The CSR: The Art and Science of Customer Care

What a problem to have....

2010-06-02T10:46:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

While things are dark and gloomy in some places and some are even talking about a double dip recession, we have other problems here at InnoPath.

Phones and the services that run on them are becoming increasingly complex. No longer is voice king, data and data driven services are important parts of the revenue pie.

InnoPath is not the only company that sees this. Handset makers and operators see it to. That is why they are all looking for ways of managing the smartphone boom and it also is why they all seem to be knocking on our door, seemingly all at the same time.

While this is good in many ways, good for the subscriber who will end up with better service. Better for the handset makers and service providers as their offerings will be better and more cost effective, it also puts us in a bit of a bind.

We need more people.

Now.

A couple of the really hot positions that we are hiring for (multiple openings) include Customer Support Engineers and Field Deployment Engineers. Expansion and progress on the customer side have created multiple career opportunities. Generally we are looking for senior/expert level pros who are intimately familiar with Sun/Solaris, Oracle, Weblogic, web/java front ends, TCP/IP networking and large system deployment and support at large telcos. Beyond just hands-on skills, we need people with solid project and communications skills - the kind of people who are comfortable and effective in front of customers.

The full list of jobs is here:

http://innopath.com/jobs/jobs.shtml

See you at the interview!

Innovation at InnoPath

2010-05-19T08:02:00.001-07:00

Jason Lackey

Silicon Valley is a special place. Few places on earth have the concentration of diversity, entrepreneurial spirit and technical acumen to pull off the constant cycle of technological rebirth which we see in the valley. Indeed, from the good old days with people pulling silicon ingots in their garages (and occasionally blowing up said garages in the process) to late nights coding in front of glowing screens, both flat and in the bad old days CRT, the Valley has a history of innovation.

Part of the strength of The Valley comes from the wild profusion of different ideas we get here as a cultural, business and technical nexus where some of the best and brightest from India, China, Japan, the US and Europe come together and create new technologies, new products and new ideas.

InnoPath is proud to be part of the culture of creation. We actually help write the book, so to speak, by means of our active participation in standards creation with OMA, the Open Mobile Alliance. While standards are nice, it is also vital that there be some meat behind the specs, thus we are particularly proud of our patent track record, with 22 US and 2 Japanese patents awarded and a large number pending.

Anyway, to those of you busting your butts every day trying to build new things and blaze new trails, we salute you. To those of you busting your butts every day trying to build new things in wireless, we recruit you! InnoPath is hiring and we are looking for the type of talent who can come up with new and patentable ideas who can make new and wonderful technology do cool and useful things in production networks.

The iPad, Surface and How Microsoft Missed Apple's Bogey

2010-04-05T17:23:00.000-07:00

There are few things any sadder than wasted potential not realized. Microsoft's very juicy, lovely Surface effort, like many GM show cars, was nearly an example of missed opportunity and waste, but fortunately Apple seems to have "gotten" it and they threw in a little Cupertino magic twist - they added mobility making for a very compelling device.

Read Dave Ginsburg's post on this topic on TMCnet here.

InnoPath's Dave Ginsburg interviewed by Rich Tehrani on TMCnet

2010-03-30T12:24:00.000-07:00

What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, however InnoPath's own Dave Ginsburg's interview with TMCnet's Rich Tehrani is one of the exceptions. While some were manning the booth, doing live demos on the show floor, others were living La Vida Loca doing interviews with the likes of Rich Tehrani. The video is here.

InnoPath: Keeping That Which Happens in Vegas Safely on Your Smartphone and Off the Internet

2010-03-22T07:50:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

Smartphones are both a blessing and a bit of a curse. We have talked about ARPU and support related issues around smartphones in the past, but the increased capabilities of these devices also have other implications, some potentially large indeed.

With vast storage and the ability to open files like Word, PPT, Excel and the like as well as photos, videos and movies, there is no doubt that a smartphone is much more like a pocket computer than a phone. There is also no doubt that the loss of a corporate roadmap, compensation information or compromising images and the like would be a much more serious blow than the exposure of phone numbers, which is pretty much the only thing you would lose on an older voice-only terminal.

When the service provider can lock and wipe a lost or stolen device remotely, over-the-air, this potential exposure is limited and in some cases eliminated, helping keep that which happened in Vegas safely in Vegas, or at least on the phone.

See you at CTIA. We will be at Booth 3749. In the meantime, check out our press release here: http://innopath.com/news/press_releases/2010/2010_03_22_ctia_rim.shtml

InnoPath Named CTIA Emerging Technology Award Finalist

2010-03-17T08:08:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

Well, delivering the green is no longer the exclusive domain of leprechauns and the like. While some of the advantages to FOTA and other OTA update technology are fairly obvious, things like preventing recalls, heading off support calls and in-store brick and mortar visits, enhancing subscriber satisfaction, squashing bugs and so on and so forth, some of the advantages are not always immediately obvious.

One of those is the environmental impact, or lack thereof, of doing updates remotely, over-the-air.

Let me explain.

When you need to ship or hand carry a device somewhere to get it reflashed, this is going to take some non-zero amount of fuel to fire up the family truckster or whatever and get the phone to the store. When using technology like InnoPath's Mobile Update, the phone stays next to your bed and gets updated in place and the family truckster stays in the garage and the co2 stays out of the atmosphere and the oil stays in the ground and generally everything is incrementally better, cleaner and greener.

May not seem like much, but by our calculations we saved 33m kg of co2 emissions in 2009 with the numbers for 2010 looking to be considerably larger.

Evidently the folks at CTIA agree with us that this is kind of cool stuff, we are CTIA Emerging Technology Finalists because of these energy savings, something that we announced in a press release today, "InnoPath Software Named CTIA E-Tech Award Finalist".

Happy Saint Patrick's Day!

Helping Carriers Sleep Better at Night

2010-03-12T14:06:00.000-08:00

The industry is both delighted by the rise of the smartphone (or as some like Om Malik or Rob Glaser are calling them, the superphone) and horrified. They are delighted because they bring people into the stores, they create a lot of excitement (iPhone, Moto Droid) and they help keep subscribers. The service providers are also horrified - they are horrified because smartphones cost more to support and are hard on their wireless networks.

RCR Wireless recently interviewed our Dave Ginsburg on how InnoPath is helping the carriers sleep better at night. You can watch the interview here.

Jobs, Jobs and More Jobs!

2010-03-11T12:24:00.000-08:00

Jason Lackey

Last weekend I blogged about how fortunate we are here at InnoPath to be working in wireless during one of the most exciting times the industry has ever had. This still is true most of the way through the week, although we still have a bunch of things to do before CTIA. By the way, if you are going to be at CTIA, let me invite you to drop by our booth, we will be there at Booth 3749 with a professional barista, some cool ActiveCare demos including stuff on Android and RIM and you can even drop off a resume or talk to us about working at InnoPath.

Anyway, on the subject of fortune, I just posted another job, this one for a Senior Director of Sales for CALA. Know a motivated closer with high level telco contacts? Send 'em our way!

Right now we have a total of 9 positions posted, with more to come. We are busy and we need good people. Check out the jobs page and see if there is a good match. Even if you don't see an exact match, but you do have relevant experience, either technical or business, go ahead and send in your resume. We are always looking for good talent.

Hope to see you at the show!

Citius, Altius, Fortius - The Service Provider Olympics!

2010-03-08T11:20:00.001-08:00

While the end of the party in Vancouver brought a tear to some otherwise dry eyes here at InnoPath, it also inspired a bit of thought with regard to a kind of competition we all enjoy and benefit from that doesn't require scary fast bobsled runs or foggy ski courses to hold - competition between the mobile operators.

Dave Ginsburg has put some thoughts to paper with regards to Gold, Silver, Bronze and DNFs in the Mobile Operator Olympics in a story available on TMCnet.

Citius, Altius, Fortius!

Right Here, Right Now

2010-03-06T10:16:00.000-08:00

Jason Lackey

"Anyone working in the mobile and wireless industry is fortunate." - Dr. J. Gerry Purdy

Way back in 1990, inspired by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the British pop band Jesus Jones released the single "Right here, right now" (snippet here), a tune which captured well the zeitgeist in Europe with the end of the cold war, a magical time. I will never forget sharing cigarettes with some of the East German guards through holes in the wall as a college student on vacation and how blessed and fortunate many of us felt to be sharing smokes instead of burning on an atomic funeral pyre, which for a while had seemed a likely outcome.

Fast forward through 9/11, a recession, a housing bubble, global financial crisis and the whole bright shining future as seen in Wired Magazine of the mid 90's seems for many a dim and tarnished dream and reality is starting to look more like some sort of cyberpunk dystopia.

Except not everywhere.

As an example, Friday was bonus day at InnoPath. Sure, everyone is working hard and sure we are doing more with less but this does not diminish the fact that while so many are still getting pink slips and San Francisco is dolling out 15,000 pay cuts, it was bonus day at InnoPath and a year of blood, sweat and tears was recognized in a very real way at one company in Silicon Valley.

Dr. Gerry Purdy pretty much summed it up with his quote - we are fortunate to be in wireless, particularly right now. While construction, commercial real estate and the automobile industry suffer a holocaust of near biblical proportions, we are dealing with customers who are growing faster than they thought and who are scrambling to build enough capacity. While some are shuttering factories, we are going to be hiring another 30-40 people over the next year or so. Speaking of which, if you or anyone you know are interested in working in the wireless industry, please visit our jobs page, here. Maybe your dream job is there, but even if you don't see an immediate match, if you know people with experience in the industry encourage them to send in their resumes.

Time to go play with phones now...will it be the Nexus One or Tilt2? Hmmm....maybe both!

CLIQs to Bricks and Bricks to CLIQs

2010-02-26T08:08:00.000-08:00

Jason Lackey

One of my favorite device blogs, the Boy Genius Report, today reported that something seems to have gone wrong with the latest round of OTA updates for the CLIQ where CLIQs are getting bricked.

Oops!

Some things, like OTA updates, may seem fairly simple, almost technical slamdunks. However, once you start peeling back the onion, you will find that things are not nearly as simple as they might appear.

When we work with and OEM, we do extensive testing, not only of the client/server delivery mechanism, but also of the packages as well. The overall system must work end-to-end in order for it to be considered successful. Fortunately we have a world class team of device engineers at InnoPath. This fact was hammered home for me a few months back when we were up the peninsula doing some demos for a device maker and our device team made some observations with regards to how a new device was being built and made some suggestions to a large OEM about how they could improve their device. I was a bit shocked, but the guys at the OEM looked at each other, nodded, and said that there had been some internal debate, with the more clueful side recommending the InnoPath approach.

Anyway, testing and careful coordination between the concerned parties is one thing, building in failsafe is another. This is why, starting with our 5.6 Embedded FOTA client, we include the ability to back out of an update on the device, that way even if things go horribly horribly wrong, the worst that happens is you lose a few minutes time and end up no worse than you were when things started, which is a lot better than having a brick in your pocket!

The Mobile Data Challenge

2010-02-10T16:32:00.000-08:00

Jason Lackey

We all know that voice revenues are withering and service providers are looking to replace that lost revenue or at least slow down the bleeding. Ringtones and themes clearly are not going to do it, but what will? Data?

InnoPath sponsored a report by the Economist Intelligence Unit, The Mobile Data Challenge, which contains analysis and results of a survey of nearly 200 C-Level telco execs from across the world, NAM, APAC and EMEA.

I encourage you to get your copy today.

Here's the link.

iPhone, Android, RIM and Symbian, Oh My!

2010-02-09T08:25:00.000-08:00

Jason Lackey

We are coming right up on time for the GSMA Mobile World Congress, this year again in beautiful Barcelona, Spain. Some things are certain at Mobile World Congress, ham sandwiches at the Fira, big crowds for the colorful performances at the Cboss stand and new product announcements from just about everyone.

This year, we actually have something pretty big. We are announcing Universal Smartphone support with Android, Symbian, Windows phone, RIM and iPhone support all baked in to the latest and greatest version of InnoPath ActiveCare.

For the consumer, this means that OTA activation, updates and customer support are all available regardless of what kind of smartphone the subscriber has. For the operator, it means that the goodness of ActiveCare is now available for the entire spectrum of smartphones, making silo solutions a problem of the past.

But wait, there's more!

It gets even better, because we conspired with the Economist's EIU (Economist Intelligence Unit) to bring you a nice study of Tier 1 Service Providers, The Mobile Data Challenge. To top things off, we are even doing a webinar with EIU's Katherine Abreu on Wednesday, 10 February at 15:00 GMT/ 10:00 Eastern / 7:00 Pacific.

Anyway, exciting times here at InnoPath, but time for me to go set up all the new demos. Best thing is, wider coverage means that I get more toys!

Hope to see you in Barcelona! We will be in Hall 1 at Stand 1F39.

InnoPath Android Support

2010-02-02T10:56:00.001-08:00

Jason Lackey

At InnoPath we are very fortunate to be at the center of an exciting industry. Didn't used to be that way, Silicon Valley was a bit of a backwater for wireless for a long time, but with the Rise of Android, the coming of the iPhone and the advent the the pretty but perhaps doomed WebOS, Sunnyvale, where our office is, more or less between Mountain View and Cupertino, is now pretty central.

The whole Android thing has been amazing and looks to be picking up steam. To be honest, it was, despite warts and flaws, hard for them to pry the Nexus One out of my greedy paws. Can't really say that for the Tilt2 nor the Blackberry 9700 that have recently crossed my path, although I will admit that WinMo 6.5 Exchange support still beats the hell out of anything out of the Googleplex so far. C'mon guys, add the calendar!

Anyway, Google the precocious child is eagerly repeating all of the mistakes the mobile industry
has made over the past 20 years or so (forgot who said this first, but that person is dead on) and downplaying the importance of support and looking at a $500+ smartphone like it was some freeware Linux hack distro where the most you can hope for is some action on the support forums is a huge blunder - particularly when you ship killer hardware that appears to be running beta software.

That said, perhaps it is useful to sometimes have a counterpoint to the relatively high levels of support that are usually seen in mobile, with devices like the Motorola Droid on Verizon being the polar opposite of the Nexus One - well supported, details sweated out, refined and relatively polished in comparison, with world class customer care backing you up.

Anyway, we did a PR on support and new phones that InnoPath is shipping on, which can be found here: http://innopath.com/news/press_releases/2010/2010_02_02_innopath_supports_customers_when_google_and_nexus_one_dont.shtml

Even if Google and the Nexus One don't support their customers, InnoPath Does

2010-02-02T10:50:00.001-08:00

As we have seen, complex products like state of the art feature phones are more than just point solutions, they are part of an overall system and this system includes the operator, both network and support, as well as the phone itself. Google seems to have lost track of some of these basics, much to the detriment of Nexus One customers. Fortunately, all is not lost, because InnoPath has you covered.

Read More: http://http://innopath.com/news/press_releases/2010/2010_02_02_innopath_supports_customers_when_google_and_nexus_one_dont.shtml

Webinar: Global Survey of Mobile Operators

2010-01-13T16:49:00.000-08:00

The Results are in!
The Economist Intelligence Unit (EIU) has conducted a survey of the top Tier 1 operators in Europe, North America and Asia and will be presenting findings in a webinar scheduled for:

10 FEB 2010 / 15:00 GMT / 10:00 US Eastern / 07:00 US Pacific

Operators say voice revenues are dropping – what will replace that income?
Commoditization is a concern – what are operators planning to do?
Retention is a challenge – what are operators doing to keep their subs?
Operational efficiency is key – how are operators going to improve?

Katherine Abreu from the EIU will join David Ginsburg, InnoPath VP of Marketing, in presenting findings and analysis. We invite you to join us for this informative presentation.

REGISTER NOW for this free webinar.

Don't Frag that Android, Bro!

2010-01-12T08:29:00.000-08:00

Jason Lackey

Remember the “Don’t taze me, bro!” internet meme? If not, here’s a quick refresher with a pretty cool rap followup here. Anyway, with Android, the threat isn’t tazers, instead it is fragmentation.

The mobile phone market, at least according to conventional wisdom around the water cooler here at InnoPath, is consolidating into one where there will be increasingly fast, cool and capable high end smartphones on the high end and the typical array of cheap and cheerful jugaad phones for those who just want to make calls and not much left between. In some ways this is good news. Economies of scale require a certain critical density, something which too many players can dilute.

That however, means that the remaining players are going to be in sharper competition. The way the landscape is looking right now, the biggest contenders for the crown are going to be Apple and Android. Apple and Android, much like fighters in the good ol’ days of the UFC (the UFC, the Ultimate Fighting Championship, is largely responsible for the rise of MMA over boxing and, at least in its infancy, featured fighters with radically different styles. Those days are over, though, with the sport having converged around a mix of kick boxing, wrestling and jiu jitsu. Vive la difference), will fight in radically different ways.

Apple, the superheavyweight champion of the tightly closed and controlled ecosystem, is the epitome of how well benevolent dictatorships can work. The combined economy of scales presented by all the various iPhone models combined with the various iPod Touches brought into focus by the existence of a single AppStore have combined to show the world exactly how good the mobile experience can be when a fanatical tyrant makes the trains run on time. Screen sizes are the same, device capabilities are largely the same and apps written for one iPhone or iPod Touch will, for the most part, run exactly the same way on other iPhones or iPods.

Android, the unconventional freeware contended, didn’t go to the same plush private school in Cupertino that Apple did. Nope, Android went to the school of hard knocks and is working its way up from the streets on a ragtag collection of semi-random hardware from a variety of makers including a rising star from Taiwan, a fallen hero from Chicago, some ambitious younger chargers from Korea and some others including Europe’s great white hope and a veritable rogues gallery of Chinese attracted by the sound of free.

This is good news in that the sheer volume of handsets that these various contenders will crank out will by itself help the platform reach critical mass. However, the dazzling variety of the bunch, be it a ragtag fleet or rainbow coalition, is as much a hindrance as it is a multicolored blessing.

While the numbers help build the critical mass the platform needs, they also break it down as too many things are different and there is too much variety. Fragmentation is the enemy and it is this fragmentation from within that seems more likely than anything from outside to undo the mighty Android.

Already in the field we have 1.5, 1.6 and a couple versions of 2.0, including very shortly 2.1. Quite a few versions of a very young OS to be floating around. Screen sizes also vary, with 320x240 (QVGA) on the small side on the HTC Tattoo (and others) on up to monsters like the 854x480 of the Motorola Droid/Milestone or the upcoming Sony Ericsson Xperia X10. Some have Exchange/ActiveSync support native, others don’t.

Other hardware spec also vary widely, from the relatively underpowered HTC G1 with the ubiquitous Qualcomm MSM 7201a at 525 MHz with 192 MB of RAM on up to beastly machines with 1GHz Snapdragon and 512 MB RAM. For some things, this will not matter (much), but even with UI scaling and other tricks, it is impossible to give exactly the same experience with phones that are fundamentally so different in terms of capabilities. The same app that will seem laggy and weak on the G1 could well scream on a Snapdragon. A screen layout perfect on the Droid will likely be considerably less so on an HTC Tattoo. Geolocation APIs that work on Éclair may not work on Cupcake.

Games are a particular concern. One reason for this is that, for performance reasons, games may not use all the UI bells and whistles included with the OS, but instead may be built using a custom UI. Additionally, even if the software works perfectly, the different screen sizes have different aspect ratios, making it awkward at best to deliver the exact same experience across all devices. On top of that, there are issues with frame rates – how do you get roughly the same game play on two devices when one is much more powerful than the other? Greater detail? Move more pixels?

But wait, there’s more! One of the biggest (and IMHO, most unfortunate) trends in mobile is that of the bung-on UI. Take something that may be ugly but is at least reasonably fast, and then bung on something on top of it which may be even uglier and you present the user with the triple play of slower, less attractive and less compatible. On Android, there are at least some choices, some of which aren’t so bad. HTC’s Sense, for example. Looks like, runs reasonably well. Moto Blur? Horrible name, nothing like naming your GUI after a visual defect, but all reports are that it is pretty good. Samsung TouchWiz? A touch too clever for its own good. However, in order for any of them to be worthwhile, they really need to be not just as good or slightly better than the stock UI, they need to blow it out of the water otherwise the benefits don’t outweigh the drawbacks of a lack of standardization.

