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I have a Helio Ocean. I got it on the first day it was available. I’ve used it as I would my primary phone, getting a sense for the UI, etc.

I HATE it for these reasons:

I cannot easily read the clock
I know it may sound ridiculous, but I stopped wearing a watch about a year ago because I always have my phone with me and it has a clock on it. I am amazed at how often and how casually I glance at my phone to check the time. On most flip phones, the outside LCD dims but does not shut off completely so you can just glance at the time. You cannot do this with the Ocean.

The Ocean is a double slider, so it slides one way for the phone keypad and the other way for qwerty. When closed, that state is a keylock. Whereas other phones, to prevent pocket calls, either automatically keylock or prompt the user to do so, the Ocean just assumes that you do not want to pocket call someone and so none of the external keys work when closed. That is a smart design decision, but it comes with a major drawback, which is that because the LCD goes completely dark, you cannot press one of the keys to light the LCD so that you can glance at the clock.

That small annoyance really totally sucks.

The Camera could work better
The keylock feature is compounded by the fact that the hard key camera button is also locked, so you cannot press it to invoke the camera. I have been sliding the qwerty keyboard open then pressing the camera button, (which brings up a menu) then pressing it again to invoke the camera. This isn’t too bad, but it seems like it is a result of the keylock and not a fully intentional feature.

The music player is difficult to access
Same for the music player - those are hard keys, too, so they don’t work when the device is closed. 7 clicks to play music: You have to open the slider, select “menu” then “video+music” then “music” then “songs” then “play.” This brings up a pretty cool player that maps the 5-directional buttons pretty well. Now, if you close the device, the music keeps playing, and the hard keys on the side of the device work, but the 5-directional buttons mapped on the screen do not. I personally do not care about the music aspect of this device, so this is not a big deal for me, but it does seem awkward to have hardware buttons that do not work until you open the device.

I LOVE it for these reasons:

fastmobile is really THE reason I love this device
The rest of the device works like any other Helio device, except for the messaging function. It is a universal inbox that consolidates all your messages, IMs and emails from various providers in one place, and it works incredibly well. fastmobile should be on every device in the world. It integrates tightly to the PIM and works seamlessly with my Yahoo Email and IM, for instance. Every carrier reading this: I know there are several vendors pushing “universal inbox” but of the few I have seen, fastmobile is the most impressive. Really, well done, and kudos to my favorite company this week, fastmobile.

The physical device is awesome
First of all, the industrial design is stellar. It is like something that Sony would build, and in fact feels very much like the Mylo in that regard. The sliders are smooth and precise, and the qwerty keypad is the best of any device so far. I have large enough hands that most keypads do not work for me, but these keys are perfectly spaced. For comparison purposes, the keyboard is much better than the Sidekick 3, and slightly better than the Sidekick 2.

The phone keypad is stylish and works fine, though I gave it to my wife to get her opinion and with her smaller hands, it was clear that even with some time getting used to it, the numeric keys are too spaced out for her to effectively key in a number with one hand. This would be a two-hand device for her even in phone mode. I didn’t think I would have that problem, and really, how often do you key in a number vs. selecting one from your PIM? After a couple of weeks, I have to agree that the numeric keypad doesn’t quite work due to how spaced out the keys are, but like I said - how often do you actually punch in a number?

Messaging is a breeze
Aside from the fastmobile deployment which makes messaging better, the Ocean itself is a fantastic messaging device. It is a little smaller than the Sidekick, but the keyboard is extremely usable, taking full advantage of the horizontal space. For SMS, they nicely mapped one of the softkeys which cuts out a click. (I wonder though: Wouldn’t it be great if I could customize the Ocean so that when I slid open the qwerty, it took me straight to the message composer, because, like, why else would I want to slide it open?)

Overall, this is a great device
I understand the “don’t call it a phone” messaging from Helio, because the Ocean is much more than a phone. I imagine they have been working on this device for a long time and it just took that long to get it to market. It is a little big compared to other devices, but not really for those in its class, like the Sidekick 2 and 3. The industrial design plus the fastmobile integration makes it just useful enough to be my new, single device and make me happy enough to work around the things I hate about it. If the Sidekick didn’t already exist, this would be a category-defining device.

Last-minute note: I wrote this post last night and was going to post it this evening, but an hour ago I saw a device that blows the Ocean out of the water. (No pun intended.) I cannot say what it is, and that’s not the point anyway. The point is that the pace of technological innovation is amazingly fast. Just two weeks ago I was gushing to my friends about my Ocean, and everyone I handed it to was duly impressed. And today I see a device that is smaller, better, etc.

We just announced we secured $12mm in B round funding. We are as quietly as possible executing on our platform strategy and will be rolling out this summer. The money will enable us to broaden our capabilities. Come be a partner.

