Are Europe & Asia Tech Superior?

Monday April 25, 2011 – Stewart Wolpin

While not exactly qualifying as a jet-setter (or as a candidate for the Most Interesting Man in the World), in the last 18 months I have been in The Netherlands, Japan and, last week, Spain, at a pre-IFA media conference in the Mediterranean resort town of Benidorm. This isn't a travelogue and there won't be a boring slide show (although I do have one). I cite my international itinerary to establish my bona fides to make the following assertion:

The rest of the world is kicking our collective technology tokheses.

Cover me

Take, for instance, mobile digital broadcasting. The U.S. is only just now broadcasting their first broadcast mobile DTV signals. At this point there are about 70 stations currently airing, and over 100 stations are planning on beginning transmission in 2011.

There are parts of Asia and Latin America that are significantly ahead of us in broadcast mobile TV. Millions of 1Seg handsets have been sold in Japan and are now being sold in a handful of countries in Latin America. Even China is ahead of the U.S. with millions of CMMB mobile tuners sold, and we’re just now starting in the US with the launch of ATSC Mobile DTV. Very few consumer devices are currently available.

An even more ubiquitous network outside the U.S. is cellular service. Above-ground we may be ahead with more 4G choices, but the rest of the world is superior below ground. Subway cell service in Europe and Asia is considered normal. Yes, Washington, D.C.'s Metro offers cell service while hurtling through tunnels, but it likely will be 2017 at the earliest before the world's largest subway network here in New York City gets subway cell service.

But mobile connectivity is not just about cell service. In an underground tram station in Alicante, Spain, I encountered free Wi-Fi service. This can't be an isolated circumstance considering the number of "Zona Wi-Fi" signs I spotted on lamp posts throughout Madrid, Benidorm and Alicante, the three Spanish cities I visited. (Although, I heard many reports of poor Wi-Fi service in Madrid earlier this week, likely a result of the gadget-equipped hordes descending on the city for the UEFA Champions League match next week.)

I C U

And it's not only the ubiquity of cell service over there but how it's used. At the gala dinner to cap off the three-day IFA conference, I and two other U.S. CE writers sat with a trio of Turkish tech reporters including Yildirim Söylemez, the editor of a Turkish retail CE trade magazine, Dagitim Kanali.

In the midst of a conversation consisting of mono-syllabic English and bizarre gesticulating that would have confounded a Charades champion, Yildirim's phone rang. He spoke at his Nokia E71 – that's right, at. He held it a couple of feet from his face as he talked, then turned the phone around. On the screen were his wife and daughter waving at us all and saying "Merhaba" – "hello" in Turkish (pronounced "MARE HA-ba, I believe). We waved back mumbling "Merhaba," stunned. Yildirim was conducting a casual video call between Turkey and Spain on the plain old 3G network in each country, not Wi-Fi, as if it were as normal an occurrence as, well, talking on the phone. And of course, video cell chatting also is common in Japan and South Korea.

Not so much here.

High Home Tech

Then there is the growing importance of appliances in the European and Asian CE ecosystem. IFA started highlighting white goods in 2008 and now gloats of juicing much of Europe's recent appliance innovation. At the mini exhibition center in the hotel where the pre-IFA event was held, the Barcelo Asia Garden, Bosch and Siemens showed off some truly inventive water and energy saving appliances that may or may not make it to the U.S. If the non-committal shrugs I got from company representatives about exporting these eco-technologies to the U.S. is a clue, I wouldn't hold my breath until I saw them on these shores, which is unfortunate.

These are admittedly isolated examples, and we haven't even mentioned high-speed rail. I'm sure our lack of advanced wireless communication infrastructure results from combinations of systemic political, corporate and societal conflicts – state vs. Federal authority, corporate greed and lack of governmental influence and oversight, supposed consumer behavior, and plain lack of political or corporate will to make things happen that actually benefit the consumer, but I'd like to think these anecdotes add up to a longer tale that ought to get us off our tails and make our country's technology infrastructure at least as advanced as it is in Alicante, Spain.