So, the battle is looking like a classic Hollywood WWII propaganda movie, with the stereotypical mixed bag team with an Italian, a Latino, a Jew and a bookish WASP representing Android taking on the Aryan Supermen of Apple with better training, better troops and better equipment in a battle of guts and determination against a precision, scientific war machine. Can the scrappy mutts prevail? Hard to say, but they certainly have their work cut out for them if they are going to take this hill, much less survive. Regardless of which side you are rooting for, this one is going to be interesting. Dim the lights, grab that popcorn and sit back and watch the mortars fly.

Will the Googleplex realize that in the worlds of Steve Balmer that what really matters “Developers Developers Developers”? Will Andy Rubin et al realize that when already fighting an uphill battle? A smaller appstore lacking a pre-existing billing relationship with customers will have a harder time selling software. Sure, free downloads are fun, but if you want your developer community to be able to write software for your platform as a day job and not a hobby then they are going to have to be able to make some money at it. Top things off with a fragmented platform that means that every app has to be first written and then retweaked for each big new phone (a casual count of the number of updates to downloaded apps in the Android Shop immediately after the introduction of the Droid should tell you something…) and it should be clear that all is not milk and honey in Android land. This is not to say that the situation is hopeless or unsalvageable, because it is not and relative to stalled platforms like Windows Mobile, they are in a strong position. And to be honest, relative to folks like Nokia, with S40, several different flavors of S60 and Maemo to worry about, Android presents a unified, homogeneous front. Sure, you hear noise about some shortcomings and frustrations with Android, but the Palm folks would kill to have half the mindshare and God only knows what the Bada folks would do for even a quarter, and let’s not forget people constantly complain about The App Store. Nothing’s perfect.

But whatever you do, don’t frag that Android, bro.

Delivering a Green Christmas with FOTA

2009-12-17T15:14:00.000-08:00

Jason Lackey

In business we often view green more in the context of money than the environment, regardless of whatever lipservice some might pay to this cause or the other. Fortunately technology sometimes provides an out. One classic example that many have already forgotten would be automobile emissions. Yeah, it is a PITA to get your car smogged, but with far fewer people the air in places like LA and Tokyo was far more toxic and opaque in the 60's than it is today.

Some solutions, like smogging cars, are pretty obvious as they directly address problems. Others are less so because they are less direct.

FOTA is one of them.

FOTA - Firmware Over The Air, a way of updating the operating system of a mobile phone remotely, is a technology which, while well established in Japan (by a little software company called InnoPath), has justed started to be widely used in the US.

This year, so far, 3.5 Million devices have been updated, saving a total of 33 Million Kg of CO2 emissions.

You can check out the InnoPath Press release on it, here.

FOTA: $140m Saved and Counting!

2009-12-09T09:02:00.000-08:00

Jason Lackey

Every valley shall be raised up, every mountain and hill made low; the rough ground shall become level, the rugged places a plain. - Isaiah 40:4

Every bug shall be patched, every broken feature made whole; the rough spots smoothed over and the defective UI fixed. - FOTA 4:20

Mobile operators have it rough. On the one hand they have huge networks to support, on the other they have subscribers, each and every one of which thinks they are paying too much. Top it off with the fact that many, if not most, want to have the very latest and greatest phone and they want the latest and greatest to do more and more cool things.

OK, fine. Now this creates more than a little bit of pressure, as the operators, particular those in markets like North America where most devices are subsidized, lean on the device makers and encourage them to rush their best and most beautiful devices onto market and top off these demands with a burning desire to have a specially cooked, custom, operator specific ROM on those phones and you have a situation where you have created the perfect storm for bugs.

Indeed, it is surprising that devices don't crawl like Klendathu (homeworld of The Bugs in Heinlein's Starship Troopers) with bugs.

However, like death, taxes and dropped calls for iPhone users, bugs happen.

What's an operator to do? Well, back in the dark ages, you could do a recall and reflash the phones. Or you could invite your subs to bring their phones in so your techs in the back room of the brick and mortar could jack in with cables and reflash. If you are from Cupertino, you could set down the stone axe and pick up a bronze sword and use iTunes to sideload a full system ROM using (you guessed it) a Mac or PC and a cable. Or, you could set down the antiques and pick up a laser pistol (or at least a nice Smith and Wesson!) and do the updates Over the Air with FOTA - Firmware Over the Air.

Nature abhors a vacuum and thinking people abhor inefficiency. When you look at even major updates, they don't usually involve that much new or changed code. This means that shipping over a whole system image involves a great deal of duplication and inefficiency. FOTA is different, because with FOTA you take the old firmware and the new firmware and create a difference package and push that package to the device. A client on the device, a FOTA client, then reads the diff and uses it to gen up new firmware using the copy already on the device. No waste, no fuss, no fiddly cables or other hassles.

While some of this may not matter to upscale powerusers or may be more of a matter of convenience vs necessity, keep in mind that for an increasingly large number of mobile subscribers in the world that the Third Screen (mobile) is the Only Screen - no Mac, no iTunes, just a phone.

While FOTA has been a standard practice in Japan for years (most device there get at least one update at some point in the product lifecycle), FOTA is just getting started in the US.

Just a couple years ago I recall my delight and joy when I discovered that I could do an OTA update of my Sprint RAZR, an update which fixed a really annoying problem with a corrupted address book.

Now, just some of the devices updated by InnoPath servers in North America in 2009 include:

Casio C711

LG GR500

LG VX11k

Motorola V750

Motorola VU204

Motorola VU30

Motorola V860

Motorola W755

Motorola ZN4

Nokia 6555

Nokia 6650

Nokia E71x

PCD CDM 8975

Samsung Rugby

Samsung SGH-A737

Samsung u-350

Samsung u-450

Samsung u-490

Samsung u-650

UTS GTX75

Anyway, considering how delighted I was when my RAZR stopped autohosing itself, I suspect that the 3.5 million devices that have been updated with InnoPath technology, despite the occasional glitch, have brought a fair amount of relief to a large number of people. Things like this make it a lot easier to come in to work in the morning.

Our press release on this topic is here:

http://www.innopath.com/news/press_releases/2009/2009_12_09_fota.shtml

30 Million to go Silent in India

2009-12-01T08:54:00.000-08:00

Jason Lackey

Well, today is the day. Finally, after numerous slipped deadlines and delays, India has finally dropped the ban hammer on GSM phones with bogus IMEIs.

For background, check out our story here.

Much of the impetus behind this effort stems from the Mumbai terror attacks where terrorists armed with assault rifles and mobile phones with bogus and thus untraceable IMEIs went on a three day killing spree, spreading terror and mahem across the Indian metropolis.

Unlike prior efforts, the Department of Telecoms is not backing down, despite the best efforts of the Cellular Operators Association of India (COIA), who would prefer to take no action rather than banning paying customers.

For subscribers in India with bogus IMEIs, there is a way out. A trip to one of 1600 COIA and COIA run Genuine IMEI Implant (GII) centers, with ID and 199 Rupees and you should be set with a banproof IMEI and a paper receipt to prove it.

They aren't fully alive!

2009-11-19T10:36:00.000-08:00

Jason Lackey

Technology is a wonderful thing and sometimes produces some moments of real hilarity.

AT&T’s rebuttal to recent Verizon attacks, which can be seen here, sadly is not one of them. Rather, it is sad, in a kind of #fail way.

Unlike the Island of Misfit Toys, which manages to hit nostalgic heartstrings and be wickedly evil at the same time, although my neighbor here in cubeville has expressed her unhappiness with the usurpation of her childhood for commercial purposes, one could also argue that the original was more or less a commercial effort anyway.

We digress.

Another piece of comedy was AT&T taking their unhappiness with the whole “There’s a map for that” campaign by means of the court. Sure, this is America and we are the most litigious people in the world but sometimes we pass from the questionable to the absurd and this is one. I would recommend more spending on towers and less on lawyers, a sentiment which seems widely echoed in The Valley and on the blogosphere.

Anyway, this brings me to the quote of the day, which is from the judge who got to hear complaints that AT&T did not like the Misfit Toys spot:

"Most people who are watching TV are semi-catatonic, they're not fully alive." said U.S. District Judge Timothy Batten while commenting on the case.

Classic. Wonderfully classic.

Bat out of Espoo

2009-11-18T08:33:00.000-08:00

Jason Lackey

Performer Meatloaf has a special place in the hearts of many geeks, as he not only appeared in The Rocky Horror Picture Show, the seminal late night B movie, but also hit some chords which cannot help but resonate with degenerate teens, which is to say most of them, which many of us once were. This resonance hit stride with the album Bat out of Hell and some would say the single Paradise by the Dashboard Light was the very climax.

For those unfamiliar, the tune is about a fellow who pledges his eternal love to a girl he is trying to have his way with parked in a car some dark place. Of course, the fellow later changes his mind and tries to find a way out of his pledge of eternal love and devotion.

Reminds me of Peter Schneider, Head of Marketing for Maemo Devices at Nokia when he said "Symbian and Maemo will continue to co-exist,"

Well, guess that depends on how you define co-exist. For example, if it means that devices in the pipeline will ship with the OS they were originally planned to ship with, then OK, but it looks like the end of the line for Symbian is on the N-series is coming quickly if the Maemo folks can be believed.

Of course I expect that they won't break any promises or forget any vows, but it sure sounds like Nokia may be "praying for the end of time" so they can get on with the future of building world class smartphones which, as we have seen, is going to be a real challenge if they stick with Symbian.

Sadly the company does seem to be sending contradictory and changing messages with regards to its platform strategy. Considering the developer flight from Symbian and the rather steep fall in market share, particularly on the high end, it would seem that Espoo needs to make a choice, clearly communicate that choice and get on with life. Far worse then telling people something they don't want to hear is telling them something that they do want to hear but lying about it.

Espoo, go ahead and sleep on it.

A Clockwork Pink: T-Mobile Kickstarts Sidekick Sales Again

2009-11-17T09:00:00.000-08:00

Jason Lackey

After the recent, well publicized failure of the T-Mo/Sidekick/Danger/Microsoft cloud , T-Mobile suspended sales of the popular Sidekick and Sidekick LX advanced featurephones. Understandable move.

Operators want (perhaps need) to be able to control their destinies and one of the best ways to do that is to own and manage the infrastructure that their businesses depend on. Some wireless operators, such as Sprint, have been a bit more optimistic with regards to leaving their fate in the hands of others, but generally the guys who are serious about the subscriber experience want to have all the variables under their immediate and direct control. Of course, in some ways this makes the iPhone a bit of a slippery slope offering (ending in the land of dumb pipes) from the snake in the garden of Eden as so much of the end user experience is controlled by Apple, but then again there are some who would say that for the most part the portions of iPhone end user experience that actually work would be those controlled by Apple and not AT&T, but that is another story.

Which brings us back to T-Mobile. We have seen that Microsoft has been less than a fully trustworthy partner in the mobile space first by the existance of the Pink effort, which effectively betrayed more or less every ally and friend they had amongst the handset makers, timed when faith in WinMo to deliver with 6.5 being a somewhat lame partial reskin and 7.0 delayed until late next year (perhaps far enough in the future to no longer matter, much like the post comet-strike plans of a diplodocus on the Yucatan Peninsula). Then the whole thing was topped off by the final betrayal of their last friend, Sharp, who was going to make the Pink device. An amazing display of self-immolation unlikely to be matched again any time soon.

So, after all this T-Mobile kickstarts sales of the Sidekick devices again. It is certainly nice to see such loyalty in these times, particularly when so much reputation is at stake. I like T-Mobile, they remind me of Virgin or Southwest, a plucky competitor that "gets it" and tries harder. Their support people are great and actually seem to be alive, engaged and care that your phone works. Just somehow I cannot quite purge the scene from Kubrick's A Clockwork Orange when Alex has booted Dim into the water and feigning the offering of a helping hand to pull the flailing Dim out of the drink, instead slashed his hand with a knife.

Viddy well, droogies, viddy well.

Droid’s Angry Red Eye – An Opportunity Lost?

2009-11-13T16:03:00.000-08:00

Jason Lackey

This piece originally appeared on TMCnet.

Well, Sanjay Jha needed to deliver a home run with the Droid, and by all accounts he did. Unlike the past couple years, people are finally talking about Motorola and they are talking about things other than what a fine phone the RAZR was or how the company is bleeding to death in a sea of red ink. Handset news and blog sites have been verging on “all android, all the time”. Verizon has come out with their first memorable ad in recent history (check it out) and finally there are people talking about Moto in something other than funereal tones.

That said, I can’t help but wonder if they haven’t blown it.

Huh?

Yep, I get the feeling that they may have blown the launch and shot too low. Let me explain…

So, I get the angry red cybernetic eye. I like Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica, gadgets, widgets etc. I also get the stealth fighters and the missile bombardment stuff in the ad. I like bombs and explosions and things that go boom. I am a macho gadget fetish geek and I am their target demographic and they nailed it. My heart is filled with lust for the glowing red eye monster.

The problem is, the person in the next cube over, we’ll call her Sandy, isn’t. As a matter of fact, she is repulsed and turned off by the whole thing. Sandy understands technology and mobile in general better than many of the engineers who build it. She is clueful and “gets it”, but the ads with the “creepy red eye” and all the violence are for her a huge turn off. Personally I would love to see an ad where Kimbo Slice takes on the Get a Mac guy but there are a whole bunch of people who would not.

Early adopters, hardcore geeks and macho techno supremacists are of course interesting folks and they usually want smartphones. They want badass high spec smartphones and are willing to pay for them as well. But if we are really trying to do an iPhone killer, they are not the target to shoot for. The target that the iPhone has so successfully hit is broader - the intelligent person who perhaps didn’t realize that she really wanted a smartphone, but once she has tried an iPhone found herself hooked because suddenly the power of the Internet and a meaningful Appstore was available in a pocket able form factor and it sure was cool. This is not the person who is going to be chasing after geek superiority looking after more CPU - this is the type of person who wants her technology to help her get things done and on this front they have missed the mark.

I guess Droids are from Mars and iPhones from Venus.

Now, how about that cute little green Android, where did he go?

Down at the Old Brick and Mortar

2009-11-09T14:34:00.001-08:00

Jason Lackey

I snuck out of the house for a little bit to spend some time down at some Brick and Mortar stores, which is always a fun thing.

In a piece published on TMCnet (available here) I wrote about how I thought that Droid was being pitched wrong and that the Angry Red Eye of Droid was not going to help sell the phone to females. Of course, over the weekend when I was at Best Buy hoping to get my sweaty hands on a live demo machine. While the Best Buy phone guy was trying to get the device activated (guess inputting *228 is harder in some cases than others) one of his coworkers, a young female, heard the word "droid" and scurried over with some excitement to check it out. Exception that proves the rule?

A further exception proving the rule was the quality time I spent with an AT&T Tilt 2, aka the HTC Touch Pro 2.

I have a special fondness in my heart for the original Tilt, which turns out to be an awesome Windows Mobile Demo phone.

The Tilt 2 is without a doubt the finest Windows Mobile device I have ever used. If you have for whatever reason decided that you must have Windows Mobile then the Tilt 2 is not going to disappoint. Big screen, responsive UI even in Touchflow 3D mode and the best mobile keyboard I have used, for those who don't mind a big hunk of technology bouncing around in pocket, this is a fine choice for a phone.

Not perfect, but a solid and well executed example of the breed.

In a way, it is sad to see Windows Mobile finally hit its stride with some of the new 6.5 devices, as it seems to be a platform which has lost its steam and mindshare, sort of like a really bright velociraptor at the end of the reign of the dinosaurs.

Then again, all this may be of little relevance. I am increasingly often seeing parents pacify their kids with iPhones and iPod touches. The thing that stands out is that even children find these devices to be intuitive and pleasurable to use. They want them, they like using them and it can be hard to reclaim the device as the child often seems reluctant to give it up.

Now, try that with a nice S60 device and let me know how hard it is to get it back from a 4 year old.

Droid: Sea Change for Verizon?

2009-11-06T09:37:00.000-08:00

Jason Lackey

For some Verizon may have been the epitome of the walled garden. They have maintained strict control over their network and the things that happen on it and this control and management has paid off for consumers who are rewarded with wireless service with reliability much like that which old Ma Bell taught us to expect from telcos. Always there, nailed up and ready to go. This has not been the case with other operators. Recently Tmobile had a widespread outage and AT&T has had ongoing issues as well. Verizon? Well, here at InnoPath we were able to use their wireless data services to supply data for AT&T devices at Oracle Open World when the AT&T data network in San Francisco was overwhelmed with traffic, so I guess you could say that the ends have justified the means.

The traditional near military precision and attention to detail caused many to poohpooh the Verizon open network initiative, Big Red has shown that they are in fact serious about this stuff. North American operators have often crippled or locked WiFi, GPS on devices, "gimping" the phone and disappointing the consumer while forcing the use of for pay services sold by the operator, things like Navigation packages and such.

One of the big features of Android's 2.0 release is the enhanced Google Maps application, which includes turn by turn navigation - a huge step forward and a direct competitor to a Verizon offering. While there must have been huge temptation to do otherwise, all the goodness baked into Android 2.0 is present and accounted for in Verizon's Droid. They have given up a little control and a little short term cash, but the subscriber is the one who in the end wins.

Additionally, Eclair also marks the first Android release with native ActiveSync/Exchange support baked in to the Google Experience handset. This is exactly the type of Enteprise support that has enabled the iPhone's back door entrance into the enterprise and is the opposite of the RIM approach where all data goes through RIM servers.

These are certainly interesting times with a lot of change and upheaval, but based on past experience I have no doubts that Big Red will continue to deliver on the promise of wireline telco reliability with the benefits of wireless and open networks.

The Back 40

2009-11-04T09:48:00.000-08:00

David Ginsburg

The Back 40
noun - wild or rough terrain adjacent to a developed area.

This article originally appeared in a similar form on TMCnet here.

This last week marked an auspicious event for those of us rooted in Silicon Valley. The 40th anniversary of the creation (and yes, I’m not using that world lightly) of the early Internet… a single link between UCLA and SRI (http://www.lk.cs.ucla.edu/first_words.html). For four decades we’ve been working to tame that Back 40. And what taming it’s been. Every decade, speeds and applications improve a hundred-fold. On the mobile front, I can’t say mobile we’re completely there yet. I still see weeds. But we’re getting close.

So what does this mean, after all these years, when we can finally focus on reaping what we’ve sown? When we can finally turn our attention to services and applications, assuming a network infrastructure to support them? And what does it mean for the mobile operators?

With 3G (mostly) in place, you can now turn your attention to growing the subscriber base. As Morgan Stanley reported, this coming year will be the inflection point on a global level… the year that operators turn their attention to offering the types of data services optimized for mobile broadband, thanks to a billion subscribers with advanced devices. What is almost more telling is iPhone growth, a proxy for the future of advanced applications leveraging the global 3G infrastructure. Compare this growth to the geographically-limited i-mode offering, the world’s first 3G data service, offered by DoCoMo in Japan, and the urgency is clear. What urgency? What does this growth imply for your support organization when you are a Tier 1 operator with 20 million or so subscribers running around with the equivalent of PCs in their pockets?

As a contrast, in the wireline space, customers rarely call their provider. When was the last time you called AT&T, Comcast, or your local ISP? Why? Your end device… the PC or laptop… isn’t provided by the operator. You are more likely to call Microsoft, Dell, or HP with OS or hardware issues. The opposite is true with mobility. In most cases, there is an implied link between the phone and the operator, subsidy or no subsidy. Support call volumes are much greater; call types are more complex.

Unfortunately, you are only marginally staffed to even meet today’s requirements. Fast forward a few years with the majority of your subscribers calling with media, browser, and navigation issues, and it can’t be business as usual. You require a new support paradigm. As I’ve written in the past, you’ll need a real-time over-the-air link between your frontline CSR and the phone itself, capable of reading and sending configuration settings as well as diagnosing software and hardware issues. But what about updating the phone? It isn’t a day you go by without reading of some HTC issue, RIM’s plans to load their 5.0 OS onto existing phones via a desktop application, or Apple’s use of iTunes to push upwards of 5 updates a year to the iPhone.