We do not currently need:
- venture debt
- recruiting services
- offshore outsourced development services
- another PR firm
…so please stop asking. And now to today’s post…

“Blocking and Tackling” is an often misused phrase. Most people think it is a football reference, and use it in a business context to mean all the tactical stuff you have to do in order to “score” or “get over the goal line” or “into the end zone,” etc. In this sense, I guess you block your opponents and tackle them before they can win.

It is actually a sailing reference. A block is a pulley or set of pulleys and the tackle is the rope that goes through the pulleys. This system increases purchase while decreasing effort, like to lift a heavy object. “Blocking and tackling” means setting up all the lines and rigging on your boat before you set sail. In a business context, it would therefore mean all the preparation you have to do in order to “set sail” or “win the race” or “not sink.” It’s true meaning is therefore more strategic than tactical.

I like to mix my metaphors, and “blocking and tackling” mixes well in the business world. You need to set up your rigging smartly beforehand, because it is much harder to do in a storm out on the open sea while you are also trying to block and tackle your opponents who have come onto your ship to play football. Or whatever.

I have been thinking of this phrase differently and more directly lately, as in how many sites or services are Blocking various other “web 2.0” sites or services, a cornerstone of the value of which is their ability to connect to the sites that are blocking them. Or how many “web 2.0” sites are now Tackling the problem of discovering what their business model is. I put the term “web 2.0” in quotes to point out that it is as hackneyed a term as “Y2K” was, and I am already tired of the “we’re a web 3.0 company” jokes. “Web 2.0” is supposed to refer to a type of “two-way web” or “read/write web” company, and there have been some standout examples of massive success. I hate to see it happen, but I am seeing the term embody much more than that, now encompassing the business model, as well, which for most “web 2.0” companies that call themselves “a web 2.0 company” means “hoping to get bought by Google.” Don’t get me wrong - I am high on the concept and know what it means in a positive sense, I just wonder if that is at all dangerous, as the negative sentiment is starting to creep in, the same way that “dotcom” became a loaded term, tinged with negativity.

Anyway, that’s a longer post for another time. I am mostly interested in how it relates to the mobile space.

I’ll use as an example the recent blockery of Photobucket video by MySpace. These are obviously both very successful consumer products. Some very large percentage (I have heard as much as 65%, but I am too lazy to research it) of photos on MySpace are hosted by Photobucket. MySpace is a top 5 website. MySpace’s business model is selling advertising, and they are very clear about their rules regarding third parties selling advertising on their site: It isn’t allowed. Nor should it be. Photobucket’s videos apparently had pre-roll advertisements in them. MySpace blocked them. As much as I personally love Photobucket, it doesn’t keep me from thinking that MySpace acted appropriately. Check out Om Malik’s “5 lessons from the Photobucket Fiasco.”

I love what the web has turned into. Email used to be touted as the killer app of the internet. That was when it was the most useful communication tool available. Not so anymore. As a multitude of very open and cooperative widgets and tools that enable sharing of everything from content to time and space, (like geocaching) the internet is now its own killer app, which is exactly what it was supposed to become. Like a Mandelbrot set, it is chaos, but when you step back and look at it, it works out beautifully. Everything overlaps and when you zoom in, you see how recursive it is, and how well defined even the smallest of its parts is.

It is amazing to me how “always on” the internet has become over the past few years. I remember going to Streaming Media West back in 1999 when I worked at MP3.com, when the concept of a broadband internet was a big idea. That was when Akamai looked like a really good investment. But then it wasn’t during the cold, dark winter following the dotcom meltdown. But now it is again.
(Scott Woolley’s article about Akamai in Forbes is great, btw. Read the whole thing.)

Downloading is an artifact of an inefficient market, required because of narrowband connectivity. But now think about YouTube: You don’t ever actually download anything. You just “play” and “share.” That is an important fundamental shift that has significant negative implications in the mobile space.

Search for “open API” and among the top ten results are pages explaining the open APIs of many well-known “web 2.0” companies including Flickr, Zillow, Twitter and Plaxo. (btw, I know a lot of people are predicting the quick demise of Twitter, but I personally think it is fun.) Click the link from O’Reilly written in 2000 by Rael Dornfest predicting that web APIs are the future.

The downside of open APIs is that they are typically for non-commercial use, so while it may be cool to mash up Google Maps and Craig’s List, if you intend to make money, think again.

Similarly, if a site has no open APIs but allows embedded widgets, usually the same rules apply. Every company that has a slide in their pitch deck about their MySpace widget would be smart to bear in mind that MySpace can, and will, shut you off with the flick of a switch, as Photobucket and iMeem found out recently. (iMeem is awesome by the way, and is going to be one of the biggest sites on the net in a year.)

Big sites like MySpace are interested in staying big, and they do that in part by making sure audience is not slurped off of their site in any way.