Waking up to Mobile DTV

Monday April 18, 2011 – Shelby Cunningham

Last week at the National Association of Broadcasters Show (NAB Show), U.S. broadcasters and equipment and receiver suppliers trotted out their latest plans for Mobile DTV. While Mobile DTV is still in the earliest stage, it’s time to take a close look at this market that enables the broadcast of local TV broadcast transmissions.

Next up will be informing consumers about the differences between broadcast and unicast mobile TV. “Haven’t cell phone carriers been pushing mobile TV for years?” asks the consumer who may be watching video on their smart phones.

Well yes, but also no. It’s fairly easy to tell the story that mobile TV from local TV stations will deliver different content, but most consumers don’t really care that the programs are broadcast over a local station’s terrestrial network and not over the mobile phone network. The real advantage may actually be to mobile phone operators and ISPs who are experiencing traffic jams on their networks as more and more people expect easy access to bandwidth-eating video.

Broadcast mobile TV is received from a local TV station signal on a cell phone, tablet, netbook or other handheld device. It’s a far more efficient delivery system than that of point to point but it remains to be seen if that part of the mobile TV ecosystem can deliver the content and experience consumers crave. We’re in a brave new world of accessing multiple streams of content on a single device. There’s no reason why this model can’t work for U.S. broadcasters, but they have to get it right – the right content, the right user experience, the right integration into devices, and the right business model.

It’s not exactly a land rush but the broadcasters are now dipping their toes into the water (a few up to their ankles). According to the Open Mobile Video Coalition (OMVC) and DTC, there are about 70 stations in the United States currently broadcasting mobile TV channels, with over 100 more stations expected to start airing in 2011.

Source: DTC

There are a few mobile DTV devices on the market at the moment, such as a Dell netbook, laptop dongles, and select Samsung devices. There were also multiple prototypes being shown at NAB, but consumers aren’t seeing a flood of devices that must come to foster adoption of a new technology.

The increase of station adoptions is a good sign, but consumer awareness is another big key. And even though they’re still trying to figure out 3DTV, they can chew on the new mobile TV offerings.

Too Many Near Field Chiefs

Monday April 11, 2011 – Stewart Wolpin

When last we cyber-met, I briefly reviewed a number of new standards winding their way through specification finalization, certification and/or commercialization (and I forgot to mention the G.hn – Gigabit Home Networking – "HomeCord" specification being promoted by the HomeGrid Forum).

This week, I'd like to tackle one of these standards, one that should have been commercialized a long time ago.

In other words, why the heck don't we have NFC in mobile phones already?

That's a rhetorical question. After some investigation, I think I know why: too many NFC chefs and not enough cooks, Top Chef with no Tom Colicchio or Padma Lakshmi.

No NFC 'Grand Alliance'

Much about the current state of commercialization – or lack thereof – of NFC reminds me of the development of HDTV back in the late 1980s, early 1990s. Like NFC, the development of HDTV created a cacophony of conflicting constituencies – TV makers, TV broadcasters, cable and satellite providers, movie studios, computer companies, mobile phone carriers, the government – all of whom wanted HDTV to be their way or, in a couple of cases, no way.

So the only way to resolve all the HDTV infighting and conflicts of interest was for the FCC to appoint an HDTV czar, and we're all lucky it was former FCC chairman Richard Wiley, who formed the Grand Alliance and forced the competitors to work together.

NFC is in a similar, if not more conflicted, state of having too many would-be NFC chefs and not enough cooks. There's no one to lock all the battling Bickersons in a room and settle the issues once and for all as they seemingly have in France and Belgium.

Who's in NFC charge?

Most of the conflict seems to revolve around who's going to own/control the digital wallet.

As Orange has in Europe, U.S. cell carriers want all the personal data to be imbedded on the SIM card, they say to make it easy for consumers to securely move their financial life from phone-to-phone, but equally or more likely to hopefully grab a tiny piece of each transaction.

To this end, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile, along with Discover (the runt of the credit card litter) and other financial institutions, have have formed a coalition called ISIS to promote this position. Earlier this week, Isis announced its first commercial U.S. deployment – the day after non-Isis participating Sprint announced its own independent NFC plans.