What you’ll require is a scalable and secure way of pushing large updates OTA to the phone, be it the radio image, the embedded OS, or even applications. Think of Windows or Mac Update, but wireless. You must be able to plan mass updates in advance, targeting groups of subscribers at off-hours. And, the client code running on the phone should select the best network available for the download, including WiFi, while delaying it if necessary due to roaming or lack of 3G connectivity. The client must also be able to intelligently pick up where it left off if a download was interrupted. Needless to say, any update process must clearly explain to the user what will occur and the reason for the update. Admittedly, some of these capabilities exist with the likes of Android or even the Palm Pre today, but they must be scaled many-fold, and incorporated within an operator’s OTA solution for frontline care.

Smartphone OTA updates…. one implement for taming that Back 40.

Droid

2009-11-04T08:28:00.000-08:00

Customers Not Included - Ovi, Comes with Music and Knowing Your Limitations

2009-10-21T12:54:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

The folks over at TelecomTV ran a story about one of Nokia's latest failures, the comes with music debacle. While the Finnish giant had made considerable noise about the service, they found but 691 customers in all of Italy and another 580 in Switzerland. Not very impressive penetration considering that central Europe is Nokia's stomping ground.

Brings to mind a great movie quote from the classic Clint Eastwood flick, Magnum Force where Clint explains "A man's got to know his limitations."

Nokia builds some really good phones. They are well built, solid, quality pieces. They feel good in the hand and for the most part can be easily used with one hand.

Nokia also tries to do services, really really badly. A prime example of this is Ovi, which has been explained to me as an effort schemed up by some sort of finance guy to get the stock price of Nokia up in the stratosphere with software companies instead of down in the hardware ghetto. To be blunt, Ovi sucks. When it was announced with great fanfare and trumpets blazing, I took one of the most popular enterprise smartphones from the Nokia lineup, the E71 (reckon this is probably the pinacle of S60), and visited Ovi. At that time after a bunch of clicking and signing up for various things I eventually got to the point where they told me they didn't have a version for my phone yet.

While it is noble to excel at what you are doing, not everyone is going to be insanely great at everythign they do. Some people are going to suck at some of the things that they try. The solution to that is pretty simple - don't do those things, just concentrate on the things you do well. Very few powerlifters are effective ballerinas, nothing wrong with that, as long as you don't have to watch some hairy bear type prancing around in a tutu. When the brute bear puts on the pink tutu and the dance shoes and tries to pirouette is where dignity goes out the door.

A man's got to know his limitations. Nokia, please get back to basics. Ditch the services, farkles and other nonsense and get back to basics, get back to building great phones.

Good News in Tough Times - Deloitte's Technology Fast 500

2009-10-20T14:02:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

Tough times are the forge of, if not god, then at least the Invisible Hand of Adam Smith. These are tough times indeed, and like fire climax pines, the scorched earth of the valley in a downturn provides fertile soil for startups, which provided the fertilizer of cheap rent and auctionhouse desks and chairs can get a toehold on otherwise rocky soil.

Of course, even in the big fires of the Redwood Forests in California, you don't tend to get scorched earth. While many of the smaller and weaker plants end up returning to the carbon cycle, the bigger and more vigorous redwoods often end up strong as they were before but with less competition for nourishment and light.

At InnoPath, we have been very fortunate through the downturn so far. Sure, things have been rough for many, but in tough times you find the big players are looking for ways to get more from less and that is where our products, Over The Air customer care software, come into the picture. Like snowshoes in a nuclear winter.

Deloitte, a leading audit, consulting, financial advisory and risk management firm is in the job of finding snowshoes, parkas, snow mobiles and other objects useful in nuclear winters. With their expertise across a wide variety of markets and businesses, they are in a unique position to sort the wheat from the chaff, something they do well with their Technology Fast 500 program.

Quoting from the Deloitte website:

Each year companies rally behind innovation, break down obstacles and systematically defy the odds. We salute their efforts with the Technology Fast 500™ program, a ranking of the 500 fastest-growing technology companies in the United States and Canada.

Established in 1997 in California's "Silicon Valley," the program is based on percentage fiscal year revenue growth over a five year period, recognizes all areas of technology — from Internet to life sciences, from computers to semiconductors — and includes both public and private companies.

Anyway, my favorite little software company from Sunnyvale made the list at #238.

Here is the Press Release.

iPhone in Japan: Storming the Galapagos

2009-10-08T16:18:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

I recently had the pleasure of spending some time in Japan, a wonderful wonderful place, particularly when you speak the language. Even if you don't speak Japanese, the country is very English friendly, most can speak at least a little bit and very welcoming. That said, reality is often far weirder and more unexpected than whatever you might imagine so being able to parse the protocol does add to the experience.

The picture above probably doesn't remind you much of an Apple store, does it? Then again, perhaps it shouldn't. It wouldn't really be Japan without attractive young women wearing Space: 1999 costumes pushing electronic gear in an overamped, overcrowded frenzy. I don't recall if this was Yodobashi Camera or some similar place, but it was in Akihabara, an odd and peculiar place at the very core of Geek Chic, a place where costume play, manga, anime, maid cafes and all the latest and greatest gadgets, widgets and toys all come together in a frantic mass of churning, burning consumption.

Apple's iPhone, when initially launched in Japan July 10, 2008, was regarded as a lukewarm success at best. It lacked features, it wasn't a portrait formfactor clamshell, no keyboard, no special animated messaging characters. A foreign oddity, a misborn, malformed freak unsuited to survival in the rarified air of the Japanese hyperphones, a gimpy cripple doomed to playground bullying and a life best characterized as traumatic, brutal and short.

Yep, even Wired got on that bandwagon.

However, as seen here: http://plusd.itmedia.co.jp/mobile/articles/0909/18/news086.html things are less grim for the feisty little scrapper from Cupertino than you might think.

Rankings courtesy of Wireless Watch Japan (thanks for a great site, Lars!)

Yes, of the Top 10 Handsets in Japan, 3 are iPhone variants, including the #1 slot. This is in spite of being on the SoftBank network, a newcomer in a deeply conservative land where many still view Toyota as being a car for an adult but a new, wet behind the ears company like Honda? Bit too new, best for ricer kids, car from an unproven company lacking in history and depth like that.

Wonder what would happen if it was available on DoCoMo and KDDI as well? In France, it seems the answer is about 40% market share.

It is not clear that this would happen in Japan, but it is clear what has happened with SoftBank since the launch of the iPhone.

7/2008: 19.1m total market 103.6m (18.44% share)
1/2009: 20.0m total market 105.8m (18.89% share)
9/2009: 21.1m total market 108.9m (19.37% share)

The Operators Strike Back: The Next Generation of App Stores (Part 3)

2009-10-08T15:05:00.000-07:00

Dave Ginsburg

Last week I looked at appstores and smartphone OSs from the standpoint of the developer community, and what it implied for operator support. Today, I take the handset vendor’s perspective. At InnoPath, we call these the OEMs. More-so than an operator, who may need to support multiple platforms to reach all market segments, the handset vendor must take a more focused approach. This is especially true for the 2nd tier smartphone vendors who don’t have the economies of scale. Note the use of the word ‘smartphone.’ It is important, since some of these OEMs may have very large featurephone footprints, but may be marginal players at present in the Open OS space.

Given that RIM, Apple, and for the moment, Palm are vertically integrated, what is the best OS bet for an HTC, Nokia, Samsung, LG, Sony-Ericsson, or one of the up-and-coming Chinese vendors such as ZTE and Huawei? The first imperative is to move off legacy, proprietary platforms. Although these support web browsing, email, and are many times referred to as integrated devices, the application developer community just isn’t there. This could be said for Nucleus, BREW, and OEM proprietary OSs. Samsung, LG, and Sony-Ericsson are all known for devices in this category, though all three have announced their intent to migrate their product lines over the next few years.

The next question is then which of the Open OSs to support. We’ve got Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android, and flavors of Linux such as LiMo and Maemo. Reviewing current OS penetration on the chart below, Symbian, WM, and Android are all major players. In fact, at least one analyst, isuppli (http://www.isuppli.com/News/Pages/Reports-of-Windows-Mobiles-Death-are-Greatly-Exaggerated.aspx), takes a contrarian view to the prevailing wisdom and suggests that WM will take the #2 spot going forward on the strength of WM7 and vendor support. I’d personally also like to see webOS be made available to other vendors, as an option to Android. I don’t think Palm can build critical mass on their own in the time they have.

Windows Mobile is a bit of an enigma in the marketplace, not only due to confusion regarding 6.5 and 7.0 strategy, but around whether or not Microsoft will deliver an integrated platform. A recent article in Fierce Wireless by Mike Dano (http://www.fiercewireless.com/story/chill-through-windows-mobile/2009-09-24?utm_medium=nl&utm_source=internal) added fuel to the fire in regard to what is to become of Windows Mobile in the face of handset vendor defection. The flip side of the WM story are the rumored Pink devices (http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/09/23/images-of-microsofts-mass-market-turtle-and-pure-handsets-leak-out/) which could very well be the way that Microsoft regains vertically integrated control of the OS and hardware, successfully demonstrated by Apple and more recently, Palm.

But beyond absolute market share, what is important is application availability, a good proxy for what handsets a consumer will actually go out and buy. This sets the stage for future success, since everyone can build a phone with GPS and a big touchscreen. We’re already seeing the shift in OS dominance, from the legacy to the new, and based on applications and internet use. Just this week AdMob issued its latest update (http://metrics.admob.com/2009/09/august-2009-mobile-metrics-report/), showing just how the tide has turned. The iPhone had taken the #1 share (40%) from Symbian (34%), and both Android and webOS had strong showings at 7% and 4% respectively. RIM was at 8% and WM at 4%.

So, application availability should translate into a given OEM’s decision to support a platform (or not). Per the chart below, most vendors are fragmented in their Open OS support, even if they have only a few % of the global smartphone market. Nokia, the largest, is probably the best positioned of the ‘independents’ due to its Symbian experience and up-and-coming Maemo support. The real issue with Nokia has been its inability to counter Apple, even in its home territory of Western Europe. Motorola has taken a more focused course, placing most of its technical and marketing weight behind Android while continuing to support WM due to its strong enterprise footprint. This seems a reasonable approach and from all accounts, the CLIQ is a fine device. They’ve spent their time on matching the hardware to the OS. Unfortunately, this was not the case with HTC’s first generation Android G1, and issue addressed with the Hero.

HTC, best known for Windows Mobile devices, is now doubling down with Android. They can’t walk away from their WM legacy, but if the Hero is any indicator, their Android devices will be successful. That leaves LG, Samsung, and Sony-Ericsson, all three at the bottom of the table below, and all three fragmented in their Open OS strategy at the same time they are transitioning from legacy OSs.

Sony-Ericsson has stated that they must support all three – Symbian, Android, and Windows Mobile – to hit different geographies and market segments. But are they large enough to support the engineering and support base? Samsung and LG, though larger, are still less of a factor in the Open OS space. Samsung and LG, BTW, are also members of LiMo, as evidenced by Vodafone’s 360 announcement highlighting Samsung LiMO devices. The recommendation would be for all three vendors to take a strategic view of their market approach including tiers, geographies, and operator customers and then each prune at least one platform from their roadmap. All three have their own UI approaches. They could apply their engineering resources to perfecting this on one or two platforms, building a user experience that would begin to approach Apple.

As to the Chinese, I don’t see any reason for them to adopt anything other than Android, or in some cases, some other Linux variant. The logic when looking at application support, cost of development, and installed base just isn’t there. It permits them to better focus their development efforts and customer support, and by relying on an easily adaptable OS foundation they will be better able to apply their efforts towards differentiation (i.e., at the UI level as HTC has done with Sense on Android or TouchFlo3D on Windows Mobile) vs OS maintenance and other forms of reinventing the wheel.

The Operators Strike Back: The Next Generation of App Stores (Part 2)

2009-10-01T13:36:00.000-07:00

Dave Ginsburg

(This article originally appeared here on tmcnet.com 28 September 2009)

Last week I looked at the App Store phenomenon with a focus on how operators are introducing their next-generation portals.

This week, I’ll couple it with a perspective from the developer community, and what it means for the future success or lack thereof of the various Open OS platforms.

Next week I’ll fold in the handset vendor perspective, discussing whether they should spread their development across multiple platforms, or stick to one or two. Their future success could hang in the balance.

It goes without saying that Apple, in a relatively short time, has garnered the greatest mindshare amongst developers, independent of any perception as to the transparency with the application approval process. Apple has built sufficient momentum with regard to the types of applications available and cost points, including a wide variety of low-cost applications, try-and-buy, and ease of application discovery.

The Android Market in contrast is still on the upswing, and according to Admob, it has a ways to go to compete with Apple. The survey found that 55 percent of Android users have not yet downloaded an application from the store, in contrast to only 23 percent of iPhone users. Admob goes on to state that although the checkout process may be holding back subscribers, the real culprit is the lack of quality applications and mainstream software.

Applications are the outgrowth of a critical mass of developers, and as of August, 2009, the iPhone footprint was 40 times that of Android. More recently, Motorola and others have stated that application organization within the Market requires improvement. The new 1.6 release is expected to address some of these concerns.

The veteran, Symbian, claims the largest development community, but to its disadvantage, applications have traditionally been scattered, mostly handled by legacy operator platforms or 3rd parties. Nokia with its Ovi service and Sony Ericsson with its Play Now Arena are attempting to counter this, but their devices each only hold a portion of an operator’s network, and this varies by geography. In addition, users may not naturally gravitate to their handset vendor for applications as their primary financial relationship is with their operator.

On the operator front, efforts such as Vodafone’s 360 could help facilitate application awareness, but operator offerings do not build platform identity or directly address the developer issue.

At the same time, Symbian itself is in a transition to an open source model, and after the ^4 release, applications will no longer be backward compatible. This too will influence application development. Further confusing the Symbian issue is Nokia’s move to its Linux-based Maemo for some platforms and Sony-Ericsson dividing its loyalty across Symbian, Windows Mobile and Android. Neither vendor may therefore be considered as a proponent for the ultimate Symbian appstore.

Perhaps the Symbian Foundation will rise to the occasion, but at present the foundation’s Horizon initiative is more to act as a publisher to make sure that Symbian applications are available on 3rd party app stores such as Ovi, and the continued comfort of developers working within the framework of the foundation is unknown. This could create further fragmentation vs the centralized models of Apple and Android, as developers may need to maintain financial relationships with multiple operators and handset vendors. Additionally, one would expect that Nokia will begin to develop an application ecosystem around Malmo, influencing the prominence it places on Symbian.

Microsoft is only now launching its Marketplace with Windows Mobile 6.5, while the Blackberry App World launched at CTIA in Spring, 2009 enjoys moderate success. Both Samsung and LG also intend to launch stores in the near future, with both positioned as multi-OS in the same way as Ovi and Sony-Ericsson. Finally, the dark-horse platform with a great deal of promise is Palm’s WebOS, though the developer community is still quite small due to a minimal installed base. Nevertheless, in a short period of time and with minimal device penetration, it has garnered mindshare.

The graphic below helps clarify the various relationships. iPhone and Android developers need only maintain a financial relationship with their respective App Stores, and in the case of Android, will develop to a single, controlled ‘flavor’ despite support from different handset vendors (i.e., HTC, Samsung, Motorola, Sony-Ericsson). Developers for RIM take two paths.

The first is via the branded App Store, and the second is to the operator directly. Here, unless RIM’s App World acts as a strong broker, the developer may need to maintain a relationship with each operator. This of course won’t scale. However, development itself is still contained based on strong RIM device guidelines.

Development for Windows Mobile is more complicated. Although Microsoft has announced the Marketplace, it will take time to develop. The developer therefore must maintain a relationship with one or more operators, and at the same time the handset vendors who are launching their own storefronts. Design guidelines may also be more flexible than RIM or Apple, so a developer may need to be cognizant of handset vendor specific implementations. If successful, the Marketplace option could be the best path for the developer.

Symbian is more complex and fragmented, with no strong storefront or broker with the exception of the foundation’s Horizon. The developer at present must maintain a financial relationship with multiple handset vendors as well as with multiple operators. In addition, the various flavors of S60 result in software fragmentation, and the emergence of the foundation only adds to the confusion. Clearly, a better solution along the lines of the Windows Marketplace is required.

Here's a graphic display that I call "The Developer’s Conundrum: Application Development Ecosystems":

Separate from developer support, how do the various OSs stack up with regard to their UI, browser, and vendor support? Credit Suisse recently released a report (Smart Phones...Smarter Investments, Aug 31, 2009) looking at the smartphone market, as well as vendor and OS strengths and weaknesses. As expected, when taking the OS view, Apple is Number 1. Palm’s new webOS is 2nd, though limited in deployment, has some of the same advantages as to the UI and browser, as does Android, which is at 3. In fact, both platforms are close in the ranking and if market adoption was included, Android would be ahead. RIM, Symbian, and Windows Mobile all trail, within a few points of each other. The chart reaffirms the position that Android is the strongest ‘open’ OS (i.e., applications not controlled by a single entity as is the case with Apple). As I mentioned, next week I’ll look at how this compares to the vendor view. So what are the impacts on the developer community?

Ideally, an operator would embrace those platforms that combine large developer communities with ease of implementation. In addition to hardware design and usability, customers no longer wish to be limited to the traditional operator-controlled walled-garden and will seek out those devices with the widest application variety. Other than the iPhone, Android seems to be best positioned here for the mass market and in fact is a more open ecosystem. The success of Blackberry’s App World, Microsoft’s Marketplace, or the Symbian Horizon approach is too early to determine, though they could be more viable within an operator-controlled store. This is the approach Blackberry is taking with Verizon’s V CAST Apps Store as described last week.

Focusing on a small number of platforms will also help the operator or handset to focus its engineering, marketing, and support resources, and will also help to build loyalty by creating a critical mass of supporters . This is the path taken by the more successful operators, and given recent confusion over whether Verizon Wireless will or will not carry the Palm Pre, it is obviously top-of-mind.

Take a look at these Credit Suisse smartphone OS rankings:

Edited by Michael Dinan

The Operators Strike Back: The Next Generation of App Stores

2009-09-23T10:56:00.000-07:00

A lot has been written recently regarding appstores and the role, or lack thereof, of the mobile operator. Regarding roles, it is not that operators have been unaware, or that they’ve not tried in this space. Every mobile operator has their ‘legacy’ store, and the term walled garden would be an understatement. Ever been to one? What Apple has done with their App Store, and to a lesser extent, Android with its Market, is that they have reset the bar on usability and convenience for the subscriber, as well as ease of development (and thus building a critical mass within the development community).

The cat is out of the bag, so to speak, with Apple, but operators still have the chance to play what they consider to be their rightful role. The key to success will be to balance the points mentioned above with their business model, a model different from the OS platform provider. It embraces the notion of an open and dynamic market for applications across platforms, and the role that the operator may play in brokering applications across the various open OSs supported within their network.

Verizon Wireless, based on their announcements, is taking this approach. As reported in Verizon to its smartphones: thou shalt have no other app store before mine (Jul 13, 2009), the operator will handle all billing and will have control over what 3^rd party appstores and applications are made available on the handset out-of-the-box when its V CAST Apps Store launches before the end of 2009. They will revenue share with the application developers, and a subscriber will only need his or her single Verizon account for payments. A customer will still be able to access a 3^rd party appstore directly but only after taking the initiative to download the specific portal software for the store.

In Verizon’s favor, the operator promises a more streamlined application approval process than that for Apple, and is pushing for a set of common standards that would permit application developers to more easily adapt their applications for multiple OSs. Verizon has traditionally maintained more control over the user experience, and this approach seems to align with this.

Verizon states that developers will retain 70% of the proceeds, which is equal to that of Apple but a change from what mobile operators took in the past. This is acknowledgement that Verizon understands this new world, a world very different from the very limited operator-driven software portals of the past. They understand that they either create a business model and user experience equal to Apple or Google, or get cut out of the equation. In addition, there are larger issues at play. As Shaw Wu in The Wall Street Journal pointed out, an effective appstore is also key to facilitating hardware sales. Users are no longer interested in just a static hardware platform. Just like the PC, they expect applications and capabilities to evolve.