So what about mobile?
Well, do you know any other big companies that are interested in staying big and do not want their audience slurped away? (carriers?)

The internet is a broadband streaming universe of open network connected dots that all add up to value somewhere for someone, probably. This is incompatible with the mobile space, which is a narrowband island of closed network connection points that add up to value for the the owner of the network, and rightfully so.

There is an interesting dynamic evolving at the intersection of “web 2.0” and mobility.

My first observation is that wireless network operators, when they redefined their business from “providing wireless voice services” to “providing wireless services,” had to redefine their competitive matrix, as well. The PIM (address book) is the onramp to the mobile user experience. That means that wireless network operators are competing with any company that builds its value around a PIM, address book, buddy list, friend list, contacts, whatever. Cingular and Verizon are competing for their share of communication transactions with IM, VoIP, email and social networking sites, to name a few categories. But the carriers also recognize that if they can bring that user behavior to their environment, they can monetize it in a way not possible on the web. (As an example, IM is free and ad-supported on the web, but directly monetized in the mobile space.) The problem is that many web-based competitors see the network operators as more of a nuisance than an enabler. Why?

Because carriers operate closed networks. The difference between the internet and a closed wireless network is like the difference between going to the middle of the desert to go hunting and going to a private game reserve. The latter comes with a fee and they are harder to get on than simply driving to the desert. The former is fine if you like to eat snakes and coyote meat. But is it worth it?

Yes. But my second observation is that web-centric companies are just that – web-centric. There are twice as many mobile phones in the world as there are computers, but many web-centric companies do not seem to care about this simple fact. The CEOs at web-centric companies that I have talked to about this say that the mobile space is incompatible with their business model, which is to give consumers something for free so that they can sell ads. That’s a fair enough response, though I know better.

But that brings me to my third observation: On the internet, the advertiser is the customer but in the mobile space, the customer is the customer. There is a fear on the part of web-centric companies to even try to tackle the mobile opportunity because they don’t think their business model will translate. And they are right. It probably won’t. But that doesn’t mean the service won’t be valuable to the mobile subscriber. Try a different business model. Expect a different use case. Expect a different user. It is ok to ask consumers to pay for something of value, and they will.

That is what ANTHEM does, btw – we have not replicated web-based functionality 1:1, rather, we have faithfully reproduced web-based functionality in a mobile package that works better and then added features that only make sense on a mobile device. The result is a more useful communication tool. This solves two problems: 1) Carriers want the value of social networking but in a package that respects their particular constraints; and 2) Social networking providers want their users to have an optimized mobile experience and not “the web on the phone.” Mostly, for social networking sites we offer a direct path to the mobile consumer, which is harder to pave than you might think.

At EconSM, I talked to a VC who said he would not invest in any company that includes “working with wireless carriers” in its pitch. Worse in my opinion would be investing in any company that includes “going around the wireless carriers” in its pitch. While the former is a difficult path, the latter practically ensures failure. This is because the trend toward connectedness means putting network-connected applications in the mobile space.

T-Mobile this week quietly pushed an update that wiped off all non-T-Mobile-sanctioned apps. I am not sure how wide it was - we saw the effect on the Sidekick and some other handsets. That is the mobile version of blocking. It is kind of like a non-commercial API and T-Mobile is (rightfully) saying, “Yeah, that’s great that you went around us and got all those users. Now they are all gone byebye.” And the only way to tackle the challenge of working with carriers is to walk in the front door. That is what we provide for social networking providers and community sites: We are a sanctioned interface to the mobile consumer because we have done the blocking and tackling to get the job done right. At the end of the day, we just want to make the mobile device a better communication device. We think we know how to do that in our area of influence and we hope you will agree.

I had lunch last week with some friends who all work at the same wireless carrier. The conversation turned to social networking, etc. There were two interesting discussion topics that I thought you might find relevant to what Intercasting Corp does:
1) Personal connectedness
2) Mobile communication silos

Personal Connectedness
What does “personal connectedness” mean? During our conversation last week, we were talking about LinkedIn. Opinions varied as to what the value of LinkedIn really is. Someone thought it was more of a Monster.com killer, its greatest purpose being to find a job. Three people said they only logged in a few times a year. Some of us paid more attention to it than that, logging in once a week or more. The concept of invitations was fascinating to me. What is the value of declining an invitation on LinkedIn? Well, it doesn’t feel like it helps to decline anything. Maybe that small reward of seeing your number of connections increase by one is incentive enough to add connections rather than not add them. (And, of course, there is no deleting.) We concluded that in a pure economic sense, it is potentially less costly to accept an invitation (even from someone you don’t know) than to decline an invitation to join someone’s “network.” Why is that? Well, because you never know. For most people, LinkedIn has not paid massive dividends on the amount of time invested, but there is this thought in the back of your mind that someday it might, even if you don’t fully understand yet how that might happen.

