser discussion,” says Elop. These mobile applications will create “really rich experiences that bring that device to life.” The apps will start with email and productivity, but will be designed to drive collaboration through instant messaging, presence management, and call control. The alliance for now covers only Nokia phones with the Symbian operating system, which lends to its dinosaur feel.

Why do you need an “alliance” to create apps for a mobile computer? Microsoft doesn’t need an alliance to create Office apps for Android or the iPhone because they are (relatively) open mobile platforms. What this alliance highlights more than anything else is Symbian’s creaking age.

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Twitter grew 3,000 percent in April. Facebook hosted 61.2 million visitors in March. LinkedIn counts 20 million users worldwide.

With a potential audience that big, it’s no wonder savvy entrepreneurs are looking to unlock the secrets of social media as another way to get the word out about their businesses. Free access to many social media accounts (and potential clients) just adds to the allure. 

But is social media right for your business? Could it be a free substitute for a traditional (read: expensive) advertising plan? How much time should be spent in the care and feeding of all those profiles? The answers may surprise you.

“Traditional advertising and marketing is not dead,” says Olivier Blanchard, business strategist and principal of The Brand Builder Marketing. Blanchard advocates integrating social media into a more traditional marketing and advertising plan, “so you can have a healthy mix, much like a diversified investment portfolio.”

Though the platforms will differ based on the type of business, Sarah Granger, founder of a technology communications strategy firm Public Edge, encourages small organizations to have a solid website, e-mail list and a contact database before venturing into social media. 

Blogs: Write Your Way to Success
If you want to build customer loyalty, Kristi Colvin says start blogging now.  “Many platforms allow you to blog comfortably,” says the chief creative officer at We Heart and Twitterface. She recommends Tumblr for smaller businesses, “because it is customizable, extremely easy to learn to use, and has an additional component that allows you to follow people and re-blog their content easily.”

Colvin believes blogging takes disseminating information about a company a step beyond formal press releases, ads, marketing brochures and websites. “That is where the magic happens in social media.  A well-managed blog invites peoples’ perspectives and provides an opening for real relationships to be formed which is a critical aspect of great customer service, and a good user experience. It can be a stepping stone to brand attachment,” she says.

That attachment doesn’t have to equal a huge time commitment, but expect to spend an hour or two to knock out a post. The rewards are immediate: Blogs that are refreshed regularly get a boost in search engine rankings. “It also helps to establish you as an authority,” says Blanchard who suggests writing during evenings or on weekends to maximize regular working hours.

Twitter: To Tweet or Not to Tweet
Granger says she used to advise companies to start with a blog, but now suggests getting on Twitter first.  She also advocates engaging in conversation. Connecting with a business owner on Twitter “produces the necessary personal touch so many clients and customers prefer,” she says, and offers a time management tip for those tweeting entrepreneurs. “[Free] mobile tools such as Tweetie and Tweetdeck can make it a lot easier to keep up with the ongoing conversation,” Granger says. That way, a company announcement of a new product or promotion could be tweeted with a link back to details on the company’s blog or website, all while standing in a latte line.

The rapid-fire conversations on Twitter have the added bonus of giving entrepreneurs who’ve built a network, “instant answers to questions, feedback on brand elements, product ideas, etc.,” Colvin says.

YouTube: Be a Star
Another way to capitalize on the fast pace of social media is by posting videos on YouTube. With a little creativity and relatively low overhead (Flip video cameras can be had for as little as $100) uploading a short clip can be a rapid way to test the market. “Release freebies to capture a niche. Then find the demand and create the product,” says Steven Weathers, who documents his adventures in China on YouTube.

As founder of American English Circle, and producer and host of Foreigner Perspective, Weathers uses videos to help the Chinese learn English and to give Westerners a glimpse of life in Asia. By hiring students he spends around $10 per finished minute of video, less if he tapes himself. 

To learn how to create good content Weathers suggests watching some viral videos. The payoff? “You will reach a wider audience than with network TV,” says Weathers.

