Update: Print is more backwood than ever

Posted on December 29, 2012 by mPansy

Vor mittlerweile 15 Monaten habe ich anlässlich der Medientage 2011 einen Artikel über die Innovationsbestrebungen und Führungskompetenzen so mancher österreichischer Medien und deren Machern geschrieben. Damals wurden Aussagen wie “Print wird unterschätzt” oder “Print bringt Geld” getroffen. Die Ereignisse der letzten Wochen (Einstellung von Newsweek und FT Deutschland, Mitarbeiterabbau in beinahe allen inländischen Print-Redaktionen,…) lassen darauf schließen, dass mittlerweile die Notwendigkeit einer Veränderung gesehen wird. Das ist gut so, aber wohin wird die Reise jetzt gehen?

Wenn man diversen Medienberichten und Statements von Branchenvertretern der letzten Wochen folgt, wird einem schnell klar, dass es bei allen Bestrebungen nicht darum geht, Medien nachhaltig auf stabilere Beine zu stellen. Viel mehr geht es um das schnelle und kurzfristige Geld, welches das drohende Ende zeitlich etwas weiter nach hinten zu verschieben vermag. Die Hoffnungen der Branche liegen 2013 auf folgenden Themen:

  1. Das Superwahljahr 2013: Nationalratswahl und mindestens 4 Landtagswahlen. Zusätzlich mit Team Stronach eine sehr potente neue Partei, die seit geraumer Zeit in “freundlichen” Medien beinahe täglich inseriert.
  2. Mehr Presseförderung: es werden 50 anstelle der bisher 10,8m€ gefordert
  3. Ein neues Leistungsschutzrecht. Darunter versteht sich der Versuch ein Gesetz zu instruieren welches Suchmaschinen und ähnliche News-Aggregatoren verpflichtet an Verlage angemessene Lizenzgebühren für das Verlinken derer Inhalte zu entrichten.

Alle hier angeführten Punkte haben wirklich wenig mit Innovationen am Hut, denn es geht, wie schon vor 15 Monaten von mir beschrieben, um das weitere Melken eines kranken Systems.

Noch trauriger wird es, wenn man die Argumentationen betrachtet. Für mehr Presseförderung bringen Branchenvertreter immer wieder ihre Unabhängigkeit und den Erhalt (!) von Qualitätsjournalismus ein. Inwieweit Printmedien unabhängig vom politischen System und öffentlichen Geldern sind kann man sich angesichts der oben angeführten Hoffnungen selbst ausmalen. Qualitätsjournalismus würde voraussetzen, dass man sich diesen einerseits leisten kann (dafür ist Österreich als Markt zu klein ohne Förderungen) und andererseits zu allen Themen unvoreingenommen recherchiert (geht nicht aufgrund von Abhängigkeiten gem. Punkt 1 oder selbstauferlegten Zwängen gem. Punkt 3).

Spätestens hier beisst sich die Katze auch in den Schwanz.  Daher ist es wahrscheinlich aus Sicht der Medien auch am sinnvollsten, das System noch so lange zu melken wie es geht. Es wäre nur schön, wenn nicht der Steuerzahler die Milch gibt…

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On a personal note… I’m back!

Posted on July 28, 2012 by mPansy

3 posts in 12 months is not the ideal frequency I was hoping for when launching this blog… It has been an extremely challenging and demanding period recently. Actually today represents the first real weekend after 14 months where I can choose and not my to-do list tells me what needs to be done… That says it all! On the other side having finished my MBA at IE Business School in Madrid and even more important, having finalized the MBO of sms.at and subsequent launch of Up to Eleven just feels great.

I want to take this post as opportunity to share my major learnings out of the last 1 1/2 year:

  1. Never think again that I need to do everything at the same time and don’t stress myself. Life is long enough hopefully to do whatever I’d like to do. Just keep track.
  2. Steve Jobs is so right here. Find & do what you love. Don’t settle. Don’t waste time, it’s too valuable. I’m getting closer…
  3. I can work very hard with almost no sleep over a long time. That’s good to know, but at the same time I have also learned that efficiency dropped immensely. There is no direct relationship between effort & efficiency.
  4. All great things I’ll achieve can be attributed to pushing my own limits. I need to test new waters in order to grow. If I do it with confidence and optimism I’ll most likely never regret.
  5. An MBA can be worth the money as long as you’re looking for a corporate career or get a sponsorship.  When doing it, do it full-time (see point 1 above).
  6. The world is huge. China, India, Africa,… unbelievable in size. I’ll never be anything special, because, most likely, there are thousands going through exactly the same situation than me in another part of the world. Context makes us special. (see point 8)
  7.  Following from 6, Europe is, on average, a dying concept. Rich, old, slow, bureaucratic, risk-averse, corrupt. Others do much better.
  8. Nothing is more important than the people close to me. It’s my origin and backbone. Without them, a lot would not have been possible so far (heavily linked to point 4).

That’s it for the time being. Although I hope that there were more learnings than just these 8 points I am curious to check these points again in a few years and see if I share the same views.

Meanwhile, the sun is out and it’s time to enjoy summer. Yeah!!!

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A1 Telekom’s acquisition of Yesss!