Not everyone believes the carriers need to be so intimately involved in the U.S. First off, European cell users can swap out their own SIM cards. In the U.S., not so much, especially with Verizon and Sprint subscribers, who are limited by lack of backward compatibility. Understandably, Visa and MasterCard would rather the carriers not have this control over their business (and get a piece of their NFC transactional action) and want to promote backward compatibility, and so desire a non-SIM card solution.

Hardware concerns

Similarly, handset makers such as RIM want the encrypted data somehow built into the phone or, hoping to not have to incur additional hardware/chip costs and to ensure backward compatibility, want the digital wallet to be a special microSD card.

Then there is and, to a lesser extent, Ingenico, the primary makers of POS credit card terminals. There are approximately 265,000 "pin pad" terminals worldwide. Most have contactless modules to handle Visa's "PayWave" and Chase's "Blink," MasterCard's "PayPass," American Express' "ExpressPay" and Discover's "PayWave" current contactless credit card NFC systems.

But these NFC modules are capable only of contactless payment. Less than 5 percent – an insignificant number, according to Verifone – are fully NFC compliant, which would allow a wider variety of capabilities beyond simple payment, such as coupon pushing and management of loyalty programs.

Even if digital wallet systems are somehow unified t, retailers will have to spring for new contactless expansion models for their "pin pay" POS terminals. These are, priced between $100 and $150.

Then there's the whole separate issue of operating system compatibility (i.e. Android 2.3.3 and beyond) and app development – businesses are unlikely to build their own NFC apps with so much confusion in the marketplace over who controls what pieces.

NFC Savior

Since the government doesn't have a seat in this restaurant as it did with HDTV, it is unlikely an objective party will adjudicate the NFC cook-off.

Since the carriers have the upper hand in dictating what kind of handsets they'll sell, only one entity may be able to dictate how the whole NFC ecosystem will work: Apple.

As we've seen, Apple decides what will be in the iPhone, not AT&T, not Verizon. The blogosphere has been contorting itself trying to figure out if/when Apple will build NFC capabilities into the upcoming iPhone 5 and the next version of iOS. Many NFC sideline watchers believe Apple could create a de facto NFC paradigm, sort of an NFC Daniel Boone leading everyone through a contactless payment Cumberland Gap.

Not everyone, of course, needs to follow Apple's NFC model, whatever it might be, if it be at all. But if retailers begin to buy the contactless NFC expansion models in large numbers following an Apple NFC phone, if a public transportation network, supermarket or drug chain adopts Apple's NFC ecosystem, and if iPhone 5 users (or, iPhone 4 users using an NFC-enabled case such as the one from iCarte) take advantage of the capabilities, everyone else will likely have to follow.

But everyone is likely to follow if the following occurs:: 1) retailers begin to buy the contactless NFC expansion models in large numbers following an Apple NFC phone, 2) a public transportation network, supermarket or drug chain adopts Apple's NFC ecosystem, and 3) if iPhone 5 users (or, iPhone 4 users using an NFC-enabled case such as the one from iCarte) take advantage of the capabilities.

Until then, welcome to the contactless payment hell's kitchen.

Video on phones? Not just for smart phones

Monday April 4, 2011 – Shelby Cunningham

With all of the focus on smart phones these days, it’s easy to forget that they make up only a small percentage of the overall video playback mobile phone market. DTC estimates that 827 million mobile phones shipped in 2010 supported video playback, but only a little more than a quarter of those phones were smart phones.

Source: DTC

Most of the mobile phones supporting video playback are feature phones, or “dumb” phones, many of which have video capability through the devices’ imbedded cameras that can also record short video clips. Although most associate video capabilities only with smart phones, the universe of phones capable of encoding and decoding video is much larger than the smart phone market. Of course, there are other features of smart phones that make them better suited for video consumption, such as more powerful processors, and larger and higher-resolution displays, than feature phones.

But for basic video consumption, smart phones are way behind their less technologically advanced feature-phone cousins, the plain old feature phones.