Alec Saunders SquawkBox

Some people are going to be house bound in the great white north today.  It's snowing.  Today's guest on Squawkbox couldn't be more timely! 

This morning we're talking with Karel Lukas, from Yugma.  Yugma is a free web collaboration service that enables people to instantly connect over the internet to communicate and share content and ideas using any application or software. It works on Windows, Linux or the Mac.  Popular uses include hosting study groups or tutoring sessions, hosting virtual clubs or social events, presenting proposals or creative work, product demonstrations, training, customer service, team reviews, remote support and troubleshooting, and collaboration by artists, writers, and design professionals.

Karel's going to talk with us a little about how Yugma is different from other offerings available today, and also give us a flavor for where his company plans to take this technology.

Hope you can join us at 11 AM EST. 

Wow. 

'Journalism' has hit a new low with this piece of drivel from Lance Ulanoff.   The Death Spiral for Facebook?  C'mon.  Lance rehashes old news reports from a year ago, and then takes a run at elements like the newsfeed claiming that they're somehow privacy invasive.  

a) You clearly don't know, use or understand Facebook Lance.

b) It also seems as if you must have gotten a failing grade in fact checking at journalism school.

It doesn't surprise me that this is on FOXNews.  It's a good example of their typical factually challenged, innuendo laden horse manure.  It does surprise me that this is coming from a PC Magazine editor, though.  If they've sunk that low then they're in a death spiral of their own, methinks. 

We had another very interactive call this morning.  Of our three topics, the "death of mobile application development" was most thoroughly discussed.  We were lucky enough to have William Volk, CEO of MyNumo — a mobile application developer — on the telephone.   William eats, lives and breathes these issues every day.  Afterward, one participant messaged me privately to say that he thought that this call was one of the best yet, based on the information learned today.

Tomorrow I’ll have special guest Karel Lukas of desktop collaboration startup Yugma on the telephone as well.  Plan to join us and chat with Karel.

 

 Squawk Box Feb 26 - the death of mobile applications? [42:04m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

Welcome to a new way to promote the SquawkBox — Luca Filigheddu's Hictu!.  Each morning i'll record a 1 minute preview of the day's call.  You can subscribe to it via this RSS feed. 

And this morning's call?

Today's topics:

1. The death of mobile application development.  Rubicon's Michael Mace published a lengthy piece over the weekend where he basically said that operator greed combined with platform fragmentation has killed the market for mobile applications.  According to Mace, it's now too expensive to develop for the platform, and the distribution channel takes too much money from the developer to make mobile a viable platform.  We'll discuss this, since it's a pretty bold assertion. 

http://mobileopportunity.blogspot.com/2008/02/mobile-applications-rip.html

2. Yesterday Skype announced the appointment of a new a CEO, former shopping.com exec and evite co-founder Josh Silverman.  It naturally generated a fair amount of comment online.  What do you think the biggest challenges he faces are?  What needs to be done at Skype to turn things around?

http://share.skype.com/sites/en/2008/02/a_few_words_from_skypes_incomi.html

3. Over the last few weeks, Facebook has announced a series of changes designed at curbing spam invites, and helping users make better choices about which applications to install.  These are the reviews section on the applications about page, the ability to clear all the invites from profile, the ability to block applications when invited to them, and restrictions on the number of invites that an application can send, based on how many people respond to them.  Is it helping?

See you at 11 AM EST. If you haven't already registered, the call URL is: http://tinyurl.com/35u8be

I'm not at the point that Michael Mace has reached.  Not yet. In his piece Mobile Applications, RIP, Mace sounds the death knell for the mobile applications industry.  He blames it on the proliferation and splintering of platforms, and operator and distribution channel greed.  He recommends vendors focus on the web, and ignore the operator. 

I am certainly not far behind Mace at this point, having experienced exactly the barriers he describes, but I remain hopeful that the current mess can be corrected. Native applications provide a better experience for the end user than web based applications, and will do so for as long as there isn't universal, high speed connectivity available at reasonable price points.

My hope isn't based on operators suddenly waking up and wanting to do the right thing to grow the market.  Not at all.  As they conduct their interminable little pricing wars and lock-in attempts, the picture for third party developers looks bleaker and bleaker all the time.  No,  my hope is that giants like Nokia and Apple can force the market open in spite of the operator.

At some point operators will wake up and understand that they do two things very well indeed — they carry traffic and they bill.  They are terrible applications service providers.  The very best thing they could do for themselves, their customers and applications vendors would be to:

1. Stop trying to dictate what goes on handset.  As Mace points out, the handset is a highly personalized experience.  Operators can't possibly cover all the angles. 
2. Open the billing infrastructure to accredited third parties.  That would present customers with a single unified bill, provide application vendors with a viable business model, and most importantly drive traffic and usage on the operators networks.

It's inevitable that this will happen.  Either the operator will help the applications market to grow, or (as Mace counsels) the applications developer will move to the web and sidestep the operator.