LinkedIn: Business Networking Made Easier
A glowing recommendation is a gold star for any type of business, so why not collect and post them for all to see?  It’s easily done on LinkedIn.  Creating a profile allows an entrepreneur to create an online career history, then to connect with others they’ve worked with. Obtaining a recommendation from a former colleague or existing client may help sway a potential investor or customer. 

Additionally, Kimberly LeRiche of JK Virtual Office Resources says, “LinkedIn provides the opportunity to connect with others who are also looking to create partnerships or to collaborate.” LeRiche also notes that LinkedIn has incorporated additional social networking capabilities such as special interest groups and open discussion threads. Digests from these groups can be delivered by e-mail to scan or read in-depth, depending on interest in the topic and how much time there is on hand.

The Bottom Line
Time is money, but Weathers says it’s all about how you manage it. “Previously wasted down time like sitting in taxis for 20 minutes or standing in a bank line for 10 minutes is now spent on my mobile phone, bouncing between Twitter and Facebook. It's getting easier and easier, and for branding an entrepreneur, I think it's golden.”

No matter what the platform, Blanchard says the true value of social media is found in the conversation.  “You are not necessarily going to get 150 comments per day, but you are engaging a potential customer or client in the way you wouldn’t in an ordinary day.”

Excellent report on how top brands are using social media to engage the customer and how use of social media correlates with financial performance
ENGAGEMENTdb: Most Engaged Brands On Social Media -

Musician Dave Carroll  saw his beloved guitar being smashed by United airline staff. When they refused to compensate him he wrote a song about it and posted it on YouTube Watch the full song

The big technology news this week is that Google will launch Google Chrome as its operating system in the the coming weeks. Several commentators have been predicting Google Chrome would become its operating system and it looks like they were right.


http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/8139711.stm

Google to launch operating system
By Maggie Shiels
Technology reporter, BBC News, Silicon Valley


Google is developing an operating system (OS) for personal computers, in a direct challenge to market leader Microsoft and its Windows system.

Google Chrome OS will be aimed initially at small, low-cost netbooks, but will eventually be used on PCs as well.

Google said netbooks with Chrome OS could be on sale by the middle of 2010.

"Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS," the firm said in its official blog.

The operating system, which will run on an open source licence, was a "natural extension" of its Chrome browser, the firm said.

The news comes just months before Microsoft launches the latest version of its operating system, called Windows 7.

'Back to basics'

"We're designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you on to the web in a few seconds," said the blog post written by Sundar Pichai, vice-president of product management, and Google's engineering director Linus Upson.

So at long last Google is making its move. It is poised to strike at the heart of Microsoft's software empire.

Tim Weber, Business editor, BBC News website


Charge of Google's light brigade
Both men said that "the operating systems that browsers run on were designed in an era where there was no web" and that this OS was "our attempt to rethink what operating systems should be".

To that end, the search giant said the new OS would go back to basics.

"We are completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don't have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates.

"It should just work," said Google.

Google already has an operating system for mobile phones called Android which can also be used to run on netbooks. Google Chrome OS will be aimed not just at laptops but also at desktops for those who spend a lot of time on the web.

'Truly competitive'

The announcement could dramatically change the market for operating systems, especially for Microsoft, the biggest player with around 90% share.

"This announcement is huge," said Rob Enderle, industry watcher and president of the Enderle Group.

"This is the first time we have had a truly competitive OS on the market in years. This is potentially disruptive and is the first real attempt by anyone to go after Microsoft.

"Google is coming at this fresh and, because it is based on a set of services that reside on the web, it is the first really post-web operating system, designed from the ground up, and reconceived for a web world," Mr Enderle told the BBC.


It's a few hours since Google used its company blog to announce its entry into the operating systems market, and already opinion is strongly divided

Rory Cellan-Jones

BBC's technology correspondent


Read Rory's thoughts in full
Last year Google launched the Chrome browser, which it said was designed for "people who live on the web - searching for information, checking e-mail, catching up on the news, shopping or just staying in touch with friends".

Stephen Shankland at CNET said the move had widespread implications.

"One is that it shows just how serious Google is about making the web into a foundation not just for static pages but for active applications, notably its own such as Google Docs and G-mail.

"Another, it opens new competition with Microsoft and, potentially, a new reason for anti-trust regulators to pay close attention to Google's moves."