I am personally very positive about LinkedIn, mostly because of what I think it will become in the future. Taken to its logical extension, assuming most people do not decline invitations to connect, at some point in the future we will all be connected through LinkedIn. Then what? Well, wouldn’t they then essentially replace the address book that is tied to your PC? I mean, if all of your contacts are on their server, then why maintain a separate instance of it locally? This is different from replicating those server-based contacts locally, which would make sense for times when you are not connected and need the contact information. Isn’t a centralized server-based master contact directory hugely valuable to end users? This is not to mention the value to the custodian of that data. Imagine the knowledge you can mine from knowing all of the overlapping personal networks and the communication patterns between and among them. LinkedIn is potentially more valuable than Google in the future.

LinkedIn is a specific company slowly building its value from information that already exists. Its value is in recognizing that it is the personal connection that matters and not the interface to that connection, whether it is an email address, phone number or whatever, all of which are temporary. In the abstract, the concept of LinkedIn makes a ton of sense.

So who else has a similar store of information that could be used to improve personal communication? How about carriers themselves? Take a tier-1 carrier in North America with roughly 50 million subscribers. All of those subscribers are identified by a unique MSISDN and all of those MSISDNs are related to all of the other ones. Until recently, the relationships between those numbers could only be derived based on actual calls placed. But if carriers were to provide a server-based PIM that is replicated to the device, imagine the enhanced services that could be delivered to users.

The current mindset is that the PIM lives on the handset and can be “backed up” to a server, in some cases for a fee. While the “lost phone” insurance policy may be a true value for a small percentage of users, and thus a decent but small revenue stream for carriers, the real opportunity is to own the PIM in the abstract and service it a million different ways for consumers, including presence, integrated communication tools, LBS, calling plans, (like T-Mobile’s MyFaves) content distribution and even integration to 3rd-party communication service providers (like ANTHEM facilitates) so that they can be wrapped up in a marketing promotion or calling plan.

Mobile communication silos
So then we talked about the real problem facing the mobile consumer, which is, ironically, the mobile network operator. It is not that carriers are intentionally obstructive in any way in delivering communication services to consumers – quite the opposite of course, since it is their business to provide communication services. The problem is that wireless carriers “build” very little of their data infrastructure, instead using an ever-growing stable of vendors to provide key functionality. This, in my opinion, is a very good idea because carriers have the benefit of choosing best of breed solutions, and competition among vendors ensures continuous improvement.

The problem is that wireless carriers are very large organizations and therefore have to be organized into logical business units. We work for almost every carrier in North America and several in South America and Europe, as well, and no two carriers are organized the same way. There are some similarities, though, in that they are typically organized into either technology or revenue verticals, so there is “the MMS group” and the “SMS team” and the “Premium Alerts Group” and the “Ringtone guy.” This would make the most sense if the mobile device was more like a PC and carriers were selling software programs for consumers to put on their PCs. Then you might expect to see roughly what you see on any carrier’s deck today, which is an organization of titles by category like “Games” and “Productivity” and “Communication.” But I don’t think of my mobile device as a little PC – I think of it as a communication tool. On my mobile communication tool, I use SMS, MMS, corporate email, personal email, IM, chat and social networking. On my carrier, each of those services is provided by a different vendor. Except for SMS and MMS which use my phone’s built-in PIM, each of my mobile communication services is a silo that uses a different contact list.

Each of those vendors is the absolute best at providing their respective communication service, but none of them are integrated with each other because they are completely separate entities and have no economic incentive to do so.

How we help
Our platform solves part of the silo problem by enabling carriers to provision multiple interoperable communication services. It then wraps them in deep device integration so that a mobile subscriber can enjoy a seamless communication experience. For example, with ANTHEM, a carrier can give the user a complete integrated value chain from camera to gallery to PIM to social networking services to integrated IM, content distribution and other carrier-provisioned information services without the user having to log in and out of individual services. (If that isn’t conjuring a clear picture in your mind, you really just have to see it working on a device – it really is a dramatically improved communication experience.) Even a small amount of integration can make a big difference: A social networking site provisioned thorugh ANTHEM that is tightly integrated to the camera or gallery is an order of magnitude more useful than, say, visiting that same site through a WAP browser.

There is a move by most carriers to adopt active UIs like Flash and UIone, and there are a bunch of small companies trying new and innovative ways of addressing the handset UI challenge. I think all of this is great. When I think about the future of how I will use my mobile device, it will be more useful to me if it works as one consolidated communication tool. When it is more useful (and easier to use) I will use it more, which is better for everyone. I think the more carriers and vendors think about communication services as extensions of a single communication experience for the user, the better that experience will ultimately be. And if that means more adoption and usage, then there is a clear economic incentive for vendors to find ways to work together to deliver a superior experience.