We don’t do much posting at this blog. In fact, we want to do even less blogging - particularly at VB - in the next weeks to come. I got a couple of emails where readers asked me to expand on that “mobile eco system”/”reasons why the industry needs to be changed”. It does not make much sense to update the Android FAQ over at VB therefore I want to do a very small update here.

The other reason to make the update here is that the questions relate to one issue we track here at the mobile-facts blog: “Is this the time to time to make it big in mobile ?” I feel this is a particularly important issue as I noticed at VB how hords of developers got into mobile (particularly iPhone development) in 2008, most of them without knowledge of the challenges arising from the industry particulars. Here we go.

Linda Barrabee on the SV Mobile Investment Outlook in 2009

Over at Linda Barrabee’s I saw her commenting on a NYT article on the SV Mobile Investment Outlook in 2009. Linda says:

The article points to anticipated continued mobile investments in tried and true, so “…what they know makes money in telecommunications, like carriers and makers of phones and accessories.” And, the bad news is that it is not looking good for companies in the mobile advertising and mobile content space, as “…investors are not convinced that selling ads or content like applications on mobile phones can make much money for them.”

That’s pretty much what I continue to hear, too. Some European VCs are more upbeat, I gather. You can read an brief opinion why VCs are not impressed with the Apple app store model here.

Some things are actually going south

Some recent links: in the meantime Steven from Little Sprints Design summaries some of the issues in the current mobile eco system in a response to mobile developer Mike Rowehl. You may also want to check out Mike’s site or this overview to find out more on the mobile eco system/mobile apps debate or visit a local Mobile Monday event. Mike’s an organiser of the  Valley events.

(Disclaimer: the secret agenda behind this post is 1) I want less emails 2) less people who think mobile is just like the internet.)

Since being back in San Francisco again since Sunday evening, I had planned to do an analysis post on VB/Mobile Facts by Wednesday, the latest. I didn’t. My procrastination is due to me getting so much contrary information I felt I have a hard time to handle. When I meet people here, they usually have a hard time to hide that they are scared. People have been cutting costs in the last 5-6 weeks, something you have noticed if you followed the layoff posts at VB. So far, many people felt that they can do something concrete about the crisis. They felt: if I do practical thing A (like cutting costs), things get better. Not any longer. The problem are tickle-down effects: one person’s costs are another person’s revenues. Now most people I talked to this week understand that this is the time of such tickle-down effects and many more are likely to come … and therefore the crisis is far from other.

Here’s another such tickle-down effect. I regularly talk to two of my I-banking friends in London. They were telling me that there are huge amounts of capital flowing back to the US (one of the reasons for the crisis in Hungary, Ukraine). If you try to look at things from their perspective, these guys, they just have huge problems in allocating the capital they manage to the right alternative. They were telling me that chances are that this money lands in the Valley, on some “safe bets like mobile” … not sure whether they we pulling my leg, though. Now, when I was talking to some VC/lawyer folks here this week, it turns out that there’s so much uncertainty in the market that most folks decide not to invest at all in the last few weeks. Related to that, as Matt reported yesterday VCs are having a hard time getting the money for investments they want to do. When you drank two beers with someone it seems it is appropriate to say something like “It’s just one big mess”, do some nodding and express some Obama hope.

Back to my procrastination. I want to tell myself that I’m not affected by all this, but I am. Simply, some of the people I’ve met are more clever than I am and they are scared. So should I, I wonder ? However, I’ve actually also got some good news on mobile, too. So I see my role as someone who needs to do some balancing out the info. And that’s what I’m trying to do. It’s time for cool heads. At Mobile 2.0, for example, somebody told me that the fill rate of one of the larger mobile advertising networks has dropped dramatically in the last few weeks and suggested I write about that. Mind you, it was a competitor of that company telling me that. I didn’t. Since Thursday I’ve been doing some rational scenario planning - finally writing up some of my findings from the last weeks’ research on mobile advertising. This information will be just one of many factors in the analysis. There’s stuff to come on Android market estimates for 2009, mobile developer programs & mobile social networks, when I get around it.