Some commentators said Google's motivation in all this was pretty clear.

"One of Google's major goals is to take Microsoft out, to systematically destroy their hold on the market," said Mr Enderle.

"Google wants to eliminate Microsoft and it's a unique battle. The strategy is good. The big question is, will it work?"

At the popular blog, TechCrunch, MG Siegler said: "Let's be clear on what this really is. This is Google dropping the mother of all bombs on its rival, Microsoft."

Microsoft releases Windows 7 later this year to replace Windows Vista and Windows XP, which is eight years old.

The Redmond-based company claims that 96% of netbooks run Windows to date.

Out of beta

In a separate announcement Google also revealed that many of its most popular applications had finally moved out of trial, or beta, phase.

Gmail, for example, has worn the beta tag for five years.

"We realise this situation puzzles some people, particularly those who subscribe to the traditional definition of beta software as being not yet ready for prime time," wrote Matthew Glotzbach, the director of product management in the official Google blog.

The decision to ditch the beta tag was taken because the apps had finally reached the "high bar" mark, he wrote.

More than 1.75 million companies use Google apps, according to the firm.

Interesting read from a different perspective than the previous post.

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/davenport/2009/04/is_twitter_for_serious_marketer.html

A few months ago I was speaking at a marketing conference, and after I spoke on marketing analytics, there was a panel on social media. Larry Weber, who started and then sold a very successful PR firm (and who is on Babson's Board of Trustees), was asked whether there was a role for analytics in social media.

"Frankly, I'm tired of analytics," he said. "I got into social media in part to get away from analytics." Well, honesty is good, but I didn't see then — and don't now — how you can do serious marketing through any medium without metrics and analysis. Twitter and other social media may be fun, but are they really serious marketing tools?

I thought of this again recently while grading some of my MBA students' papers about an IT strategy for Welch's, the grape juice people. A couple of the student groups suggested that Welch's should embark upon a Twitter initiative. Okay, they get a point or two for being au courant. And to the students' credit, most suggested that it was a low-risk, low-return marketing approach. Still, I couldn't imagine which customers would decide to follow Welch's tweets about its grape juice and other associated products. The busy moms who form Welch's core customers? I don't think so.

Do serious marketers spend a lot of time and energy on Twitter campaigns? I doubt it. Sure, go ahead and play around with it — it doesn't cost much. But I defy you to do serious brand management in 140-character messages. I defy you to prove that Twitter users are your typical customer — unless you sell bubble tea or something similar — or that their tweets are a true reflection of their relationship with your company.

Let's face it — Twitter is a fad. It has all the attributes of a fad, including the one that people like me don't get its appeal. It has risen quickly and it will fall quickly. It's this year's Second Life — which, you may have noticed, nobody is talking much about anymore. One Daily Telegraph article that did talk about it noted, "While the site is still beloved by geeks and the socially awkward, Deloitte's director of technology research, Paul Lee, says it has been "virtually abandoned" by "normal" people and businesses." Ouch!

I had a conversation with an influential business editor the other day that confirmed some of my predilections about Twitter. He said he was "unfollowing" (defollowing?) those who tweet a lot — "It's just become a burden to read them," he said. I, who issue nary a tweet, am clearly sitting in the catbird seat. You have to wonder about a technology when those who use it aggressively are shunned.

I'm not as negative about the business and marketing potential of some other social media. For example, because Facebook and MySpace offer the promise of monetizing social networks — though they haven't done so yet, to my mind — they are not to be easily dismissed. And wikis clearly have some value, or Wikipedia wouldn't be so useful. Yet I haven't seen too many wiki success stories within firms, and the ones that do have value don't involve marketing. One smart knowledge manager, Sukumar Rajagopal at Cognizant, told me that he thought successful wikis within companies required that participants in them have strong network ties, and that's not always easy to orchestrate. Another pharma executive who had experimented with them suggested that they require substantial human curation (facilitation and editing) to be successful — which, come to think of it, Wikipedia does too.

One conclusion I've come to is that we should unbundle the concept of "social media," because some of its components are much more useful than others in a business and marketing context. Facebook? I suspect it faces prosperity, over time. Second Life? On life support. Twitter? In the long run, not worth a tweet.