Telefonica with its planned ‘mstore’ offering (http://saladeprensa.telefonica.es/jsp/base.jsp?contenido=/jsp/notasdeprensa/notadetalle.jsp&id=0&origen=portada&idm=eng&pais=1&elem=13765&titulo=Telef%F3nica%20launches%20'mstore',...) is also taking the same approach, leveraging Telefonica’s strong Movistar branding. What is interesting is that they plan to eventually launch across their operating companies, a user base of 200M. This will provide developers with a critical mass for development. They have described the organization structure, application pricing, but have not detailed platforms supported or how mstore will interact with the likes of Microsoft’s Marketplace or Android’s Market. Much like Verizon, Movistar-branded handsets will have the store application pre-installed.

These are just two current examples of operators getting into the game. Others will follow. But what OS platforms will succeed? Where should operators place their efforts? Next time around I’ll look at the operator appstore from the perspective of the OS platform, taking guesses on which will succeed based on the strength of their developer communities as opposed to only looking at OS features and hardware.

Standards: Conformity at Any Cost?

2009-09-23T10:53:00.000-07:00

By Jason Lackey, Marketing Manager, Innopath Software

The world of technology is a fascinating one, filled with multiple competing dynamics.

On the one hand, innovation is the engine of capitalism and it is from innovation that competitive advantage is gained. On the other hand, in order to ensure that your widget plays nicely with other widgets (as few make enough of a solution to play alone in a vacuum) standards are necessary.

With standards, it is possible to do things like build a better browser that will show your favorite Web pages as they are intended to look, but faster and better. With standards one can do things like manage phones OTA (Over The Air) and make support less of a nightmare for your subscribers. With standards a lot of things are possible, but these possibilities come with a cost.

Standards come from standards bodies. Standards bodies tend to be populated by people from companies with a vested interest in some technology but the standards efforts tend not to be a central focus of those people who often have their "real" jobs to do when they are not in standards meetings. The various vendors represented will tend to have different perspectives, goals and desires and this can make progress very slow at times.

In the world of mobile device management, standards are relatively new, just like the technology. Of course, the technology came first and in the absence of standards vendors, by necessity, created proprietary protocols. The first wave of real standardization was from the Open Mobile Alliance in the form of OMA-CP, Client Provisioning protocol. While far from perfect, mostly due to being a one way write-only protocol, CP got the ball rolling and helped illustrate the value to device management.

Recognizing the shortcomings of fire and forget, OMA followed up on CP with OMA-DM, a bidirectional protocol that let you read as well as write, allowing the operator to get feedback after device management actions have been taken. I guess some folks decided that it would be useful to know that something had been fixed by means other than the person holding the device telling you that it had been fixed. I further suppose that folks figured it would be useful to be able to do things like a basic diagnostic ping on the phone.

All this is good, but as I mentioned before standards can move slowly and in many cases the standards don't keep up with the technology, which is where things like a "Standards+" approach come in. A vendor which owns both ends of a client/server solution can do things like support standards such as OMA-DM as a base, but also offer extensions and enhancements above and beyond the standards.

This gives the advantage of interoperability out of the box while also providing additional functionality. Back when the Model T was introduced, it could be said that existing standards for road construction called for dirt or gravel and the car worked fine on those roads. When a road was enhanced beyond being a rutted goat trail, beyond the standards of the day, the car didn't stop running, it ran better and provided a better end user experience.

AT&T Device Redux

2009-09-10T16:38:00.000-07:00

Dave Ginsburg

On the heels of a pulled BB Bold update (http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/09/04/att-pulls-blackberry-bold-software-upgrade/), rumors have it that they’ve now issued a recall on the recently launched Nokia Mural (http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/09/10/att-stops-all-sales-of-the-nokia-mural/) due to erroneous 2G vs 3G settings set at the factory. What is interesting is that the internal announcement hints of an available software update. Given that FOTA has proven to be both reliable and scalable at at least one other NA operator, the question is why AT&T doesn’t push an update to the impacted Murals. Is only a cabled update available and has Nokia not provided an OTA package due to the severity of the problem? Or, could FOTA have addressed the issue but the Mural is not FOTA capable? In this day and age, that seems hard to believe, but I’ve not seen evidence that FOTA is active on the handset. Any deeper insights into what could have been an easily prevented embarrassment?

Sweet Home rue de la Victoire

2009-09-08T09:20:00.000-07:00

Telecoms is a wonderful industry although not without irony. For example, while we help our customers deliver better support to their subscribers remotely, over the air, it is also true when working on complex systems with many integration points and a lot of people involved, that it is often most effective to have a presence where your customers are. Evidently when buying multi-million euro solutions which are in the critical path of a core business function customers want to be able to get the vendor in the room and have a chat about things.

Thus, our latest office, in Paris:

InnoPath Software
52, rue de la Victoire, TMF Pôle
75009 Paris, France.
+ 33 1 56 53 63 60

Globalization, Internationalization, Localization and The Total Experience

2009-08-27T10:01:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

Native speakers of English and those using relatively plain versions of the Roman Alphabet have it easy with regards to high tech in general and computers and computer-like devices. The reason I say this is that since many of these things were either invented or refined in English speaking countries support of English and the Roman Alphabet is usually pretty good. In fact, these might be the only language and character set choices available. Great for Americans, not so wonderful for others.

Although InnoPath is based in the US, we try to be a very international company. Part of this is we have to. Our market is global, our customers are all over the world. Part of this is a conscious decision and part of this is the organic result of having a very diverse staff at our Silicon Valley headquarters along with offices in Beijing, Seoul, Tokyo, Mumbai, London and Atlanta.

This international perspective is reflected not only in our attitudes and workforce, it is also reflected in our products. The ability to deliver the UI in the user's native language makes a real difference. The US is spoiled, here we demand everything in English and people don't even like to see movies with subtitles. Other countries should be able to enjoy products and services in the native language of the user but far too often such is not the case. With the InnoPath Care Portal the portal reads the browser's language settings and presents the UI in the user's language of choice. Certainly many people over the world can read and function in English, but it provides the user with a better and more welcoming experience when they can work in their native language.

Internationalization (i18n) also known as Globalization - is the process of designing and building your product in such a way that it can easily be adapted to a number of different languages and locales. Some of the factors include being able to effectively deal with foreign characters - Roman alphabet with diacritical marks, non-Roman characters such as Chinese, Japanese and Korean, Hindi etc. Unicode, a character set containing all the world's scripts (or at least many of the world's scripts) is often used. Challenges include coping with left to right as well as right to left and/or up to down reading direction, handing text input and coping with a variety of input method editors.

Localization (L10n) is the process of taking a product and translating it for a particular locale or language. If a product has been properly internationalized from the start then this is an easier process. For example, the InnoPath Care Portal contains text for the UI in a resource file. This makes it easy to edit the text of the UI without touching the code. A non-globalized approach might have text for the UI hardwired into the code, meaning that any changes will involve hunting through and changing the code, a time consuming and potentially risky process. Places sharing the same or similar languages may treat things like address, dates and times differently, so these concerns would have to be addressed as well.

Swimming Iguanas, Funny Birds and Japanese Smartphones - Galapagos Syndrome?

2009-08-21T09:19:00.000-07:00

Risa Tanzawa

Editors Note: Risa Tanzawa is InnoPath's Tokyo based Marcom.

Blue footed boobies, swimming iguanas and other weird things make the Galapagos Islands, a small chain of islands on the equator in the Pacific, their home. Due to the relative isolation of these islands, evolution has taken some strange turns, resulting in scary looking lizards that eat algae under water, birds with a fetish for blue feet and other weirdness. Some say that the mobile handset market in Japan is similar to the Galapagos Islands, stunning and unexpected diversity that has evolved in isolation from the rest of the world resulting in if not shock and awe for the visitor, then at least surprise.

While weird and wonderful in their home market, Japanese device makers have had trouble selling their phones abroad, largely due to this divergent evolution of the market where features considered a necessity in Japan are not seen elsewhere. This problem is called the Galapagos Syndrome.

That said, let’s take a look at some of the unique features of Japanese mobile phones.

QR Code (two-dimensional bar code)
While many phones technically can read QR Codes, the two-dimensional bar codes seen in many Japanese ads, this is a technology not widely used or understood in the US. You can almost think of it as mobile Cue Cat except that, at least in Japan, QR has caught on and is widely used. This helps overcome the not so fun task of multitap/T9 input of long URLs.

IrDA (Sekigaisen-Tsushin)
You see a young couple saying goodbye on the street. Then you notice they are pointing their phones at each other like they were taking tricorder readings. The tricorder must have some good news, because both smile and bow and go their separate ways. What you just saw was the exchange of contact info over IR. Infrared, being short range and line of sight, is good for the semisecure exchange of info like contacts. Because it is short range and line of sight, it can be secure without having all sorts of passwords get in the way and it is a lot easier to do than to manually input a long, complex email address by hand.

Osaifu-Keitai®
Osaifu-Keitai is trademark of NTT DoCoMo, meaning Wallet-Mobile Phone. This technology uses Sony's Mobile FeliCa ICs. "Osaifu-Keitai" uses NFC radio and provides electronic money, credit card, electronic ticket, membership card, airline ticket, and other functionality. At convenience stores, you only need to hold a phone over a machine at the casher to purchase anything if you have enough money on your phone, which saves time and is very convenient. More from docomo.

One-Seg (TV)
One-Seg is a mobile terrestrial digital audio/ video and data broadcasting service. One-Seg is free and in many cases is used to watch TV on the handset. 86% of handsets shipping in Japan ship with One-Seg.

Apps
Japanese featurephones have been application friendly for a while, a feature which in combination with the powerful hardware helps blur the lines between a Japanese featurephone and a traditional smartphone. Games, including 3D shooters and the like requiring hardware acceleration, are available, but beware, downloads and use can chew up a lot of data which is expensive unless you have an unlimited plan.

Animated Emoticons and Email Decoration (cHTML email)
Japan is big on the cult of kawaii, people old and young all love “cute” and cHTML email puts the cute into mobile mail with animated emoticons, graphics, backgrounds and the like. This is particularly popular with women and children. There are more and more cute pictures, so actually I enjoying receiving new ones from my friends. You can reuse emoticons and pictures you have received, making this a fun, social feature. This feature was said to be one of the barrier to entry into the Japan market for the iPhone, which did not support this feature. Here is KDDI's page on this feature in Japanese.

So, just like the Galapagos Islands, Japan is a small island country and mobile phones, like the blue footed boobie, have taken on unique forms and colors to better meet local requirements. Sadly this supreme adaptation to local conditions, while useful in the native environment, makes life harder once off the island.

BTW, InnoPath is Hiring!

2009-08-20T13:28:00.001-07:00

Jason Lackey

Recession? What recession? We are busy, as in we have more work that we have people. As in we need help! The wireless business has, far more than many other industries, weathered the recession fairly well. Customer care and mobile device management, as slices of the larger wireless industry, done very well themselves.

Part of the reason for this is the Rise of the Superphone. Sure, we all knew that the day of the Smartphone was coming, but it was not clear how fast and how hard it was going to hit. Just today we learn that Smartphones have taken 28% of the US market. The additional functionality of smartphones is great, especially for powerusers. However, with power comes complexity and with complexity comes difficult support. Difficult as in long phone calls to do things like fix email etc.

Another part of the equation is that while support is always a place where operators are going to want to find ways of being more efficients, during rough economic times it goes without saying that mobile operators are going to want to save money on support, which is one of their largest expenses.

Other things contributing to things being busy around here include megatrends like The Rise of the Rest. For too long a disproportionate amount of the world's wealth and power have been concentrated in too few hands, leading to vast, global imbalances. With the rise of the BRIC and other nations, taking their rightful places at the table, global demand for wireless is rising and countries like India are no longer just buying cheap dumbphones, devices like the N97 are selling briskly there. Wonderful stuff!

We are also seeing trends like the Third Screen (ie the mobile screen) being the Only Screen for many millions of subscribers around the world. It used to be taken for granted that someone wealthy enough to own a smartphone would be wealthy enough to own a PC to run Nokia PC Suite or iTunes on. As it turns out, this is not necessarily the case anymore. Many can buy and desperately want a nice smartphone but may not be able to afford or really want a desktop PC. Guess for those people their updates are coming over-the-air, at a brick and mortar, or not at all. Hmmmm...wonder which way is cheapest and most convenient?

Anyway, we are hiring. Check out our Jobs Page but don't be overly fussy about the exact job description. We are hiring in many groups across the organization and if you have significant experience and/or expertise in Java, Oracle, Weblogic, Solaris, IP/SS7 networking, technical writing and even product marketing our recruiter would probably like to talk to you.

Just like the Jesus Jones song says, "Right here, right now, there's no other place I want to be."

SMS 20/20

2009-08-17T10:40:00.000-07:00

Dave Ginsburg

We usually write about care-related topics, but sometimes something crosses our desk that just hits a nerve. The Brits, in their unique approach to ‘reality’, have produced a video on the dangers of texting while driving: http://gizmodo.com/5338475/texting-while-driving-psa-delivers-bloody-bone+crunching-message

I’m remembering back to my Driver’s Ed and the videos they ran. In the same way that alcohol was compared to a drug, it is even easier to make the comparison to texting. It’s not like you drank 200 beers in a day, but that many SMSs is common amongst hard-core users. And though we jokingly draw comparisons to our Blackberries, calling them ‘crackberries’ in reference to another well-known drug, the urge to email when first waking up won’t do fatal damage to those around you (the impact on your relationship could be another matter, though).

California is one of the states that has banned texting while driving, and just last week announced a crackdown, countering those that claim the law is ineffective. Southern California was also the site of a texting incident last year on a commuter train in which a number of people died.

So, it’s not like texting is a bad thing. Just take it in moderation, and at the right time and place.

Text responsibly.

Customers as Hostages

2009-08-13T10:39:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

Some industries seem to feel that they have the right to abuse their customers. In the US, airlines are one. While most have grown used to surly trolls bitterly tossing tiny bags of peanuts, once in a while even US domestic airlines rise above the threshold and venture into new and uncharted territory. In a previous post, we talked about United and their collective hatred of guitars: http://thecsr.blogspot.com/2009/07/customer-service-epic-fail-united.html, but Continental recently outdid them with a mini hostage crisis where pax (passengers) were kept on the plane overnight until 6:30 in the morning despite no food, little drink, crying babies and an increasingly rank smell. Bloomberg has more on this: http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601103&sid=aGBrdHwGc3x4

You can keep pax or subs hostage for a short time, but later they tend to remember that they did not enjoy it very much. Hopefully this lesson will not be lost.

Did you ever have one of those days?

2009-08-03T13:31:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

Ads and marketing can do powerful things in terms of building and shaping a brand and can either contribute to building something of value or get in the way. To be certain, Infiniti has earned respect by building good cars for a number of years. Then again, they had to as the launch of the Q45 (think Cedric for you JDM types) in the US was held back by the ads, which were viewed by some as being zen and forward looking while many had trouble understanding why a car company was showing them pictures of rocks and trees.

Apple has a way of getting things right, both with product and with the branding around the product. Then again, they have passionate people who are fanatic about the customer experience from ad, through the unboxing until product end of life and these people pay attention to the whole thing from end to end. Speaking of Apple, remember the Ellen Feiss Switch Ad? Classic! Well, her long lost twin was recently found in Santa Cruz at a City Council meeting!

Palm, recently risen from it's deathbed with a technically stellar OS (WebOS) on merely adequate hardware (Palm Pre) is in a bit of a bind. While many have fond memories of Palm and wish them great success, they really need to be firing on all cylinders and they don't have the burn time to buy a lot of do-overs. In this context you might expect them to do a nice series of ads highlighting the technical argument in favor of the Pre, perhaps hammering on multitasking or the cool apps you can run etc. Oh, wait, Sprint already did that. They even did one based on the price of the service plan for the phone, one of biggests chinks in the iPhone armor.

Palm, in contrast, did some really weird art pieces with Tamara Hope, who in these ads looks like the long lost sister of the Borg Queen. Nothing wrong with weird - if it connects. Nothing wrong with art, if it works. Seems that in this case the pieces, for most, do neither, and it is a shame, because Palm as a great new OS of which we have only seen the tip of the iceberg. However, they are running the risk of alienating exactly the consumers they should be appealing to and damaging a brand which deserves some polish.

Not Quite a Killdozer Rampage

2009-07-31T08:36:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

David Pogue of the New York Times is on the warpath. While perhaps not as passionate or heartfelt as Marvin Heemeyer's killdozer rampage, his "Take Back the Beep" Campaign has certainly ruffled some feathers and caused some difficult questions to be asked.

The basic premise is this: the voicemail instructions you hear when calling many mobile devices are too long and are there for the purpose of racking up billable minutes. By Mr. Pogue's math, this works out to about $620 million per year for a large North American Tier 1.

Wow.

Of course, there is a flip side. I used to run a corporate helpdesk and anyone in the business of providing technical support will back me up - you can never be too clear, too explicit or repeat yourself too often when you are trying to provide the general public with instructions for using some widget or service, no matter how simple. Sure, the instructions burn cycles and take time, but it could be argued that being less clear would leave at least some customers clueless and that would result in an even greater burden in terms of total time spent on support calls for people trying to figure out how to use voicemail.

I hope the Komatsu D355A stays in the garage!

When Worlds Collide

2009-07-30T10:05:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

The recent AT&T/Apple/Google fiasco with the banning of the Google Voice App from the Apple App Store highlights the type of issues and conflicting perspectives that the industry will increasingly face, with the dawn of 4G helping to bring things to a head.

Let me explain. The operators, being large and profitable, like the way they have been doing business and would like mobile to continue to look like wireline services just without the wires. They want to deliver a service with the reliability and predictability of a utility.

Subscribers, increasingly raised on IP and the internet, have different expectations. They see services, the network and devices from the perspective of an internet user - they can (for some, perhaps should) come from different places. The operator carries the bits, someone makes the phone and services exist in the cloud. Oh, yeah, almost forgot, the services should also be free.

Of course there are regional market differences. For example, Gmail and Yahoo don't get much mobile love in Japan, where most people tend to use operator provided mobile mail accounts. Europeans seem to have a better understanding of handsets not needing to come from the operator, probably due to the dominance of GSM, while in the US near universal subsidies and sim locks on GSM devices help curb the view of the mobile terminal as being something not tied to the network. However, the tide is turning.

Which brings us to the slippery slope. Folks like Apple insist on control as that is the only way they can guarantee a good user experience and that sometimes things that would be impactful in a bad way will be verboten. Fine. What about things that don't break or harm the phone or network but that the operator doesn't like for business reasons? VoIP, for example. The operator may want to block such things, but is this in the best interest of the subscriber? Microsoft, for example, believes that Internet Explorer provides the best possible user experience for PC users, but the EU seems to differ.

Long term, I suspect that the world of wireless will come to more closely resemble the internet, but it will take some time and there will be some bumps in the road. Just like some ISPs try to block p2p traffic, you will also see some operators try to block apps they see as threats, but I suspect that long term the operators will come to see stuff that runs over their data networks as being good because it drives demand for data. Until then, expect an occasionally bumpy ride.

Under Promise and Over Deliver

2009-07-15T15:57:00.000-07:00

Dave Ginsburg

For those of you who have worked with sales, or have stood in front of a customer explaining the latest and greatest from engineering, these were the watchwords. The worst you can do is make a promise, or an implied promise, and then break it. Better is to take a more conservative approach, only promising what you know is rock solid. Anything above and beyond, and you’ll ‘delight’ the customer. Unfortunately, as BGR reported, Sprint hasn’t seem to have learned their lesson. These are the things that lost customers are made of. And, whether Sprint’s decision to outsource operations to Ericsson to permit them to ‘focus’ on their customers will improve things is anyone’s guess.