Also, the other reason for procrastination is more business development I’ve been doing with VentureBeat, after helping Matt connecting with folks in Germany. We’ve met up some of the folks connected to Mobile 2.0 like Rudy, Carles & Gregory to exchange on mobile. Unlike in Europe, the “serious” papers are dying fast and a popular expectation is that most of them will not survive the downturn. That’s what 0-6% of ROI do to you (Germany: 16-20% ROI, I’ve been told). A cynical, yet possibly hopeful point of view. “Matthäus”, one experienced entrepreneur (he said he went through 4 downturns) told me, “times of crisis are very good for the Valley. It makes broken models die even faster. That’s very good for our business.” We’ll see if it’s good for a startup like VentureBeat. Privately I’m biased and upbeat. Either way, we see how things go.

After witnessing the G1/Android launch I’m under the impression that the Google Android team is thinking that the techblogs are irrelevant in their marketing effort.

Mind you, this post does not show that I know what the team is thinking. It’s an attempt to infer, based on a few clues, what the company might be thinking.

After MG’s Amazon Mp3 Music Store scoop (I talked to MySpace’s John Faith a week before) MG and I were commenting the launch in a Friendfeed room. Ever since, I’ve only been watching and we abstained to join the commentary chorus as only very few people managed to say something substantial which was not said before. Let the dust settle, we felt, and let’s report the facts, only.

My first clue was some private statements from the development team in the last few months. The team was totally appalled by “speculation” and “dumbness” of the techblogs. I feel that they lost a lot of respect for how the tech media work, especially in the Valley. The second clue was Andy Rubin’s blog post and Rich Miner’s talk last week. They both did not say much what they were not already saying a year ago. There was little development in their argument. For an example just compare Miner’s GigaOM keynote (last week) to the Stanford one (November 2007). It’s basically the same presentation, just a shorter version. More telling, you see little “marketing” effort. Hereby I mean Miner’s story looks unpolished, untested, “stream-of-consciousness” like. To illustrate: many good startups I know “test” pitches to see which one works with the various stakeholders best (VCs, media, customers etc). Usually you have 4-5 pitches which you present to different people, see which one works best, you work on the wording etc. There was clearly no one in the Android team doing that. Their marketing effort on the launch date was to go to the big international media and PR agencies (Mossberg, Spiegel, Webershandwick, Waggeneredstrom etc) and do classical top-down marketing. Mind you, by all accounts, the Google PR team did a great job at the launch event. But it’s not the PR I’m talking about, it’s the marketing I’m discussing in this post. Right now, the media debate centres around un-informed iPhone-”gPhone” comparisons like this:

Ok, this comic is actually pretty cool. You can find the original image here. But my marketing point is: What are the big ideas around the Android launch ? T-Mobile has been trying to spin the marketing effort around the ideas of “open” & “unleashing innovation” in the latest 2 weeks or so. While that may be ok, it strikes me as very late. Who’s telling the techblogs that the “iphone”-gphone comparisons are wrong ? Who’s telling the techblogs about the revolutionary character of the Android project ? Technically, the Android story is unfolding on at least 3 levels. According to Android’s Rich Miner, Android is
1) “An Open Source mobile phone platform that encompassed every layer of the phone
2) A series of phones powered by that platform
3) A go to market strategy to guarantee global distribution of both platform and phones”

Few blogs get that distinction. Few blogs (including NYT, Guardian, Spiegel etc) tell the readership why Android is groundbreaking on all the 3 levels. Possibly, Google figured out that this type of story is hard to tell. I kind of get that. For example, hardly any commentator has grasped the concept of “platform”. Or they don’t want to be telling it as an open marketing strategy may be against their OHA partners interests.  Still, another way how one could market this is via personality marketing. To me, as an industry observant, it’s nothing short of amazing what Android is trying to achieve. It’s very daring and to me it actually even feels like a thriller, a notion I’ve mentioned before. Rubin, Miner & Co. have possibly spent their last 10 years of trying to crack the mobile web category. Their story can be painted as a story of unsung heroes so far: a tale of their convictions, of defeats, of small victories. How will our heroes now do with the G1 launch ? Will they win ? By now, imo, we should be all watching them in awe. Have our favourites, etc.