What do you think? I'd love to hear your thoughts, but please restrict them to more than 140 characters.

From Harvard Business Blogs. A Positive viewpoint on Twitter

http://blogs.harvardbusiness.org/sviokla/2009/04/twitter_a_marketers_duct_tape.html

or read below

Duct tape is universally useful because it is incredibly simple, almost infinitely flexible, easily available, and cheap. Twitter shares all these attributes. Just like duct tape can be used to repair a chair or make an artificial flower, twitter is a means of communication that can be layered over anything and everything,

By now, most of us are familiar with Twitter and its 140-character long tweets. Anyone can use the web and their phone to both send and receive tweets for free. It enables people to send messages directly to one person, groups to self-form, or to send a tweet to everyone who follows you. While some people only follow a few dozen compatriots, Guy Kawasaki follows over 100,000 people and has almost 100,000 followers, as well as creating (with some help) over 28,000 tweets. As a pundit, Guy is using Twitter to build an ongoing audience. By way of comparison, the Boston Globe had a circulation in 2008 of about 350,000 — which is falling at a rate of 8-9% per year.

But Twitter can do so much more. As Chris pointed out on his blog, the range of applications is spectacular, from providing truly instant online commentary for any off-line event, to the visualization of Super Bowl tweets developed by the New York Times, to Pepsi's integration of Twitter with geographic information at the spectacularly popular South by Southwest festival, to Whole Foods tweeting recipes. Almost every major media outlet is tweeting, the Apple App Store has over 100 Twitter applications, and there are over 100 other free tools that have already bubbled up.

How did this seemingly trivial application created in two weeks by Jack Dorsey back in March 2006 as a way for him to know what his friends were doing grow into this global phenomenon? We think it is because of three critical things: first, the design. Twitter's design is simple, modular, scalable and cross-platform. Instant messaging used to be a youth-dominated phenomenon, but just walk into any business meeting and think about how similar tweeting is to BlackBerry-ing. As social animals, we humans are addicted to communication and understanding how our social group is acting and thinking. In business this is very practical — and in social settings, it is very entertaining.

Second, Twitter has an open technical architecture. As Chris has pointed out, it is an example of an application that sits "in the cloud" and is available everywhere. The interfaces to the capability are simple and well defined in their Applications Programming Interface (API), which makes it easy to plug into their messaging capability.

Third, and perhaps most importantly, it is very easy for people to join, and to self-organize around topics, companies, individuals, and events. In this sense it is an incredibly "democratic" medium — with all the control at the ends of the network. Our Diamond Fellow David Reed wrote in the Harvard Business Review many years ago about the power of self-forming networks, so potent because of their innate flexibility.

Of course there are Twitter doubters, and everything goes through a hype cycle — but the idea of self-organized, peer-to-peer, persistent communication, at almost zero cost, is powerful for coordination and communication alike.

Twitter is (and can become) so many things, that we suggest three questions for marketers to think about — but they are only a start:

1. What are people saying about my brand? There are many tools that can help you track how people are talking about your company, customer complaints, or other issues your customers are thinking about.
2. How can I connect and build a direct communication between my firm and all the customers who want to follow our tweets — on their phone, computer, or other device? There is no downside, as long as you put thoughtful effort behind the initiative.
3. What capabilities should my firm have so that we can use the right tools to track topics and conversations being tweeted about in my industry, product or service area, and target market?

We believe — as other pundits have pointed out — that this current iteration of the internet is becoming increasingly real-time, populated by many mini-applications like Twitter that we'll be able to cobble together to create functionality. Marketing and sales have always been about communication, references, and word of mouth, and Twitter turbo-charges that age-old human activity.

We believe that the new "links" that Twitter creates with its tweets, among and between people and groups, will someday be mined for superior search and attention management — just the way Google uses page links to power its search algorithm today. It is only a matter of time before Google or Microsoft buys Twitter and integrates the functionality into their platform, and tweeting becomes part of how every company communicates and markets. Starting now will give you a jump on your competition.

Chris Curran co-authored this post.

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