Pajama Entrepreneur

You’d think it was the end of the world. Today on CNBC, I listened to one of the most ridiculous exchanges about whether companies should get their IT departments to support iPhones and Mac laptops.  What triggered this discussion is a Businessweek article (The Mac in the Gray Flannel Suit) on how employees are demanding Macs. Goodness, what is this world coming to?

The moderator of the CNBC discussion asked why should your boss get you a Mac — so you can be “unproductive” since you’ll bring in your iPod and download music while working. This question is a common one among corporate Wall Street types. There’s still this assumption, especially in the business news area, that Macs are for fun and are not for business (productive) use. Haven’t these people seen the catastrophe that is Windows Vista?

That millions of people, including serious businesses like ad agencies and film companies, have managed to “get by” using Macs has completely passed them by. The iPhone is a wonderful device. It has an elegant interface and is easy to use. The people who use it know they are more productive with it it. Same with any of the Apple laptops. Why not ask the user why he or she likes it so much instead of making assumptions about their productivity/non-productivity? Apple puts so much effort into designing good interfaces and beautiful devices that make people fall in love with them — ask the users why.

I switched to the Mac around 2002 and never looked back. It’s not just how beautiful their devices are, it’s also the ease of use, the operating system, etc. They’re not perfect, for example, they need to fix the wireless networking problems in the Mac Book. But I’ll take beauty (Macbook Air) and a good interface design over the horrid Windows Vista and those hideous clunky Dell laptops.

The city of New York told Apple it won’t accept new Macs for its schools until the Wi-Fi problem is fixed. Not sure what the problem is exactly but many users have reported a lag time in logging onto a Wi-Fi network, slow connections on Wi-Fi versus on a wired connection.

Read more here.

Coming in Q3 2008, the follow-up to the N95: the N96 has 16 GB of flash memory which allows one to enjoy up to 40 hours of video, full Flash built in, FM and Internet radio, Nokia Maps application and GPS receiver. This is one of my absolute must-haves for the year.

I was at Mobile World Congress (formerly known as 3GSM) in Barcelona the last two days checking out the latest in mobile gadgets and this one is my favorite because it marries the basic thin Nokia phone with Nokia’s new Maps 2.0 application. Maps 2.0 is the Nokia GPS map adapted to pedestrians. According to Nokia, it has an “accelerometer” which measures changes in direction and orientation. The built-in compass makes it easy to follow the map when you are walking around in a city. So when you turn, the map automatically switches orientation so it shows you where you are facing. This is very handy when you are emerging out of a metro station and have no clue in which direction to proceed.

I had a chance to try out the 6210 (pictured above) with Maps 2.o yesterday. I signed up for Nokia’s “Hidden Barcelona” tour. I went in a tuktuk (see below) with a representative of Nokia. We drove to the center of town, close to the Barrio Gotico and we had to find a hidden square called the Square of Silence. Anyone who has been to Barcelona knows that it’s easy to get lost in the center with its tiny alleys. There is no way to orient yourself against the steeple of a church or a building. It’s like walking in a maze.

So with the 6210 and Maps 2.o, I walked, the map told me to turn left here, right there and voila, there I was at the Plaza Saint Felip Neri. I realized suddenly that I had been there before but I don’t think I could have found it again without the 6210’s Maps application. Below is photo of the square, which I took with the new 6220, a phone that Nokia announced this week which has a 5 megapixel camera with Xenon flash and Carl Zeiss optics. I could have uploaded this photo directly to my Flickr account but decided to transfer it instead to my Mac Book Pro so I could post it on this blog.

What I also like about Maps 2.0 is that if you are driving, you can see upcoming parking lots, auto mechanics and petrol stations. The map also marks churches, museums, metro stops and train stations.

How often have you wandered around a city completely lost, trying to figure out where the metro stop is, not knowing that it’s only one block behind some building?

What I’d like to do with Maps 2.0 is layer over points showing my friends’ favorite restaurants, cafes and hangouts in Barcelona. Then, Maps 2.0 will really shine. It’s great that Nokia is putting this application on the lower end phones so that it gets mass adoption.

I have written in the past about Blyk, a mobile virtual network operator in the UK, that offers free mobile phone calls to 16-24 year olds in exchange for receiving ads via SMS or MMS. According to this article in the The Times:

The response rate to Blyk’s advertising campaigns, which take the form of text and picture messages, is, it says, 29 per cent. That is more than double the typical response rate to direct marketing and a figure that independent analysts say is extraordinarily high.

Many people are skeptical about the free-calls-for-ads business model since it hasn’t worked in the past. Blyk, however, targets a particular demographic, young people, and they are focusing only on the UK (for now). I can only think of similar free-WiFi-for-ads models such as MetroFi’s and EarthLink’s. EarthLink pulled out of the metro Wi-Fi business and MetroFi wants cities to become anchor tenants; it seems they have abandoned their original business model which had 2 elements: (a) free WiFi with ads; and (b) WiFi with no ads, but pay a fee.

For a Wi-Fi service provider to succeed on the ad model, it needs a lot of people using the service and the “right” people, i.e. the users that the advertisers on the network are seeking to reach. There are a few ad-serving companies targeting ISPs that have launched recently: NebuAd, JiWire (although they’re not a startup, they launched their targeted ad serving business last year), and others.

Nonetheless, I think it is great that people are experimenting with different ways of delivering wireless services to people.

A study conducted by the Stichting Kijkonderzoek (SKO) in the Netherlands estimates that 28 percent of Dutch households has a DVD or hard disk recorder that allows people to view TV shows and movies whenever they want, and skip advertisements. One quarter of households already has a flat screen TV. Digital TV is growing as well: 8 percent of households have a satellite dish and 4.6 percent have a subscription to Digitenne (KPN Telecom’s digital TV service).

Watching TV via the computer has already increase dramatically. At the end of last year 17 percent watched one or more TV programs on the computer. This is 5 percent more than the year before.

As more people are able to skip ads and watch TV on demand, where does a company that sells detergent advertise? How do brands that traditionally have managed to force people to watch their ads on TV deal with the new reality?

A study reveals that close to one third of iPhones sold by Apple in the US have been unlocked to work on other carriers’ networks. That’s one million iPhones! Apple will lose $500 million in 2008 in revenues because it gets no revenue share from these phones. One wonders how much money Apple would make by selling the iPhone unlocked to begin with. How many people did not want to buy the iPhone because of it is locked?