Customers are precious, especially today. Their loyalties have been shaken, as evidenced by the move to prepaid. The postpaid subscribers that remain are more demanding, and expect a premium experience. I’m sure the folks at AT&T are none too pleased about recent reports on network throughput and reliability. But that’s today’s reality. Everyone’s voice is heard through the power of blogs, Youtube, and other social media. CNN and Fortune now use these as sources. For people a decade or so younger than me, this their reality. Witness the posting on United (http://thecsr.blogspot.com/2009/07/customer-service-epic-fail-united.html). In fact, as I write, over 3 million people have viewed the video on Youtube.

The premium experience customers expect doesn’t end when they push the purchase button on the operator’s website. When calling in for support, they expect first time problem resolution as opposed to a runaround on what ‘might’ be the problem, and they don’t want to die on the vine on the IVR. They want information, and one of Sprint’s problems was not providing accurate updates as to when the phones would actually be available, and where. Much like being in an airport, staring up at the departures screen, and wondering when and if your plane will ever take off. Not fun. It is incumbent upon the operators to look at all phases of the customer interaction, from the first TV ad to contract renewal. Look at the various ways that customers interact, and seek to improve each phase.

The Bung-On UI and Other Horrors

2009-07-10T11:32:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

It wasn't long ago that 1 Gigahertz was respectable performance for a desktop. Now, thanks to the wizards at Qualcomm, Snapdragon brings 1 GHz performance to the phone.

Sadly just as Qualcomm giveth, we have seen that device makers such as Toshiba, have figured out how to taketh away. Enter the TG01.

The hardware is somewhere between cool and stunning, but the user experience is less so.

The Toshiba marketing guys clearly had a powow with their engineers and issued some dictate to the effect that it was necessary to do Windows Mobile but it needed to "look cooler, like an iPhone" or something. This is where things started to go wrong.

Windows Mobile in its newest, most beautiful iterations, is not bad. It is not particularly fast or spry, but not bad. However, if you take an OS that is not particularly fast and then bung on some 3D spinner laden UI overlay (the type of thing that we all know does a good job of sucking CPU), mix it with a big big screen with lots of pixels to drive and then suddenly you have magically transformed what should have been an amazing screamer into a bit of a lethargic pig.

Part of the iPhone magic, which also applies to many Symbian and even some Featurephone RTOSs as well, is the snap that the UI has. When you tell the phone to do something, it responds instantly. In the case of the iPhone, a bit of misdirection is used from time to time, some stuff actually takes a while to launch, but at least the phone comes back to you and tells you "Sir, yes, sir, I am on that sir!" right away. Indeed, one of the gripes about the Nokia N97 is that far too often the user is left hanging, which is exactly what happens with the TG01.

To paraphrase Pink Floyd, "Hey, Device Maker, leave that UI alone!". For another take on the sad TG01, check out Engadgetmobile.

Customer Service Epic Fail: United Breaks Guitars

2009-07-10T08:35:00.001-07:00

Jason Lackey

While the dawn of the social web presents companies with a whole new set of tools and opportunities to provide better service and more value for customers, it also provides customers who feel they have been wronged with unprecidented opportunities to share their grievances with others.

Dave Carroll, a country singer, watched in horror through the aircraft window as baggage handlers at O'Hare abused with vigor and great violence his prized $3500 Taylor guitar. Bad if it is just a tool, worse if said guitar is how you make your living. Although he complained to a number of different employees, Mr. Carroll got no satisfaction nor what he viewed as adequate compensation so he made good on his promise to make a song and video about his misadventures with the carrier.

The video is here.

FOTA, Your Safety Net

2009-07-08T15:36:00.000-07:00

David Ginsburg

We like to think of our mobile phones as bug-free, but we all know this isn’t the case. Handset vendors, under pressure to ship the latest and greatest in time for school or in time for Christmas, can’t correct every last problem. Their wireless operator partners accept these phones into their networks with waivers, and as long as any bugs are not network impacting, the vendor is usually given a few months to make corrections. In an industry where every week of development counts, the 6-8 weeks that a handset vendor has to debug the software between shipping the phone into the operator’s inventory and the operator actually delivering it to the customer can do wonders for stability.

If only they could take advantage of that time. If only the phone, when turned on for the first time, could automatically check for an update and download what is probably a more stable and bug-free release. Seems like a simple concept, and in fact when you unbox a PC or Mac, this is exactly what happens, but this wasn’t the case with mobile phones until just recently.

Customers now have a safety net, and in fact one leading North American operator, using a technology called FOTA (Firmware Over The Air), has pushed over a million successful updates over the last year across multiple phone vendors and device models. They’ve recently begun pushing updates even at the time of phone activation if their handset partner informs them of a critical fix. Depending upon the severity of the problems fixed, and whether a particular bug impacts a service that the subscriber needed, this could mean a million avoided calls to the helpdesk or a million avoided trips to the phone shop. The financial benefits to the operator are obvious, not to mention the impact on customer satisfaction and even the environment.

In the great scheme of things, over-the-air updates are still the exception vs the norm. This will change. Smartphones, texting phones, integrated devices, or whatever you want to call them are just little PCs. Their hardware and software is subject to the same defects as their larger brethren. With the deployment of 3G, and in the future LTE, and with the availability of stable and interoperable update clients on the phones, operators have at their disposal not only the technology but the network infrastructure to push updates on a regular basis. And they will.

FOTA is one net you want to be caught up in.

Seeing is Believing

2009-07-07T09:47:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

They say that seeing is believing, an old adage which is doubly true in technology circles. It is one thing to put together some slick slideware, another to do something real with your new technology. Recently the good folks at the Open Mobile Alliance (OMA) were kind enough to let us here at InnoPath put our money where our collective mouths are and show the world that Over The Air customer care as enabled by OMA-DM and other standards is a real thing.

Guess what? It worked!

Of course, for us it was no surprise, this is what we do. However, if you are a CSR faced with another long hard day of "do this, read me that" then you might be pretty excited by a demonstration with real phones on a real network of OTA device management where things like Email and ActiveSync accounts are set up with the click of a button, broken configs are autofixed and software is installed (and removed) over the air.

To make it even more fun, we demoed on a couple different platforms, one being Symbian, in this case a Nokia E71 and the other being an HTC TytnII running Windows Mobile 6.1.

The Media Alert is here.

OT: Weird Japan Mobile Ads: Brad Pitt and Musashimaru

2009-07-01T09:10:00.000-07:00

Brad Pitt and Musashimaru (520 lb Samoan sumo wrestler) in an intesting Softbank TV commercial, courtesy of Mobile Crunch.

PEZ Boards the Customer Service Fail Truck

2009-07-01T08:37:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

In customer care there are various degrees of success or failure. In the case of wireless providers, some will go the extra mile and after tackling some sort of technical issue the CSR may take a look at billing plans vs usage and suggest a better plan for the customer if such exists. Stuff like this tends to surprise and delight people.

On the other end of the spectrum we find things like the RIAA and their brutal assault on fans and customers, somewhat akin to being stabbed by Winnie the Pooh or pickpocketed by Dora the Explorer.

You may be familiar with Pez candy, the otherwise forgettable candies that came in interesting flip top plastic dispensers. A couple in the San Francisco area run a Pez museum, with over 600 rare Pez dispensers on display including a giant Pez that dispenses Pez dispensers.

In a stroke of Customer Service Fail, Pez Candy, Inc., instead of praising them or loaning them some unusual items or in some way partnering with them to further promote their goods, is suing them.

Anoraks, Standards and Micro USB

2009-06-29T09:57:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

It is easy to fall into the trap of thinking that standards are something that only anoraks would care about. In some cases, there is some real world utility in knowing what is going on. For example, when buying WiFi, it might be helpful to understand that B/G/N routers running 2.4GHZ radios can get clobbered by microwave ovens, while 5.0GHZ kit is considerably less prone to such interference.

As the demo guy at InnoPath, I have been in more or less constant pain due to what should be a relatively easy problem to solve - charging mobile phones. One would think that something like this would be relatively standard, after all it is fairly well established how to get juice into the phone. However, until now there have been powerful incentives to not be standard. Some were actually altruistic - a desire to prevent the entry of soil and water contamination into the device. other reasons were less so - a proprietary connection helped ensure that the customer would come to you to pay $20 for a $1 part.

Earlier China, demonstrating one of the advantages of central administration, decided that there would be one standard for devices made in China and that would be Micro USB. Apple, Nokia, RIM and others have backed the European Commission and will be doing the same.

One interesting observation is that this illustrates a longstanding trend with the Rise of The Rest and how the US is no longer central to some fundamental industry moves.

The other is the benefit of standards, particularly to the little guy. In this case, the little guy is the consumer, who will now be in a better position to buy reasonably priced chargers which will work with just about any phone. The little guy will now get more for less with less grief, aggravation and hassle.

This also helps illustrate why InnoPath is such a strong backer of OMA-DM, the industry standard for device management. When phones are OMA-DM enabled, the little guy wins with a better user experience, superior support and fewer headaches and other pain.

Standards, not just for anoraks anymore.

Duh, Pick Up the Phone!

2009-06-26T08:41:00.001-07:00

Jason Lackey

Sometimes the world of business is filled with surprises. Sometimes, though, the truth is blindingly obvious.

McKinsey recently released the results of some customer care analysis in the wireless space. The big finding? Satisfaction increases as hold/wait times decrease. Willingness to recommend the service to others also increases as hold/wait times decrease. What a surprise! Customers tend to prefer doing business with companies that treat their issues with a sense of urgency.

Things get a little tricky when figuring out where the point of diminishing returns is, however. Below a certain minimum hold/wait time, there may be significant additional costs but there may not be any real increases in customer satisfaction - cost without benefit.

Check out Improving Customer Service in a Downturn from McKinsey.

Pixar - Epic Customer Service Win

2009-06-22T09:40:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

Once in a great while, you run into stories of customer care where the bar gets reset. The Nordstrom's "Old Widow and The Tires" story is a prime example. Movie giant Pixar, in an industry more known for abuse of customers via agents such as the RIAA, has provided another.

10 year old Colby Curtin was dying from a rare form of cancer. In situations like this the patient sometimes looks forward to small things, which can actually mean a great deal. In this case, Colby, having seen a preview for the Pixar movie, Up, wanted desperately to see the movie.

Her condition deteriorated, although she made it to opening night she was in no condition to make it to a theater. Relatives contacted Disney and Pixar asking for their help. Usually stuff like this ends up in the bit bucket, but this time was different. People at Pixar cared.

The found someone in the office, loaded him up with a DVD, some Up character stuffed animals and other movie related stuff, put him on a plane and sent him to go meet Colby.

Young Colby, in great pain, was asked if she could hang on. She replied that she was ready to die but that she would wait for the movie. Unable to open her eyes due to the pain, Colby's mother explained the movie as they watched it together. Shortly after the movie, Colby died.

Although there was no financial or business incentive for Pixar to do this, indeed, the company has not commented on the case, this clearly meant a great deal to Colby and I suppose that for many the name Pixar now means a bit more to them.

Bolt-Ons, Blowers and Other Enhancements: Hotrod Device Clients

2009-06-15T16:03:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

For about as long as there has been an auto industry, there have been people who have modified cars to get more performance out of them. Not everyone is a skilled machinist or is in a position to fabricate power-adding parts, so naturally an aftermarket parts industry grew up along with the automotive industry. These parts, often preconfigured and set up for a specific application, are referred to as "bolt ons" as all you (in theory) have to do is bolt them on. One of the cooler bolt ons is the supercharger, also known as a blower, because a supercharger is a high volume air pump which crams more air and fuel into an engine, allowing for more power (yeah!). A prime example of which is shown above on Mad Max's V8 Interceptor, an early 70's Ford XB Falcon GT coupe suitably ratrodded. From mild to wild in a few turns of the spanner, or wrench.

At InnoPath, one of the things we have seen that our customers want is the ability to hotrod their device management capabilities in the future. We have a pretty good idea what we want now, and we know that in the future we are going to want more and better, but it is not always clear what we are going to want more of and how exactly it is going to be better.

This is where the bolt-ons come in. We have released a new client, our 5.5 embedded client, that allows for "aftermarket upgrades" - a first in a device management client. The basic engine ships with the phone, already the equivalent of a hot V8 with FOTA packages up to 73% smaller than prior clients, a huge improvement. However, this is just the start, because now the mobile network operator can push customer care modules to these devices after they are already in the field, in effect bolting on a blower while the car is driving down the highway. After the customer care modules are installed, the operator is then in the driver's seat and can do a number of different things to help ensure a better user experiences, with capabilities such as device hardware control (DCMO), Software Management (SCOMO) and Lock and Wipe (LAWMO) all being on the bolt-on parts list.

Now, one of the things to know about tuners is that they are never done. The car is never perfect, there is always some additional optimization possible. Maybe they start doing track days or High Performance Driving Events instead of drag racing or autocross, so then it is time to change out some parts. Same can be said for device management standards - they are still evolving and changing and over the air customer car is too. Thus, it is good that the ActiveCare customer support extensions are both modular and field upgradable. The mobile operator, should a new version of LAWMO come out, can upgrade the LAWMO bolt-on and have a horse more suited for the new course.

For more, please check out this InnoPath press release:
http://www.innopath.com/news/press_releases/2009/2009_06_15.shtml

Anything Worth Doing...

2009-06-11T12:10:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

You know, in certain older civilized cultures, when men failed as entirely as you have, they would throw themselves on their swords. - The Operative, Serenity (2005)

Customer Care and in a wider sense interaction with the public is something that many give lip service to but few really get right. For example, even Nokia, a company rated Exceptional (93 points) by Vendorrate blows it from time to time. One of the things the Finnish Giant is trying to do is get ahead with Software and Services. Perhaps it is possible to teach the old dog some new tricks, perhaps not. Regardless, when you do something like put up a blog in support of a new service you are trying to push, it might be nice to update that blog from time to time. Of course there are some who would suggest that they might be better of finding some apps to put in the app store but that is a different story. All grumbling aside, they make great phones and we use Nokias like the E71 in our demos because they are not only popular, but they are also sturdy, reliable and have good battery life as well as decent MDM capabilities.

Of course it would be in bad form to single out any one company on this, as it is very common for the web-facing customer service parts of companies to fail. In many cases email aliases are not monitored, forms go off into the ether never to be read, feedback goes into spam filters and the like.

In contrast there is a recent trend of companies using Twitter, blogs, forums and other social web devices to proactively reach out to customers. Even companies such as Comcast, with a Comcastic Vendorrate score of just 63, are starting to work Twitter, Jaiku, FriendFeed and the like. Some of these initiatives, like Comcast's, are even driven bottom up, with employees proactively seeking out unhappy customers in order to deliver on the service front.

Now just imagine, you have tweeted about some problem with your phone, and then whoever is playing the role of Frank Eliason at your mobile network operator is not only able to twit back, but better yet, reach out and fix your phone over the air. Now, that would be something, huh?

The Ramen Nazi and Other Customer Service Lows

2009-06-10T10:20:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

The Japanese are an interesting people. Usually reserved and quiet they sometimes surprise you. A series of movies, "Bakayaro" illustrate what happens when such nice, reserved people are pushed to the edge and snap. Each of the movies was a collection of short features, each of which ending with someone snapping with the exclamation "Bakayaro!", which can be thought of as somewhere between "You Idiot!" and something a lot stronger and obscene.

Of course, not all Japanese are so quiet. There is a famous ramen shop in Tokyo, Ramen Jiro (ラーメン二郎) , a visit to which is documented on NPR, where the Soup Nazi would be viewed as a soft hearted rank amateur. There is no backtalk at Jiro, no, not even talking. "Shut up and eat!". No special orders, no this, no that, eat it all and get out, next.

Some say that Jiro has the best ramen in Japan, particularly at the original shop. Perhaps. Perhaps it is also the shocking contrast to the normal levels of Japanese customer service where even the staff at McDonalds bows and neatly folds the bag with a sharp crease, to go to a place where talking is forbidden as are most other things not directly related to eating ramen.

Polite, no. Focused on the task at hand? Certainly, which is in strict contrast to the story of the Overtime Ambulance Driver.

The driver worked for North East Ambulance Services in England. The run started normally enough, an elder gent by the name of Ali Asghar was felled by a stroke and was thus in need of transport to a hospital. OK, so far, so good. The ambulance picked him up and they started off to the hospital. However, the driver noted he was 15 minutes over his shift, so instead of going to the hospital to drop off the ailing patient, he went back to the depot to hand over the ambulance to the next driver.

Mr. Asghar died. At least they kept overtime to a minimum.

Have any of your own experiences with badly broken customer service? We would like to hear from you.

Need a Job? InnoPath is Hiring

2009-06-09T16:18:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

UI Wizard? Seasoned device pro? Customer deployment engineer with a can-do attitude and Unix skills? Check out our job page, updated Tues, 9 June:
http://www.innopath.com/jobs/jobs.shtml

One Ringy Dingy….

2009-06-08T08:32:00.001-07:00

Dave Ginsburg

Customer care… the good, the bad, and the ugly. Over the years, TV and now Youtube has poked fun at the typical user care experience. Who can forget the Soup Nazi, or looking back further in time, Ernestine the operator? We’ve evolved, as evidenced by the latest from Virgin Mobile. Or have we? The care organization, be it retail, financial, or here, the mobile operator, is always looking for greater touch… the ability to reach out and see just what is wrong. Sometimes they are successful, and sometimes they are not. But they try.

So, enjoy, and send in your favorites….

Ernestine:
http://www.lilytomlin.com/video/Ernestine/SNL_1976/SNL_1976.html
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k9e3dTOJi0o
The Soup Nazi:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M2lfZg-apSA
Virgin Mobile:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QkyNtvNz3DQ
Apple:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zVvdqpDL9vY
Genesys:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EbuP9A11cbs&mode=related&search=
Newscast on the best and worst of care: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OJVHg_JAGNU&feature=fvw

Mobile Satisfaction: Virgin on Top w/ O2

2009-06-05T09:33:00.000-07:00

Anna Yong & Jason Lackey

The J.D. Power 2009 UK Mobile Phone Customer Satisfaction Study is out, revealing interesting differences between pre-paid and post-paid customer satisfaction.

Broken down by Pre and Postpaid ratings, on the 1000 point scale, the results are:

Prepaid:

O2: 734

Tesco Mobile: 710

Virgin Mobile: 691

Postpaid:

Virgin Mobile: 718

O2: 698

Orange: 673

One factor impacting mobile satisfaction seems taken out of the airline frequent flier miles playbook: incentives and rewards. Both Prepaid and Postpaid customers who receive incentives and rewards tend to be more satisfied than those who do not. It is also likely that those customers who are receiving rewards and incentives are using more minutes or additional services to earn those rewards, making them higher ARPU customers - just the ones you want to hold on to. Maybe it is a good idea to throw your best subs a bone from time to time.

A surprise finding was that Postpaid subs report more desire to churn(!) than Prepaid, 17% vs. 12%.

A non surprise finding is that Postpaid subs spend more: £26.87/month compared to £12.09 for prepaid.

Get the J.D. Power Press Release here: http://www.jdpower.com/corporate/news/releases/pressrelease.aspx?ID=2009100

Strength Through Joy: Lower Churn Via Happier CSRs

2009-06-03T11:18:00.000-07:00

Anna Yong

CIO Today recently reported “contact center staff turnover appears to be higher than one would expect in today's environment.” One of the reasons for higher turnover was attributed to “lack of staff empowerment and flexibility." Most agents want to help those they are communicating with-doing so gives them tremendous satisfaction-but they get frustrated when they are tied down by bureaucratic red tape and procedures”. (http://www.cio-today.com/story.xhtml?story_id=00100044AD6X&page=1)

In fact, I would surmise that it’s not only the internal red tape and procedures that frustrates agents; it’s also the tools they have to use, and the hit they take on their metrics when they can't fix a problem or when inefficient tools slow down the process. If front line CSRs were empowered with the right tools, both customer and employee churn would decrease, improving your bottom line.

From this, to this.

FOTA and the Aluminum Falcon

2009-06-02T16:36:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

When not playing with phones, doing demos or making collateral, one of the things that I like to do is play with big, fast motorcycles. So far my favorite has been the Suzuki Hayabusa, a machine named after a Japanese falcon with which it shares a nearly 200 mph top speed. In memory of Han Solo and Chewbacca, I sometimes call it the Aluminum Falcon. Interestingly dual length velocity stacks give it an intake resonance which sounds a bit like the warbling cry of a wookie.

