State of Telecom Industry in Pakistan

G1 was introduced officially in the US today and it made headlines everywhere. Some cool features are shown below. It will be available through T-Mobile next month. For $179 (and 2-year contract) it is a sweet deal. As I said before this year has been great for smart phone consumers with more choices than ever. Blackberry touch phone is next in line. A more hands-on review of G1 will come soon.

In the last few days, Google has come up with useful improvements to the mobile search, location and maps applications. Here’s a summary of these for the location-based application enthusiasts. The first one is that the size of the blue circle varies and indicates the relative accuracy with which the application pinpoints your location. These are the kinds of iterative and incremental improvements that keep Google a few steps ahead of its competitors. Follow links to official google mobile blog.

My Location: smaller is better!

Your location estimate will be centered closer to your true location, and we have also improved the calculation of just how good our estimate is. When we originally launched the “blue circle” on Google Maps for mobile, the circle usually stayed the same size no matter if you were in downtown Manhattan or rural Iowa. Now, the next time you’re using Google Maps in downtown Manhattan, expect to see a much smaller circle that’s also far more accurate.

Here’s the basis for this improvement.

Mobile operators typically need a lot more cell towers in populous areas to service all the users. This means each individual tower provides a much smaller coverage footprint. On the other hand, in a very sparsely populated area, towers provide much larger coverage footprints. We’ve developed algorithms to try and figure out what the right circle size should be.

Street View and walking directions come to Google Maps for mobile

Now mobile phone app gets the same street-level imagery available on desktop. You can now read business reviews, so you’ll know if it’s actually worth driving across town to that store. And once you decide where to go, you can get there on foot using the same walking directions (beta) we recently launched on desktop.

There’s one more. Mobile Search with my location but it isonly available only for US & UK for now.

Warid has recently announced 2 location based services: friend finder and place finder (i.e. local search). These are pay-per-use services (Rs.3+tax). Using SMS or MMS. you can find the location of another warid cell phone customer or do a local search for a point of interest such as bank. Service is limited to major cities.

This is an interesting first step towards location based services (LBS) for the telecom industry. In US and EU, navigation and related data services are growing rapidly and account for a major portion of network operator’s revenue. The rules and privacy norms are quite different in developed countries and sharing of real-time location is subject to a lot of scrutiny. Warid is simply relying on per-request permission to work around the privacy concern. However I do not find this a good approach — it can be quite annoying to get such messages left and right.

In the US, LBS is a hot area with lots of startup acitivty. Companies such as brightkite, loopt and whrrl have received tons of VC money to develop all kinds of fancy mobile and web-based applications. Recent inclusion of GPS in 3G iPhone has created even more buzz!

Warid has taken a different and relatively simple approach where the application is based on back and forth sms or multimedia message (MMS). The SMS solution is pretty much the same which Google offers in the US and which works extremely well for quick searches. The MMS option is for the map display - limited to a few major cities. Since there is no mention of GPS requirement, Warid must be using triangulation algorithms to find the approximate location. See my previous post on Google maps and how it works.

Although there are many limitations of Warid’s LBS this still matters because this is the first attempt for location based service. I can assure you that this is just the start and we will soon plenty of other implementations around the buddy finder concept and LBS in general. There are so many creative ways to use this service, especially when combined with a personalized website and higher resolution maps.

Google’s model is to build a killer app, then monetize it later – Andy Rubin, Director Of Android.

I would like to present two recent stories about the challenges faced by Google’s Android platform. As I wrote previously, the mobile OS platform war is one of the most important and pivotal for mobile industry and consumers. It reminds me of the browser wars of a few years ago. For Android, there are a few technical challenges but the real critical issues are related to business.

There is competition from Nokia, Apple, BlackBerry and Microsoft. The questions still remains on how applications will be distributed and how developers will earn revenue from them. Then there is the tension over who controls the phone features (Google or manufacturers like Samsung). My conclusion is that despite these initial problems, Android has all the potential to become a breakthrough success.

A few excerpts from this month’s Wired Magazine: Google’s Open Source Android OS Will Free the Wireless Web

The only firm that seemed to be successfully navigating the mobile labyrinth was Microsoft, one of Google’s biggest rivals. The Windows Mobile platform had less than 10 percent of the US smartphone market, but it was growing fast. Microsoft’s system, however, was the ugly stepsister of what Google was proposing: Redmond executives cared less about opening up the Net to mobile users than about tying the mobile operating system into its desktop dominance. A decade ago, Microsoft had underestimated the growth of the Web and then lost control of it to Google. Now it looked like it was Google’s turn to be caught flat-footed.

Windows Mobile is now installed on 140 devices, hosted by 160 carriers around the world. Key to its success was Microsoft’s ability to use its desktop domination as a battering ram.

The Android team had violated an essential tenet of the wireless industry: that users are too dumb and dangerous to be trusted with downloadable software. Engineers who write for just about any mobile operating system today have to spend time and cash obtaining security keys and code-signing certificates. Android would allow any application to be installed and run, no questions asked.

“The handset makers are on a treadmill, trying to turn out hardware every six months that’s innovative and thinner, with bigger displays and lower costs, while having to do the systems integration,” says Andy Rubin, director of mobile platforms at Google. “The net result is no innovation. They don’t have time. You know what? We make really good software. We can take on all that work.”

The second story is from Wall Street Journal (extracts below) and it describes the difficulties and the resulting delay in launch: Google’s Mobile-Handset Plans Are Slowed

Google now says that the handsets won’t arrive until the fourth quarter. And some cellular carriers and makers of programs that work with Android are struggling to meet that schedule, people familiar with the situation say.

T-Mobile USA expects to deliver an Android-powered phone in the fourth period. China Mobile, the largest wireless carrier in the world with nearly 400 million subscriber accounts, had planned to launch an Android phone in the third quarter but it has run into issues that will likely delay the launch until late this year or early 2009, a person familiar with the matter says.

Read more »