But we aren’t.

And that is really surprising to me.

I’m not sure why Google is not showing much effort in this regard.

A possible explanation. Maybe they decided to be factual and “personal”.

Another possible explanation. It wasn’t until the past weeks that they realized that it would actually be necessary to explain themselves. And by then it was too late to carve out some resources (mostly time) to get things done. That would explain quite a lot, actually.

And then there’s another possible explanation, which I find highly plausible: they think that the techblogs - the Silicon Valley crowd, mostly are irrelevant for the success of the G1. Once HOA starts bombing TVs and radio with “the highest marketing budget for a device, ever” as it was announced on Tuesday perceptions will change. I guess you don’t need to care about techblogs if you’ve got a, say, 25M $ budget. If I understand it correctly the G1 is mostly targeted towards the 13-24 “teenies”, families and small businesses in the US. Not the “posh” iPhone/Apple geeks (disclaimer: I write this blog post on a wonderful Mac). And to reach them, Google came to understand, the techblogs are irrelevant.

Not sure what all that means. What do you think ?

• There is a strong disconnect between what’s important to the techblogs (ideas like “open networks”,”iPhone”, “Android”) and the companies attending (”business”).

• Those looking for ideas were mostly disappointed, if I am to judge be the feedback I got. These people were looking for “Apple”, for “Android”/”T-Mobile”. As a VC told said to me: “The biggest news are the non-news. Apple was not here”. He’s got a point, imo. Even though, per policy, Apple does not attend other shows, I’m not sure this is a good approach in mobile. Yes, probably most mobile startups have done/are doing something for the iPhone. I’m not sure, though, that Apple recognises that the platform is not really appealing to VCs. Few people speaking about platforms “got it” related to Android. Developer questions were left unanswered, mostly. The few T-Mobile execs were only reachable privately.
• Many content companies looking for business were saying that’s been the best CTIA so far. This line catches the mood best: “Two years ago they came in masses to ask who we are. Last year they came to check out how we do in relation to our competition. This year they came to do business.” Mind you, there were much less visitors than last year, though, I was told.

So far some of my CTIA impressions. I have not seen anybody reporting about that - and I’m not sure what to conclude out of that.

Update: Mark from Abi Research and Julie Ask from Jupiter Research seem to agree, sort of.

The big PR news of the conference were certainly the carrier data and related keynote I also covered. I argue that this was the “big” PR news as that data and its importance were the only news covered by mainstream US media.

From our personal angle, Daniel and I had prepared data for that piece for 2 months and were waiting for a good moment to add it as to provide value for readers in our analysis. I watched the keynote for 25 minutes, took down some notes, took this image you see with my G7, went out of the room to get an internet connection and hoped the speakers will not say anything relevant after I left. 15 minutes later we broke the news and continued to update the piece for two hours.

At Venturebeat, we try to have a startup angle covering mobile. We think that the mobile eco system is slowly opening up and think a lot what this means for our coverage. For example, we generally don’t report on-deck deals as most VCs continue not invest in on-deck models. Sure, these deals continue to be important for the companies getting these deals. Still, we consider this spam we don’t expose our readers to.

In many ways we believe mobile tech journalism is starting. These data revenue news continue to be really important and I’m expecting good techblogs to provide context on that. As a VC calculated for me: “What’s the size of the Apple app store revenue ? 180M $ worldwide in a year ? (100M apps have generated 30M $ revenue in 2 months times six, I guess).” That’s pretty much nothing in relation to the reported $14.8 billion for the first six months of this year. These numbers provide a lot of context for much of the reported news out there. We need to make sure to drill them down and show that context when necessary.