Anyway, I head up to the hills for a spirited romp. I was having an OK time but the bike was feeling more like a garbage truck and less like a nimble predator. Must be getting old, either bike, rider or both. I backed off. Yuck, old age sucks, entropy too. Not happy. Maybe it is time to throw in the towel and get my Jitterbug.

Then I checked the front tire, oops, all the tread was chewed off. Time to head down to the local shop for a pit stop. $200 later I am back in the hills and the machine is transformed. What was uncertain, unwilling and trucklike had become eager, aggressive and sticky. Ah, this is the machine I remember. Ah, this is the user experience I was missing. No longer old and hobbled, I am off to the hills. Nice!

Getting back closer to topic, that renewed bond, the restoration of lost luster that I got with a new tire is in many ways like the user experience a mobile subscriber can get with Over The Air management.

Let me explain.

Phones ship with bugs. Complex ones more so than simple ones. However, it is not just the smartphones of the world that ship with bugs, featurephones do too. Regardless of what kind of phone it is, it is grating when you find bugs. In some cases the bugs can degrade if not completely ruin the user experience. One popular featurephone would periodically corrupt its address book and crash - fixed with FOTA. Another had significant issues with speaker volume, to the point of potentially damaging the hearing of users. Another had issues with the integrated speakerphone. Dropped calls, poor battery life, crashes, freezes, a long list of Bad Things - all fixed with FOTA.

In my case, after an over the air upgrade of my aging flip phone, much like the Aluminum Falcon with new rubber, it was like having a new phone. All the stuff that I liked was still there, set up, configured and ready to go. Much of the stuff I didn't like that was making me sour and mean, poof, that stuff was largely gone. Best of all, no pit stop required, do not pass go, do not pay $200.

To be sure, you can indeed update devices with special apps that run on your PC. To be sure, you can brick your phone doing this kind of thing as well. If you want a real chuckle, take a look here http://thecsr.blogspot.com/2009/04/zen-and-art-of-handset-maintenance.html and check out the gauntlet you need to run in order to update your Blackjack. Hmmm....doesn't seem to be quite as easy, fast or convenient as one would probably like.

I guess you could also go to a brick and mortar store as well. Last one I was in had a whole bunch of people waiting for help, but no real queuing system, making for long waits and frustration as well as contention and dominance struggles about who was next. With luck, you get a tech who actually knows what he or she is doing and has all the right cables and is allowed to help.

Or, you could click down a couple menus and go to the fridge and by the time you have fetched a cool, refreshing beverage you could be well on your way to stomping those bugs and having a more rewarding, better experience. Think I like this plan. Wonder what happens if I enter *#0000#?

Now, what's in the fridge?

Wireless Broadband - Preparing for the Quad Play

2009-06-01T10:10:00.000-07:00

David Ginsburg - as published in CED Magazine

The 4G mobile broadband road is paved by Mobile Device Management.

The road to 4G has two branches: WiMAX and Long Term Evolution. For a number of years now, operators – mostly in emerging regions – have been trialing WiMAX. There have already been a few commercial deployments, notable among them the launch of Clearwire’s Clear WiMAX service in Baltimore and Portland, Ore., and this month in Atlanta. Comcast plans to resell Clear in Portland, and Time Warner Cable has plans to do likewise in an unidentified market later this year. With Verizon, AT&T, Cox Communications and other major providers choosing to pursue LTE, the imminent expansion of 4G is assured.The question is: How will operators transition their users to the new networks?

GROWING SUBSCRIBER EXPECTATIONS
With the growth of smartphones and other advanced mobile devices, mobile operators, both new and established, are looking to provide a premium customer experience across their mobile broadband offerings, while at the same time reducing operating expenses. Subscribers expect their services to work as advertised, and when they don’t, customers expect to have any problems resolved in short order.The burden placed on the mobile operator will come even more to the forefront with 4G adoption, when many previously tethered subscribers will cut the cord. They will depend on wireless connectivity for their very livelihood and will expect reliability and technical support responses equal to – or exceeding – those of their former landline offerings. They will run more applications on their devices, and these will change more rapidly. They will have more complex security and business relationships, with an assumption that the single device is used for both business and pleasure, and that the device must support protected applications such as banking. This is where Mobile Device Management (MDM) enters the picture.

WHAT MDM BRINGS TO THE TABLE
Briefly, MDM establishes an over-the-air connection between the subscriber’s phone and tech support, streamlining the tech support process, saving time in troubleshooting and reducing device returns. As such, established operators are deploying MDM for both cost reduction and customer satisfaction, the latter relating to customer retention – critical in the current economy.MDM consists of a server located within the care organization, at either a wireless operator or a handset vendor, and a client on the device. The over-the-air link uses protocols defined by the Open Mobile Alliance Device Management (OMA-DM) Working Group and supports a set of “enablers” that define capabilities, including updating, checking and changing configuration settings; loading applications; controlling hardware settings; and, if the device is lost or stolen, locking or wiping all data.With OMA-DM, once the client receives notification from the server, it creates a secure data connection over the air. Alternatively, the connection to the server may also be client-initiated, where the user wishes to perform some OTA action. In either case, the server receives feedback on device management commands sent to the device. This last point is critical and separates OMA-DM from earlier OTA technologies that were one-way, referred to by some as “fire-and-forget.” Through OMA-DM’s closed-loop connection, the server administrator can remotely conduct a number of critical care actions.

WHITHER WiMAX?
MDM plays a crucial, upfront role in WiMAX device provisioning and network registration. When a device first enters the network, MDM plays a role in initial provisioning of network settings and applications (see Figure 1). More recently, OMA-DM has begun to supplant those “fire-and-forget” methods for application configuration due to its flexibility and reliability.In 4G, MDM is used to send configuration settings of basic applications – including MMS, e-mail and Internet connectivity – to the device. However, within WiMAX, MDM also plays a role in network identification – the interaction between the device and the network operator in selecting a preferred network and then authenticating. In fact, WiMAX access in the presence of multiple operators is much like dial access. In most cases, a software client on the device makes first contact with the server for this provisioning. LTE device activation will more closely follow the GSM model, so this step is unnecessary. Once the subscriber is connected to the WiMAX network, OTA manageability ensures that any configuration or usability issues can be quickly addressed.Greenfield operators in regions competing with incumbents look to MDM to provide a positive, ‘out-of-the-box’ subscriber experience, critical when deploying a new technology. Finally, in some locations, incumbents have been issued licenses for WiMAX spectrum, providing them with a non-LTE path to 4G. Here, the advantages that MDM brings to the table echo those presented to greenfield operators, since in many cases these operators will compete with LTE.

LTE LOVIN’
Despite wide adoption of WiMAX, LTE is expected to be the technology of choice for most operators due to cleaner migration from GSM, and even CDMA.

In February, the GSMA reported that more than 26 operators globally have made plans to deploy LTE in the 2009-2012 timeframe. These operators span all regions and include both GSM and CDMA. Over the next decade, as 4G deployment follows the earlier 3G deployment curve, hundreds of millions of subscribers are expected to be connected to the technology. In the U.S., Verizon Wireless, looking at an early migration from CDMA, is expected to deploy LTE in 2010, while AT&T, with HSPA at its disposal, will begin deployment in 2011.Globally, major operators announcing support include Vodafone, DoCoMo and China Mobile. All told, operators representing almost 2 billion subscribers have announced their plans. As with WiMAX, MDM will play a major role in provisioning, and in frontline customer support. Naturally, both CDMA and GSM operators that have already deployed MDM will leverage their investments by adding LTE to the list of supported network types.

MDM SAVES GREEN
Once the device is registered and operational on the network, the same set of lifecycle management capabilities are available under WiMAX or LTE (see Figure 2). If the user is experiencing difficulty with e-mail access, for example, they’ll call tech support. With MDM and its real-time OTA connection between the frontline CSR and the device, the problem can now be quickly identified and corrected, with the first step being a quick check of the device to determine current hardware, software and network settings. This information alone will go a long way in creating a more efficient troubleshooting call. If the device manufacturer issues a firmware update or the operator wishes to patch an application it controls, MDM will provide the conduit for pushing it to one device, or potentially hundreds of thousands of devices.And, if the device is lost, tech support agents will be able to quickly lock and/or wipe it. In fact, at a 3G operator of 20 million subscribers, MDM’s positive impact on the frontline could result in savings of more than $100 million each year. Savings for 4G operators, with their more modest initial deployments, will therefore be proportionate.

Flushing Profits: The On Hold Drain

2009-05-28T11:48:00.000-07:00

Anna Yong

On NPR today, they covered a survey by Jacada, an Atlanta-based customer service software company found that people tend to multi-task while on hold. In a survey of 1000 people their results were:

What People Did While On Hold

36% went to the bathroom
26% made a meal
25% watched a full TV show episode
17% completely cleaned a room
16% played two or more games of solitaire
14% read an entire magazine or newspaper

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=104505494
But really, is being on hold even necessary? Even if customers can find something else to do, being hold actually decreases loyalty and satisfaction. “Switching levels are 83 percent higher among customers who are put on hold, compared with those who are not." J.D. Power and Associates, Aug 2008 http://www.jdpower.com/corporate/news/releases/pressrelease.aspx?ID=2008120

So as refreshing as a potty break might be, do you really want to risk the higher churn rate cited by J.D. Power, or might it be better to arm your CSRs with the tools they need to effectively help customers, fix phones and let your subscribers get on with their day?

The Rise of the Androids Redux - Klaatu barada nikto!

2009-05-28T08:35:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

By now many have likely at least seen an Android phone and the device fetishists amongst us have probably even played with one. The first of the line, the HTC/TMobile G1, is a strong first effort with one of the best browser experiences on the market. Indeed, it is largely because of the browser that noted pundits such as Om Malik put the G1 in the rarified superphone category, along with the iPhone, upcoming Pre and high end Blackberries.

HTC has followed up the G1 with the Magic, which looks to be a serviceable piece. HKC, a Chinese maker, has the dualboot Pearl. Samsung's I7500 should be in stores very soon now and has every indication of being a very desirable piece.

Matt Richtel, of The New York Times reports that Andy Rubin, who runs Google's mobile efforts, announced 18-20 devices at Google I/O (developer conference in SF). The thing about open source is that anyone who wants to can run the basic stack and there will be phones running Android that Google has never heard of. I am sure that many of the blossoming Chinese makers will be unable to resist the combination of pricing (free) and features (good).

At InnoPath, we have seen considerable interest from a variety of directions, domestic and otherwise, in device management for Android. We announced support for Android on 23 September, 2008. Back then there was a lot of curiousity, but now we are seeing indications that real people are building a lot of real phones and they are looking for device management and other solutions for Android now. Personally I am really looking forward to seeing some of Motorola's efforts, rumor is that they are on their way to being an almost exclusively Android shop. I would love to have an "American" phone with software from Mountain View, where I live ;-)

I've fallen and I can't call help! Samsung's 911 Jitterbug

2009-05-26T11:56:00.000-07:00

Anna Yong

Today I noticed that Samsung was recalling 160,000 Jitterbug cell phones because “When the recalled cell phones are in a no-service area and display an "out of range, try again later" message, they could fail to connect to emergency 911.” As part of the recall “Samsung and Jitterbug are directly contacting consumers to schedule a free software upgrade.” (http://www.cpsc.gov/cpscpub/prerel/prhtml09/09744.html)

Wow. Think about the logistics of this. Calling 160,000 customer takes at least 2 minutes, and therefore $2 of CSR labor and costs. That’s $320,000 right off the bat. Now Jitterbug needs to actually have the customer bring the phone back to the store, get it upgraded, which could probably take another 10 minutes at least – and that’s for a trained professional that probably costs $2 a minute. So $32k just to notify people , and then 160k * $20 = $3.2 million dollars to update the phone. All for a free software upgrade which could have been done remotely if the phone has been designed to include updates over the air.

Considering the fact that “Jitterbug was created for people who prefer a simple, easy to use cell phone, a friendly, helpful service experience”, perhaps a little bit of technology built into the phone ahead of time, would have saved a lot of headaches afterwards.

Where's My Cupcake?

2009-05-22T08:43:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

One of the many cool things about working in wireless in general and at a device management company like InnoPath in particular would be....devices! We always need to keep on top of the latest and greatest, so we have a cool assortment of commercial and prototype devices coming through here. If you are of the nerdly persuation, this is powerful good stuff indeed.

One of the more interesting toys to come down the pipe has been the Tmobile G1, the first Android phone. All in all, a reasonably solid smartphone that is in some ways almost as slick as an iPhone and almost as stable as Symbian with one of the best browsers and a big, bright, lovely screen. Some fatal flaws, like lack of real Exchange support, but what fun would a first effort be without some sort of missing features or blemishes?

The phone we have here is currently on Firmware Version 1.1, we have been through one update, which was pretty slick. With Cupcake, the 1.5 FW being out, I am of course eager to get my hands on it.

Here is the sticking point. One of the rules of good UI design is that you should never tease the user or create expectations that are not going to be met, but that is what happen here. We know that Cupcake has been released, and the UI of the phone has a place where you can check for FW updates. Thus the expectation is that even if there is a FW push going on that has not reached the device that a client initiated update done from the phone would be successful. In this case, checking for an update just gets you "Your system is currently up to date".

One of the lessons I learned from a long and painful stint in corporate IT was that managing expectations was key, perhaps even more important than overall technical excellence. If you set expectations right and kept people updated, they usually didn't complain too much no matter how hosed up things were. In contrast, technical excellence meant little when the unmanaged (and often unreasonable) expectations of the unwashed masses were not met.

So clearly the hard part is building a new version of the firmware and coming up with a decent OTA distribution system. Clearly the easy part is manipulating a string such as "Your system is currently up to date" which could easily be manipulated to say something like "An update for your phone will be available shortly" or better yet, do the push such that the main push happens on schedule but client initiated jobs are allowed priority. Even home networks can handle QOS these days and let VOIP traffic have priority over email, business processes probably should be able to do the same.

So, where's my cupcake?

How Much is that Smartphone in the Window

2009-05-12T12:35:00.000-07:00

Dave Ginsburg

So there’s been a lot of discussion lately about where subsidies are going for the current crop of smartphones. To put it in perspective, just today BGR ran a story (http://www.boygeniusreport.com/2009/05/12/att-blackberry-curve-8900-to-run-99-with-a-2-year/) that included a chart of AT&T list and subsidized pricing. As an example, the FUZE, an HTC device, runs $499.99 list and $299.99 under a two year plan with rebates. At the other end, the Palm Centro is only $279.99 list and just $49.99 under the same plan. Interestingly, the new Nokia E71x, a phone that received a great deal of publicity when launched at CTIA this year, is only $99.99 after rebates. In comparison to some of the Blackberry and Samsung models, it demonstrates how aggressive Nokia is in entering the US market.

Now, what would be interesting is a parallel to the (mostly) public price sheet. A yin and yang, if you would, of the smartphone world. But this sheet would outline the true cost to the operator of supporting the handset. For example, by model, it could outline how many calls they receive, the reasons for each call, and how long they take to resolve. The operator would know if working the subscriber through email settings is much more cumbersome on one OS platform or model than another. Although some of this analysis may currently go into what the operator is willing to offer as a subsidy or even what handsets they are willing to carry, I don’t think this is the case given the lack of good analytical tools.

Think of it as akin to a gas guzzler tax for cars, but in this case the consumable is tech support minutes. Operators would be more careful in inviting into their network devices with known support issues, would be more careful on the subsidy, and would be more open to devices that had a demonstrated support advantage. Here is where technologies such as over-the-air device management will come into play to help create a more efficient and therefore less costly support environment. A handset vendor delivering a phone to an operator with such management capabilities will have a financial advantage, able to demonstrate up-front lowered lifecycle support costs. This much like selling a more fuel-efficient car. Although at InnoPath we’ve done most of our ROI modeling with the operator in mind, the handset vendor’s perspective helps complete the picture. It not only takes millions off the cost of delivering frontline support by the operator, but results in additional handset sales to the operator as well. And it will help add another datapoint to answering the question we seem to ask all the time… just how do they calculate the subsidy?

The End of The Mobile Gravy Train?

2009-05-08T09:24:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

Analysts are a funny lot, sometimes they can put a spin on something or call attention to what should be a fairly obvious megatrend and it can cause a ruckus.

JP Morgan's Mike McCormack is an excellent example, writing:

"With high wireless penetration, more aggressive competition from prepaid, and the struggling economy as a backdrop, wireless subscriber growth at AT&T and Verizon continues to decline. After falling below 10% for the first time in more than five years last quarter, postpaid subscriber growth was 8.8% and 8.7% for AT&T and Verizon, respectively, in 1Q09. While postpaid add growth at AT&T has outperformed declines at Verizon, we believe the company is unlikely to duplicate its past success absent a meaningful product refresh from Apple (which would likely impact margins)."

Uh, yes. The US is a mature mobile market. There are only so many people in the country and many of those people and most of the ones who want mobile phones already have them. Once you reach the point where everyone who wants something already has it then double digit growth is going to be hard to achieve. The game then becomes a zero sum effort and your gains will come at the expense of your competition. These things should be obvious.

Sometimes, you find that the analysts can actually miss a pretty big trend, or at least be surprised when it rears up and bites them in the posterior:

"The move to devices driving subscriber behavior is disturbing, in our view, taking the carriers out of the driver’s seat and commoditizing the carrier’s networks."

Couple things here. One is that for the past several years, both the wireless operators and the OEMs have all realized that devices sell and that having sexy cool devices is of vital, critical importance, particularly in markets like North America where you find that phone and wireless service tend to come from the same place and that subsidized handsets are the rule rather than the exception. There is a reason why device makers feel an intense and burning need to get their devices to market in a hurry. In other markets, like Europe, where GSM has been dominant forever, the phone market is much more like the PC market here, there is no binding between AT&T or Comcast and your Dell or HP PC, your Nokia can work on any network and when it is time for an upgrade you can go to Carphone Warehouse, score a phone, pop your SIM in and be done.

In the US, where the subscriber has been trained to view the handset as being tied to the MNO, probably a mindset going back to the good ole days of the Western Electric Model 500 and before, where even the handset was viewed as belonging to the phone company. As an interesting aside, I know from personal experience that the Western Electric 1500, the touch tone replacement for the Model 500, was so well built that it would stop a .38 Special bullet at point blank range. I doubt that my HTC Raphael (or Touch Pro or Fuze) would do the same. Two year contracts and subsidies, where the wireless network operator pays for a big chunk of the handset up front, are a big part of this game. Of course it ends up being a contest on two levels, one being to have the least offensive plain phone for making phone calls at a close to zero dollar post-subsidy price and the other being to have the coolest possible phone at what has historically been about $200 post-subsidy, altough there are signs that this is moving in the direction of $100.

Clearly, with no unplowed, virgin fields remaining, there will be increased competition in mature markets, North America being one of them. There will be pressure to ship better devices, faster, cheaper with more bells and whistles. With many of these phones shipping with data capabilities, increasingly including things like email and web browsers that are actually worth using, savings are unlikely to come from reduced network utilization.

What are the operators going to do?

There are some, like us at InnoPath, who would say that there are a couple things that they can, should and in some cases already are doing that will help. One of the things that North American Tier 1s are already starting to do is to use FOTA (Firmware Over The Air) to fix bugs over the air. Long and short of it is that phones ship with bugs, and that complex phones with lots of features that are rushed to market may ship with a number of bugs. With FOTA, these bugs are easily fixed and fixed in a way that is transparent and easy to the subscriber. Saving the cost of recalls and returned devices can make a significant impact, in some cases $200 or more per incident.

Another thing that operators can do to help deteriorating margins is to enhance their customer care organizations with mobile device management. We have seen that support, particularly smartphone support, is hard and expensive to deliver well. Indeed, smartphones cost roughly 4x as much to support as their dumbphone cousins and the stakes for failing to deliver on support are higher too. With a dumbphone, maybe you lose a voice sub. With a smartphone, maybe you lose a high ARPU data services customer or leave a bunch of money on the table as the sub who never could get email or internet to work ends up cancelling data services which are not needed if email is broken. We have also seen the price that an operator can pay for treating support as a cost center - witness the example of the North American Tier 1 who fired its worse customers, only to find itself in a sea of churn. Better support, delivered in a more cost effective manner, ensuring that high ARPU services actually work, well, that sounds like something that would be real nice to have in a maturing market.

However, it is not just the mobile network operators who can benefit from this type of technology. You find that some OEMs are responsible for supporting their own devices. One noteworthy example is Apple, with the iPhone. Now that the iPhone has conquered the top of the smartphone market in the US, the only place left for growth is down, expanding into lower cost market segments. While this will help provide volume, there will be downward pressure on margins. When looking at millions of devices in North America alone, the ability to shave a couple minutes off every support call can start to look appealing. Apple isn't the only one, Nokia provides FOTA updates for some devices already and other OEMs are increasingly interested in OTA support and the advantages it can bring in terms of time to market and better end user experience.

Mobile phones - Progressing or Regressing?

2009-05-06T13:44:00.000-07:00

Anna Yong

Lately, I’ve been noticing that my smartphone is behaving rather erratically. Erratic to the point that it crashed in the middle of a phone call. And I’m sure that the propensity of this happening is MUCH higher than it was in the past with previous, simpler generations of mobile phones which only made phone calls, plain and simple. (I seem to remember, that any time I needed to call on my now ancient candybar cell phone it always worked.)

Don’t get me wrong - I love the fact that I can surf the web, check email, text, take and send pictures and more, with my multi-faceted phone. I consider this progressing. I don’t like the fact that it would crash in the middle of a phone call. This is regressing. Mobile device management is the technology that helps ensure a phone working at its best, and would have prevented this regression in my phone’s behaviour.

If we have the ability to ensure progress, let’s make sure it applies in parallel to both what my phone can do, and how well it does it.

Downward Spiral to the App Store

2009-05-04T12:35:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

Trent Reznor, better known to millions as the lead man of industrial metal band Nine Inch Nails, has a gripe with Apple and the App Store thing, and he is correct.

Let me set the stage. Unlike many other smartphones, Apple controls who can put software on the iPhone. The way this is done is by making the Apple App Store the only (official) way to install software on the device.

OK, fine you say. Apple feels that the end-user experience is important so they filter out crap to keep their users safe. We certainly wouldn't want people installing fart noise apps or baby shaker games, right?

The Nine In Nails folks came up with a pretty slick looking app - a dedicated portal into the body of good stuff available on nin.com all formatted and optimized for the iPhone. If you are a Nine Inch Nails fan with an iPhone you would probably want to have this application.

Unfortunately Apple seems to be having trouble scaling their App Store approval process or being consistant. Let me explain.

The problem that Apple seems to have with this application is content from the album "The Downward Spiral" (damn fine album and a good part of the soundtrack to some of the more interesting parts of my wayward youth). Yes, to be sure there are lyrics that are obscene, but they are just as obscene on iTunes, also run by Apple. Sure, it is understandable how these things can happen - different organizations, different people, but in the end the public sees it all under the Apple umbrella and expects that the different arms of the organization would follow the same rules.

Interestingly this type of failure is not uncommon. Indeed, many who comment on customer care advocate "rep surfing" - the practice of calling for some sort of issue and then if you don't get the answer you want to hand up and call again, knowing you will get a different rep who might give an answer you like better. Many companies have websites that breathlessly ask for your feedback and correspondence yet nobody answers the phone, replies to emails or answers the stupid form that you filled out. Not such a big deal, except unmet expectations are hugely annoying. A phone number or email combined with text about how "We are eager to hear from you" creates the expectation that you will be able to contact someone. If you cannot get there from here, fine, not a big deal. Kind of like having kids, tell the kids that there is ice cream tonight and you better have that ice cream on hand. Other times it might not be a big deal, but once you promise you better deliver.

I suspect that the answer might end up being to have a multi-tiered arrangement in the appshop where in the clean, well lit area everything is Disney clean, while in the somewhat seedy parts there are fewer restrictions but it will be like a trip to the Tenderloin - you can do whatever it is you want but there may be sights and smells that you will not be able to soon forget.

Anyway, hope Trent, NIN and Apple sort things out. Apple products are hugely popular here at the office and I am personally looking forward to seeing Nine Inch Nails (with Jane's Addiction!) at Shoreline on May 22. Should be a really good show. Wonder if Trent can figure out how to rep surf the App Store?

The customer is always right (except this time)

2009-04-29T11:50:00.000-07:00

Anna Yong

Apparently a RadioShack employee punched a customer trying to return something this past weekend. http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/us_customer_punched
So the question is, how often do CSRs trying to handle returned mobile phones feel the same way?

Mobile Device Management (MDM) can prevent the number of returns devices by 20%. (Statistically, 63% of devices have “No Trouble Found”, and 31% of those are only configuration problems – problems addressable via Mobile Device Management – so 63% * 31% = 20%). Essentially reducing the customer service frustration factor by 20% right? Isn’t that worth it?

When Systems Override Logic - Why you should not let IT dictate business rules

2009-04-24T11:39:00.001-07:00

Jason Lackey

Today I got to celebrate Friday by spending a fair amount of time on the phone dealing with a mobile operator's customer care department. I had a phone, in this case an HTC Kaiser, aka HTC Tytn II, which I use for demos. In this case it was SIM locked to a particular operator. Unfortunate but understandable, except in this case I had actually walked into the brick and mortar store and paid full price. Since I had paid the full, unsubsidized price, I figured that I should be able to get it unlocked without further hassle or backtalk.

A reasonable assumption, yes, but there is the hoary old adage about assumptions and what they do to you and me and that was the case here. Unlock codes are keyed to IMEIs. In theory all you need in order to get the unlock code is the IMEI. It is certainly possible to buy a phone from this particular operator at full and unsubsidized price without having an account with them so you would expect that there would be provision for unlocking devices without reference to any particular account, right?

Well, not so fast there, cowboy! Whoever built this operators CRM system made the reasonable (although in this case not necessarily true) assumption that an operator's CSR would only be interested in talking to someone with an active account. OK, well, I have a number of SIMs from this GSM operator, but I use them in a variety of different phones. For me there is no link between a SIM and a phone that I stick it in, but I guess the assumption in some markets is a bit different.

OK, so after I tell the guy a phone number, a corporate demo account number, he of course needs the FAN (Foundation Account Number) which I don't have, nor do I have any of the magic words. Bummer. OK, plan two, grab my boss who has service throught the same operator and use his number. His plan is personal, he knows the magic words. So far, so good, we have now jumped what I felt to be the last possible hurdle.

Not so fast there, cowboy! Time to go on hold a couple times, be passed one place and another and then back to another CSR, who is yet another nice fellow who remains so despite suffering abuse from me because I have at this point spent a good 30 minutes on the phone trying to get the unlock for something that probably never should have been locked in the first place. After further back and forth I am then informed that a ticket has been opened on my case and that in the fullness of time, perhaps another 5 days, I would receive an email with the unlock code.

What does this have to do with IT and business rules? Well, a couple times the CSRs mentioned that they felt it was reasonable that they give up an unlock code and that they wanted to but that their system required certain things, one of them being a MSISDN (phone number). It would appear that fairly reasonable (but incorrect) assumptions were made when their systems were implemented and that those assumptions were still driving the way that calls were being handled.

Operators are understandably reluctant to make changes to back-end systems. Experience has shown that things that don't get changed tend to work and that the best way to break things is by starting to make changes. Certification can take a number of months and involves fairly rigorous testing and a lot of time and effort on the part of vendors and operator personnel. Thus it is of considerable operational advantage to be able to change the behavior of software without having to change the code.

As an example, let's say that you need to update the firmware on several zillion phones to fix some sort of bug - a fairly common thing, but not talked about much. Let us further suppose that the lawyers you have at the operator hear that you are doing outrageous things like fixing phones with no opportunity for legal to contribute, obviously a wrong and bad thing that would need to be fixed by some sort of long verbose, latinate, rambling EULA popup. Well, if you have a flexible MDM system, making that EULA popup happen (or making it go away after you fire the lawyers) is actually a pretty easy thing when you are workign with drag and drop workflows. If, on the other hand, workflows are hardcoded into the product, you are going to have to go back to your dev team, or your vendor, ask for code to be changed, which will take some time, and then go through recertification, which will also take some time, usually measured in months and long days and missed teeball games and the like.

Thus, more often than many would probably suppose, business processes and rules often get written by software vendors. Sure, change would be nice, but is often too expensive in terms of time, money or effort, unless, of course, you have drag and drop workflows....

Patience is a virtue, but fix my problem right NOW

2009-04-23T17:14:00.000-07:00

Anna Yong

How many of us believe that “ patience is a virtue”? But as every customer service representative can tell you, we (as a general population), don’t practice this as a mantra. If we really did, every call for customer support would be a congenial conversation, no one would be upset with being on hold, we would enjoy the elevator music, and the website for http://www.gethuman.com/ (which helps customers bypass phone systems and talk to a live person) wouldn’t exist.

Having established that a world like that doesn’t exist, let’s turn to the realities of life. Customer service representatives are dealing with customers who are calling about a problem and want it fixed “right NOW.” Satisfying (or disappointing) consumer demand for “fix-it right now” makes every CSR interaction a chance to keep, or lose a customer. In fact, “ The vast majority (95%) of a contact center’s satisfied customers indicate they will remain with the company. Further, 92% of customers satisfied with the contact center experience will recommend the company.” For a mobile operator, satisfying customers this means a 95% probability of $500- $1000 of revenue per year, per year, per customer. And for the opposite, disappointing a customer means a high likelihood of losing $500-$1000 per year. (statistics according to the Contact Center Satisfaction Index from CFI Group - http://www.cfigroup.com/resources/whitepapers.asp
).

Ultimately, just ensuring all calls a handled by a single CSR in a single year satisfies customers’ demands means half a million dollars or more each year. Isn’t that motivation to find better ways, such as MDM, to “fix it right now” for the customer?

Zen and the Art of Handset Maintenance

2009-04-22T08:37:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

You may be familiar with Robert Pirsig's 1974 work, Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, which depending on your perspective is either a littery classic or the confused ramblings of a somewhat addled fellow who spends too much time hand wringing, fretting and wrenching on crappy old BMW boxer twins.

Yesterday, I noticed that the headlight on my Suzuki Hayabusa, a machine which although sharing two wheels, is vastly different from the 1930's tech BMWs that Pirsig fiddled with, had lost its headlight. Normally replacing a headlight is a trivial act, and perhaps for someone more nimble with smaller arms it would have been. For me? Not so much. I ended up having to remove the entire front end of the machine (full fairing, lots of plastic) in order to get at a single light bulb. While Pirsig seems to have taken great joy in wrenching, I am handicapped by a lack of mechanical skill and an inability to enjoy the journey, just a desire to get to the end, at least with regards to mechanical tasks.

Anyway, what does taking apart the front end of a Hayabusa to change a lightbulb have to do with phones? Well, as I was crawling on the floor, trying to reach into awkward places hard to get at, I was reminded of my experiences upgrading handset system images. Take for example, the Samsung Blackjack - a good, popular phone that delivers a lot of bang for the buck in a small, convenient form factor.

Just like I like my motorcycle, lots of people like their Blackjacks, but that does not mean that they are really easy to work on. For example, if you want to upgrade the firmware on the device, instead of a seamless, transparent OTA effort, you have to do the following:

1. Ensure you have a data cable with the proprietary form factor connector.
2. Back up all your data on the phone, all will be lost.
3. Be sure you are running the right version of Windows or have the right version of the update software, XP updater and Vista updater are different.
4. Disable popup blockers
5. Download update software
6. Remove SIM from phone
7. Install SGH-i607 Modem USB drivers (verify correct version too)
8. Go into Device Manager and change Blackjack USB settings from ActiveSync to modem
9. Open ActiveSync, turn off USB
10. Turn off the phone, disconnected USB cable
11. On PC, run update program
12. With phone off, connect USB cable
13. With phone off, press and hold Right Soft Key and Camera button, with buttons held down, press Power On with third hand (gripping hand?)
14. On PC, click Start on updater program
15. Wait several minutes while update happens, but don't disconnect cable or remove battery or you will brick the phone

Makes doing the headlight on a Hayabusa seem....almost pleasant. Where's my wrench?

Beauty - More than Skin Deep

2009-04-21T10:42:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

Much of the noise in the industry since the coming of the iPhone has been around UIs. I suspect that this phone caught many sort of like the impact that created the Chicxulub Crater caught diplodocuses chewing their cud in some ancient swamp - more than a little off guard.

Suddenly, design became more than just a hardware thing, the importance of design came to the UI as well. One of the more eyecatching examples, HTC's Touchflo 3D, pictured above, certainly is beautiful to look at but sadly is far from perfect. Sometimes slow to respond, often inefficient in terms of use of available space, the UI also suffers from inconsistancy, ended up being just a shallow, thin skin over something different, in this case, Windows Mobile. Thus the user has to adapt to two different ways of doing things, two different looks and feels, two different ways of failing or doing the wrong thing.

However, it looks really good. One of the things that pegged the lust meter for me for the Touch Pro T7272 I have on my desk here is in fact that sexiness of TouchFlo 3D.

Recently, Phil Goldstein at Fierce Mobile wrote about the need to go deeper than just the surface in the quest for UI goodness, and he is right. Although there are companies such as Yappa which do a good job of adding necessary eye candy to UIs, Phil quotes Avi Greengart, "Having a prettier set of animated weather cards isn't going to be enough."

There are different approaches one could take. One, like the iPhone and some of the more recent Blackberry offerings, would be to concentrate on executing well against the traditional way of doing things. Make the phone stuff work intuitively, make it easy to get at contacts etc.

Another approach, which Noah Kravitz of Phonedog wrote about recently, would be a "people centric" view. Instead of breaking up the user experience based on whether it is phone calls, emails or SMSs, the contact becomes the fundamental reference point or key field, and things are arranged around your communications with a particular contact.

Given the difficulty that handset makers have had with executing well against well established paradigms, it would be surprising for the first efforts at the people centric thing to be real stellar. However, new approaches like this and others will undoubtedly change the way that we think about and interact with mobile phones.

Android - not just for phones anymore

2009-04-17T09:05:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

As announced by KDDI (Japanese), Android has a real home outside of mobile phones, in this case in a set top box by Motorola. Interestingly the au BOX was announced last year but has seemingly lost its old OS and been assimilated by Android.

This is interesting in a couple ways. One is that it should bring a decent web experience to the livingroom TV. The other is that this is one of the first major consumer facing applications for the Android OS outside the mobile world. Combined with whispers of netbooks running the OS, one can easily imagine a role for Android larger than just on phones and one can also imagine the synergies that could be found when having largely the same OS on your desktop, laptop, home theater and phone. I have to believe that those offering triple play services would probably prefer to support one OS rather than several and it might be nice to be able to use a single management platform rather than many....

Cap'n Crunch, In-band Management and the CSR

2009-04-16T09:36:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

In the good old days before computer hacking, malware, botnets and distributed denial of service attacks, there were things like ham radio and phone phreaking. One of the things that make phone phreaking, or hacking the phone system, possible was the use of in-band signalling. This is where signals in the phone call itself were used to control the switching equipment. This is in contrast to out of band signalling, a more secure approach where data and control are on different channels.

You may have seen 2600: The Hacker Quarterly at the news stand. If you are old enough, you may be tempted to believe that name has roots in the game console world with the Atari 2600, which for many was their first game machine after Pong. As it turns out, 2600 comes from 2600 hz, the frequency of certain switching commands used by old AT&T (and other) switching systems to release trunk lines. Interestingly, John Draper, a legendary hacking figure, somehow figured out that the plastic whistle that was packaged in some boxes of Cap'n Crunch breakfast cereal could be readily modified to produce a 2600 hz tone which could then be used to do interesting and illegal things to the phone system.

What does this have to do with mobile phone CSRs? Well, interestingly I was on the phone with TMobile support, who really are a delightful bunch, somehow managing to be cheeful, friendly and helpful in the face of dealing with the general public. Anyway, during the call I was surprised when I was temporarily cut off. The CSR came back on the line and was all over herself apologizing when she explained that there was something about her voice which caused their phone system to do funny things. Evidently the systems they have in place use some kind of in-band control, and just like Cap'n Crunch and his 2600hz whistle, she was causing the phone system to do unexpected things.

Funny how seemingly unrelated things can sometimes end up having connections.

My OS is Legion: for They are Many

2009-04-14T14:46:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

Providing support on mobile devices is certainly hard enough. Connections cannot be seen, smelt or touched, there are many platforms and on each of the many platforms usually many different devices, most of which have different form factors, screen sizes, keyboard and button layout and design.

Subscribers demand the latest and greatest and efforts to deliver on these demands have contributed to a longstanding problem in the industry - platform proliferation.

For those of you old enough to remember the Bad Old Days of computing, there used to be many platforms for desktops. Commodore had a couple, Tandy/Radio Shack had a few flavors of Trash-80, Apple had the infamous II+, Atari had the 400 and 800 with player missile graphics, color registers and sprites, then there were things like the Exidy Sorcerer and other CP/M machines not to mention all the weird and wonderful MSX machines from Japan. Those were wonderful days where there was real variety and differentiation in the world of the small computer, but there were huge drawbacks to this in terms of compatibililty - nothing was compatible with anything else and both hardware makers and software makers found it difficult to enjoy any sort of economy of scale. Later as the industry matured and the PC (and to a lesser extent the Mac) became the default standard(s), at least prior to the later rise of Linux. To some this was a withering of opportunity and a shrinking of choice, to others it was instead an opportunity - an opportunity for more developers and engineers to reach a critical mass with their products, an opportunity for everyone to do more with less and an opportunity for skills to survive upgrades to newer, faster hardware.

The mobile world is in a similar position today. On the smartphone front we have the iPhone, Symbian (S60 and for a little while more UIQ), Windows Mobile, Blackberry, Android and LiMo. This is not even starting to talke about the various RTOS featurephone platforms. While the overall mobile market and opportunity is huge, that opportunity is diluted across too many platforms, resulting in too much duplicated effort and not enough economy of scale. In the end the consumer, along with the CSRs trying to support those consumers, are the losers.

Enter Crazy Eddie

Crazy Eddie, apart from being the East Coast electronics chain that crashed and burned, was a mythical character from the Niven/Pournelle scifi epic The Mote in God's Eye. A certain alien civilization was locked into an unending cycle of explosive growth and total destruction, with no way out. There was always at least one Crazy Eddie who would always try to do the right thing at the wrong time. One example was in a city where the waste output had grown to take 100% of all possible removal capacity, in a civilization that on a good day when everything was perfect that was choking on its trash, Crazy Eddie would lead the garbage men on strike for better conditions.

In a way, both Android and the up and coming Palm Pre's WebOS remind me of Crazy Eddie - right thing at the wrong time. God knows we could all use a strong competitor to the iPhone and it seems safe to say that both Symbian and Windows Mobile, in their current forms, are having trouble delivering on that front. Certainly there is room for far better smartphones and better UIs and it is clear that Android, which not quite an iPhone killer, is showing good promise in its 1.0 incarnation and Cupcake is looking like it may be rather tasty. WebOS is looking equally, if not more appealing, but it remains to be seen how it will do in the wild.

So what is Crazy Eddie about these promising new platforms? Well, what the industry really needs right now is fewer platforms, not more. With so many platforms, a lot of effort is spent reinventing the incompatible forms of the wheel and then scrambling to find the roads that they work on with less left over for developing applications and content and true differentiators. While we are not in danger of a Highlander scenario (There can be only one!) I think that it is safe to say that operators, subscribers and developers would all like to see fewer, better platforms.

Anyone for a garbage strike?

Like Fertilizer in your Baby Food: 25,000,000 Phones with Fake IMEIs

2009-04-13T08:28:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

The world is a funny place and there are many who will do some very odd and even criminal things in order to turn a profit. One recent example was the melamine milk scandal, where a chemical used in fertilizer and plastic production was added to watered down milk to make it test higher for protein than it actually was. Some would say that we in the US have little grounds for criticism, having been down a similar path famously portrayed in works such as Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, others would suggest that perhaps something was lost in the Cultural Revolution that seems unlikely to be replaced by Capitalism. Regardless you see some funny things coming out of China and GSM handsets (cell phones) that have bad IMEIs are one of them.

While a bogus IMEI is unlikely to directly cause painful death or kidney stones, it sure does make tracking down a particular handset a real challenge. In light of the recent Mumbai terror attacks, which were coordinated with mobile phones, authorities in India have a justifiable desire to be able to track individual devices, which is something that unique IMEIs help accomplish. Should things go as planned, as of 15 April 2009 devices lacking proper IMEIs should be locked out of Indian networks.

To see the IMEI of your GSM phone, you can dial:

*#06#

- which on most phones will return the 15 digit IMEI.

The phones with missing or bogus IMEIs are "unbranded" Chinese made devices, sold through informal channels at user friendly pricepoints.

Up to 8% of handsets in use in India today may be impacted by this problem. I would not be surprised to find that in a number of cases valid IMEI ranges have been used by the handset makers, which would add to the difficulty of identifying which device claiming to have a particular IMEI is the real owner of that unique identifier and which one(s) have dupes. In some cases over a thousand devices have been detected on some networks with the same IMEI.

The sad thing about this whole effort is that using real IMEIs would have been trivial for the original maker of these phones, but now the Indian consumer gets to eat the cost of 25,000,000 phones, many of which represent a considerable investment for their owners.

In the end I see the following outcomes:

Losers:
Indian Operators - nobody likes to be the grinch that stole the mobile
Indian Consumers - surprise, you're hosed
Indian Device Dealers - think you can sell a Chinese phone in India now?
China Inc - not really doing a stellar job of building the brand here, are they?

Winners:
Nokia, other well known handset vendors - in times of uncertainty, the known good can command a larger premium

The Backdoor Man - Hacks, Freaks and other Fun

2009-04-10T09:04:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

One of the cool things about technology is that the more you know the more fun it gets. Who can forget their first easter egg or hack or cool trick, be it typing xyzzy in the original Collosal Cave Adventure (Welcome to Adventure. Woul you like instructions?) or the flight simulator imbedded in Excel 97, there always was a sense of wonder and joy at finding such things.

Some "secrets" are fairly well known, such as the following Nokia commands which often work on other handsets:

*#06# - display IMEI
*#0000# - Software version:
*#7780# - Restores default settings
*#7370# - Factory reset (may need additional code 12345)
*#92702689# - life timer info & other stuff depending on device
*#2820#: Display the Bluetooth device address
*#62209526#: mac address of the wifi card

Other secrets are less well know. Anders Borg, of Abiro - Mobile News, writes about a couple Sony Ericsson codes for OSE-based phones:

#speedy (#773339) then down arrow x4 - turns on HSDPA
#outofcash (#688632274) then down arrow x4 - no cost data (!)

When Johnny Come Marching Home - The Return of Support to the US

2009-04-08T10:20:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

The service industry is a tough one, and providing technical support of any kind, much less mobile, is a challenge under the best of circumstances. We have also seen a bit of a sea change, where the real winners have shown that it pays big to resist the temptation to view support as a cost center but rather to look at support as a strategic differentiator. Another sea change is the reversing of the outsourcing tide and the return of customer care to North America. Some examples of this in the media include WXYZ's story on Chrysler bring back call centers to the US and Peter Whoriskey's article in The Washington Post. Even lender Sallie Mae is getting into the act.

If support is nothing but a cost, an expense and unwanted burden, then obviously fobbing it off on the lowest bidder makes sense. If, on the other hand, support is a critical touch point, one of your main interfaces with the customer and a powerful service differentiator, then quality rather than just cost, should be a key factor in sourcing support.

Looking at support, customers tend to complain about a couple things with outsourced support. One is language and the difficulty effectively communicating with those who may not speak an entirely familiar form of English. The other is effectiveness in resolving issues - did the problem get fixed or did the customer burn time and get frustrated with no positive outcome to show for it. With outsourcing, as the labor market has tightened in places like India and as the whole cost cutting mindset behind outsourcing has encouraged overseas call centers to cut corners with training and qualifications, all too often the end result has been to leave the customer unhappy while still spending money.

Of course, challenges create opportunity and this sea change is no exception. Organizations looking to stay with an outsourced model will be under increasing pressure to deliver better results in order to compete with the locals. While accents and dialects are somewhat challenging to deal with, upgrading the tools available to support reps is less so and may actually deliver more in terms of satisfaction. One example of tools that could be used in this manner would be mobile device management, where mobile phones and other wireless devices can be configured and updated over-the-air. Technological solutions such as this can dramatically shorten call times and also provide a better chance of a FCR - first call resolution, the holy grail of customer care.

Another opportunity is where the company has decided to return call centers to the US (Canada too, eh!) - a move which is often very popular, particularly now in these uncertain economic times, as many customer support the generation of jobs in the local economy. However, regardless of how people feel about where jobs are going, the bottom line is that someone is going to still care about how much it all is going to cost. In an environment like that, many of the costs associated with higher hourly labor costs, higher rents and more expensive utilities can be recouped with greater efficiency and if that greater efficiency can be topped off with greater customer satisfaction even better. Here too mobile device management can play a powerful roll. With greater insight into the device and the ability to manipulated configurations and settings over the air, CSRs are provided a powerful tool that can shorten calls while delivering on the FCR promise sooner and more often.

Change and upheaval, regardless of whether or not they are moving in a direction we like, are often painful and stressful. However, this does not mean that even in the face of pain there are not opportunities to be taken advantage of. Any revisiting of customer care should involve a look at the tools that front line care personnel have at their disposal and any honest look at those tools should not only involve things like IVRs and CRM packages but also tools like MDM, which allow not just better tracking of info, but actual over the air delivery of help and fixes.

Customer care, welcome home. It's good to have you back.

Every Customer is Sacred

2009-04-06T11:06:00.000-07:00

Dave Ginsburg

No… this isn’t another blog about the state of the economy. What it is, though, is a view into two impacts the economy is having on the new generation of smartphone users that were attracted to email and browsing when times were good, what this means to operator revenue, and how to reverse these impacts.

The first is the shift from postpaid to prepaid. Although prepaid is the norm in many developing regions, it is gaining respectability in developed regions as well. In fact, pay-as-you-go may also be common amongst some mobile broadband users. Prepaid has a real impact on subscriber loyalty, in that without a long-term contract, switching is as easy as not paying the next month’s bill. A few months back we thought that mobility was going to be mostly immune from the troubles, but this is no longer the case. What this means is that, when a subscriber does have a problem, the care experience must be without question. If an issue is not resolved the first time, there may be no second time. The subscriber is gone. Over-the-air frontline and automation care can help ensure a positive customer experience. What it also means is that operators, now dealing with lower ARPU prepaid subscribers, can make use of the same over-the-air capabilities to reduce their operational expenses.

The second, related to the first but potentially more disturbing, is a trend amongst some users to back off from smartphones when their contracts expire. Instead of re-uping, some are reverting to simpler featurephones, citing data-plan costs as the culprit. And, once a customer turns their back on the more advanced services and the revenues they generate, it is more difficult to win them back. Operators can do two things here. One is to increase the availability of lower-end data-capable phones, devices that require lower subsidies since they are cheaper to procure from the device manufacturers. They may therefore be offered with lower up-front costs and data-plans. The largest US operators are now beginning to head in this direction. The second is addressing the data-plan tariff itself. Part of the fee is based on the presumed cost of servicing the customer – dealing with support calls. If the operator had systems in place to reduce frontline OPEX, they’d have a better view to their true costs, and could adjust tariffs downward. Yet another reason for over-the-air care.

Crunk!

2009-03-30T10:46:00.000-07:00

Just had a minor earthquake here in Sunnyvale, CA (roughly 60 km South of San Francisco). Nothing broken, USGS says it was a 4.6.

Blurring the Boundaries - Dell as an MVNO

2009-03-30T09:44:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

Stacey Higgenbotham over at Gigaom wrote about Dell Getting into the Carrier Game today, an event which although happening in Japan is of some interest to the global market not only because of the size of the players, both Dell and DoCoMo being big names in the industry, but also because of the blurring of the boundaries of the traditional roles of the network operator and the device maker.

In the past the network operator was, from the subscriber's perspective, the source of all things. Service was provided by the operator and this included not only basic voice/data/connectivity but also applications that used connectivity. Devices, particularly in the CDMA world, but also to a lesser extent in the GSM world, were always provided by the operator and supported by the operator. If you had a problem, you called AT&T or whoever your operator was, not Nokia or HTC or whoever made your device.

Nokia, ahead of the curve, was one of the first manufacturers to offer over-the-air updates, FOTA, for its devices. While custom ROMs specific to particular operators were available, they were available thru Nokia.

Apple is another example of breaking the mold, where the iPhone is supported not through normal operator support channels (in many cases) but rather support is handled by Apple.

Dell's deal, which sounds kind of similar to Sprint's Kindle deal (where Sprint provides ongoing data connectivity for Kindle) marks a bit of a departure for device makers, although again it is possible to say that Nokia was again ahead of the curve with the providing of services in the form of Ovi. True, Ovi does not include any sort of data connectivity (I suspect they would like to run over a dumb pipe) but it does offer navigation, games, sync/backup and other services which have traditionally been the responsibility of the operator.

In the end, these are likely to be exciting times for both consumers and the industry. Any time of disruption, either from technological advance or external factors such as the global economic cratering event, also tends to be a time of innovation and advance. The wiping of the dinosaurs by a massive comet strike 60 some odd million years ago was traumatic, to be sure, particularly for the dinosaurs, but it opened up the door for the rise of the mammals, who had until then largely be relegated to playing the role of skanky little protorats.

Meanwhile in Japan - KDDI rolls out HTC Smartphone

2009-03-25T16:21:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

In a Press Release here, KDDI announced their rollout of the HTC made E30HT, a phone largely identical to the HTC Raphael aka the HTC Touch Pro T7272. This really is a gorgeous looking device with a 2.8 inch vga (640x480) screen.

The picture does not really do the phone justice and they are selling it with a feature called "Walking Hotspot" - a feature which allows up to five different machines to connect to the E30HT as a WiFi base station. Very cool indeed.

However, all this goodness comes at a price. The Japan market is unique and challenging in many ways, particularly for those in the wireless space. Consumers in Japan have grown accustomed to hypersophisticated featurephones - featurephones with very powerful hardware and a rather lengthy list of features and goodies. Good stuff if you are a consumer, a real challenge if you have to support open OS smartphones.

We have seen that smartphones usually end up costing about 4 times as much to support as featurephones. We have also seen that many of the more interesting things that smartphones can do are harder for most subscribers and tend to generate more calls for help, things like better quickstart guides and the like have not really helped and there is a danger that the rise of the smartphone will cause support costs to grow faster than revenue. It is likely that Japan is one of the places where this is most likely to happen, as they have a large subscriber base already used to actually using a wide and sophisticated featureset and they also tend to have little tolerance and understanding of things that don't work. Just like network operators, the average Japanese consumer is very "fussy" and intolerant of flawed products, even if the flaw is relatively minor.

With these things in mind, we suspect that the rise of the smartphone in Japan will be a disruptive event - a previously insular market dominated by domestic players will increasingly accomodate new players from Taiwan and Korea and proprietary RTOS devices will be displaced to some degree by open OS devices and the support load per subscriber will likely go up. Of course, for companies like InnoPath, this is not an entirely bad thing, as InnoPath specializes in providing network operators like KDDI with solutions that enable better support with less effort. Sometime one person's challenge is another's opportunity ;-)

Impact of Customer Experience on Wireless Loyalty

2009-03-23T10:02:00.000-07:00

Dave Ginsburg

As expected, mobility is one of the more sensitive industries to impact of customer experience on loyalty/purchasing/recommendations. When deciding how to resource frontline care, and what types of process to put in place to ensure a positive ongoing customer experience, understanding the sensitivity analysis below is key to making the right decisions.

March 12 2009 - http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2009/03/12/more-info-on-customer-experience-and-loyalty/

Some overall trends:

Meeting needs tends to correlate the most with purchasing more
Being easy to work with correlates the most with purchasing more and making recommendations
Enjoyability correlates the most with making recommendations

Looking at the matrix of customer experience and loyalty, here are the industries with the highest level of correlation in each area:

The bottom line: It’s another wake-up call for wireless providers, TV service providers, ISPs, and banks

Feb 18 2009 - http://experiencematters.wordpress.com/2009/02/18/customer-experience-correlates-to-loyalty/

Fixing the Simple Things

2009-03-20T08:40:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

Free markets are funny things. Like other organic processes such as evolution, they produce some funny things and odd tangents, like the platypus, along with occasional bouts of real progress, such as the opposable thumb or prehensile tail.

In some ways the mobile phone market is in flux - new features and capabilities are rapidly being introduced, but it is not always clear where the real value can be found. Certainly we are getting more and faster hardware for our hard earned Euros, Pounds or Dollars, but in a world where many people claim that they just want a phone so they can make some calls the trend toward more and better functionality runs against what some customers really want - smaller phones that are easy to use with long battery life.

Dutch Giant Philips, with their Xenium Series, is going to delight a bunch of people in China, Russia and similar markets where the phones will be sold. Unlike just about anything else on the market, the Philips Xenium X500 will offer *two months* of standby time on a single charge, which can be mixed and matched with up to 16 hours talk time or 40 hours of mp3 joy.

While the other specs may not be hugely impressive, the battery life of the Xenium phones should go a long way to addressing one of the biggest mobile subscriber complaints - short battery life. At least for those who can buy these phones.

Getting it Right - Sometimes the Little Things Count

2009-03-19T10:08:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

Many in the customer service profession have probably been subjected to the story about the old widow and Nordstrom. For those unfamiliar with the tale, an elder woman was a customer of high end retailer Nordstrom for n-number of decades. At some point her husband died, leaving some tires in the garage. With some help, she schlepped the tires to Nordies, which did not sell tires, and tried to return them. The fellow at the counter was a bit perplexed, as Nordstrom did not sell tires, but he rose to the occasion, looked up a reasonable price for the tires and refunded the woman's money. After all, she *always* shopped at Nordstrom. Nice work, good "wow" effect.

An example closer to home involving a call center comes to us via Amdocs, where Bruce Graham writes of his Uplifting Burglary. He parked his car in an underground lot and came back the next day to find window smashed and stuff strewn. When he called the autoglass repair place his conversation went like this:

- "Hello, Autoglass – how can I help?"
- "Well – I've just had my car window broken by a thief, and I don't quite know what to do."
- "Well, the first thing is are you okay?"

Sometimes it is the little things, like when the woman asked "first thing, are you OK" that make all the difference. This one line, which cost nothing, made a lasting impression. Next time Bruce needs new windows in his car I can guess who he is going to call.

Working in call centers, particularly when dealing with mobile subscribers, presents challenges, to be sure, but also opportunities. Subscribers who have lost or damaged their mobiles are likely to be very upset, but they are also likely to remember how they were treated. This creates the perfect opportunity to make a "wow" moment. If you have had such a situation where you left your customer suprised and delighted with their treatment, why not take a moment to share?

Does Apple Show How Upgrades Should Be Done?

2009-03-18T09:22:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

Sascha Segan, in pcmag.com, writes "Apple's iPhone Shows How Upgrades Should Be Done" in an article available here. While it is clear that Apple is doing a lot of things right, particularly with regard to getting a lot of coverage on an update that is not even available yet, when we look under the hood there is still room for improvement.

One obvious area for improvement is that iPhone upgrades are not done over the air. You need to have a PC or a Mac and you need to have the right cables and you need to have iTunes running on that PC or Mac. Not everyone who has or wants a phone has or wants or can afford a computer and not everyone who has a computer wants to run iTunes. Particularly in developing markets, a persons first exposure to data services and the internet is increasingly with mobile devices.

Another area for improvement is the updates themselves. iPhone updates are system images with file sizes in the neighborhood of 300 meg, fine with all you can eat broadband, not so fine on over the air or even with some of the low caps found in places outside the US. For example, some Australian providers have bandwidth capped as low as 2 GB/month, of which 300 meg is a significant chunk. One way around this is to send partial updates or diff packages. Instead of sending the whole system image, a partial image or just the difference between the old and the new firmware can be sent and then software on the device can use that diff package to create the new version of firmware from the old version already on the phone. This process, usually called FOTA (Firmware Over The Air), is a lot more sophisticated and is in use at many Tier 1 operators in North America and Japan and is also employed by device makers such as Nokia.

It was interesting that Sascha called out Nokia for lack of info on updates, but then again regardless of how many press releases they did I would be surprised if they got much, if any, coverage in North America. That said, it is possible to update many Symbian devices over the air and such updates can be triggered from the phone itself using just a few clicks.

In the end, it is clear that the customer experience can be shaped by different things - technology is certainly one, but policy, procedure and practice are other, equally or perhaps even more important aspects of the overall experience.

Nokia 5800 XpressMusic Woes - Justification for FOTA?

2009-03-17T17:04:00.000-07:00

Jason Lackey

A technology which has already done much to save subscribers, operators and handset makers, FOTA, or Firmware Over The Air, still evidently has a way to go. Nokia recently released the 5800 XpressMusic, a nice phone to be sure, but one which (like so many others) had some bugs. Many issues with mobile devices are not fundamental hardware issues, which are relatively rare, but more often problems with firmware, which can be fixed with updates.

In the past, firmware updates were done via cables - you patched in to the device and made sure the battery was topped off and loaded a special app onto your PC and downloaded the firmware and used the app to load it on to the phone and hoped and prayed that nothing went wrong during the upload or you would brick your phone.

That was then. Now, many operators and handset makers, including Nokia on many of their models, offer the ability to update firmware over the air. This is far more convenient for the subscriber, who gets the benefits of a phone that works properly (or at least more properly), without having to take the phone to a brick and mortar shop and have a tech patch in and update it. It also works out well for operators and phone manufacturers, who can very inexpensively patch large numbers of phones - a process which often heads off support calls as problems are fixed before the impact the subscriber, clearly good stuff.

If the 5800 was FOTA capable, subscribers would be able to use the phone to trigger updates or updates could be pushed by mobile operators offering the handset. In some cases, the phone manufacturer may want to offer such updates as well. Sadly the 5800 does not seem to be FOTA capable, and thus 5800 owners are invited to call support or visit a Nokia flagship store for a replacement. Ouch.

More from Softpedia News.

some customer care factoids

2009-03-17T16:19:00.000-07:00

Dave Ginsburg

• Cheap calling plans are the top reason customers switch carriers, according to the survey by CFI Group, a research firm based in Ann Arbor, Mich. But customer service was a significant factor, cited by 27 percent of cell-phone users as the reason they switched or canceled their service.
o Cell-phone industry wants to play nice after years of customer rage, Oct 2008

• "Customer care centers and service representatives are under pressure to handle the increase in inquiries, while still trying to understand and resolve the customer's issue on the initial contact. This can potentially increase the number of transfers and the hold times for customers. With an increase in hold times, providers run the risk of decreasing customer satisfaction and losing customers to other providers, as switching levels are 83 percent higher among customers who are put on hold, compared with those who are not."
o J.D. Power and Associates Reports: Customer Service Hold Times for Wireless Phone Customers Reach an All-Time High, Aug 2008

• “Best Customers More Likely To Switch: Subscribers buying the most in services and new products were found to be the most likely to be disappointed and more likely to switch to another provider offering better customer experience.”
o New Research Reveals Most Subscribers Are Satisfied, But Many Will Switch Service Providers for a Better Customer Experience, Amdocs, Feb 2008

• “Future churn levels are almost four times as high among those who rate their wireless carrier below average in customer care. Thus, the challenge for wireless providers is to offer an easy and efficient customer care transaction experience.”
o JD Power and Associates, Feb 2008

• "What Do Customers Really Want? - 1. Listen to me, 2. Know more than I do (about your product or service), 3. Be easy to work with
o What Do Customers Really Want? Survey Reveals the Truth, by Kevin Stirtz the "Amazing Service Guy", May 2007