Posted on February 4, 2012 by mPansy

I just ran into an article about the recently announced acquisition of Orange Austria by Hutchison “3”. Part of the deal is the subsequent sale of Orange low-end brand Yesss! to market leader A1 Telekom Austria for 390m€. The previously cited article includes some information on Yesss! historical business numbers and they don’t help in explaining the 390m€ valuation.

Here some facts about Yesss!:

  • Customer base (no. of SIM cards): 740.000
  • 2010 Revenue: 56,4m€
  • 2010 Operating CF: 2,37m€
  • 2010 ARPU: 6,71€
  • No. of Employees: 15 (!)

Yesss! is an MVNO and was using the Orange network infrastructure so far. Consequently they also don’t have any major fixed assets that can be acquired. Yesss! annual revenue went down 50% from 2007 to 2010. Taking into account current market dynamics it is hard to imagine any change to this tendency.

So what is it that makes A1 spend 390m€? It would take more than 8 years of full 2010 revenues without any cost to recover the purchase price, so even the argument that A1 will have hardly any fixed cost when running Yesss! (because of lower interconnect fees and already in place network infrastructure) doesn’t help. Next to the Yesss! customer base A1 has also acquired the “One” brand (former brand of Orange) and frequency packages for 900, 2100 and 2600 MHz. So let’s say that Yesss! was worth 50m€, that leaves almost another 350m€ for the frequencies.

A1 shares have had a hard time during the last 5 years, partly driven by failed acquisitions in Eastern Europe that were just made for the sake of growing, but not to add value. As a shareholder of A1 I would be concerned and challenge this purchase. In order to fully evaluate the deal one would need to know how urgent A1 needs the frequencies. In the end they’re not acquiring Yesss!, they’re acquiring frequencies (and this is still subject to regulatory approval).

 

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Mobile could do so much more…

Posted on January 29, 2012 by mPansy

All over tech blogs one can read that smartphones and connected devices represent another wave of the digital revolution. There are 5.6bn mobile phone subscribers and at the end of 2011 already 835m of them were equipped with smartphones. Smartphone sales in Western Europe and the US are meanwhile outpacing feature phone sales. But it’s not only about device coverage – we also became heavy users of our smartphones these days. Total app downloads have surpassed the 30bn mark lately in 2011. 8 out of 10 would select their smartphone out of 3 things they can take on a lonely island. We tend to think that all of this is a huge step forward for mobile technology and innovation will slow down over the next years. I think it will be the opposite. To me, so far we have only achieved the technical foundation (soft- and hardware for mobile devices, wireless data transfer,…) to get the real revolution going. The main reason why this has not yet taken fully off is because the “non-mobile” environment is adapting very slowly to the new reality.

Let me give you some more data to underline my argumentation. Today’s most widespread activities on smartphones is communication, according to Google. We make calls and send sms (> 90% of users), we check e-mail (82%) or use social networking sites (63%). Other top categories include playing games, checking news or weather. Some of us (roughly 1/3) also listen to music and watch video on mobile. Six years ago I used to have a Windows Phone, one of the first connected phones, that let me do all of that stuff too. It was just not that fast and the quality was much worse than my iPhone today – but still it were the same activities. Nothing groundbreaking new since then. Still we think that in the last few years so much has changed in mobile.

So what would be the real innovation that I am looking for in mobile? Actually it’s quite simple things and all technical requirements are already available. Here are some examples:

  • I want to use my phone to store all my ID cards on it. No more driving licence and no more passports. One phone to rule them all.
  • I want to order pizza in a “smartphone way”, so not by dialing a number, just by selecting from a menu and it gets delivered and I see when it arrives and everything is paid via Paypal or iTunes.
  • I want to shop my everyday consumption in my favorite shops from my mobile and pick all the stuff up on my way home from office.

The list would be endless. Still, I am not demanding to have NFC or a perfectly integrated mobile payment solution (I want to do online payments on my mobile), so not any functionality that is not yet technologically mature. All ingredients would be available today, it’s just nobody goes after the opportunity, because the “non-mobile” environment (government, pizza service, retailers,…) is slow in adapting to the new reality.

My motive for this post was a recent visit to McDonald’s in Graz, which has just recently been refurbished. It appears that they have new self-service cashiers. You can select your meal and pay with bank or credit card at the self-service cashier, then you’ll get your meal handed out to you. See the picture below.

These stations are called easy order. Now imagine how easy ordering would be if you can do it on your smartphone. Open the McDonald’s App and select the menu during your drive to the restaurant, payment is done online. Once you’re there, you pick up your meal and go have a seat.

For McDonald’s such an app won’t change a lot compared to the current “easy order” flow. But I think more people would be using the app option (more speed for McDonalds and better process flow), more data is collected for marketing purposes, space in the restaurant can be used for seatings (they had 4 easy order stations there!!), customers would be happier and a lot of money would be saved (compare the cost of an app to the cost of 4 stations per restaurant).

I am sure in a few years things will work out the way I’d like to see them now. Then also the “non-mobile” environment has realized that mobile can do much more than they always thought. I hope mobile is not about playing games when I’m waiting for the bus, mobile should facilitate people’s life’s.

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Print is back(wood)

Posted on October 18, 2011 by mPansy

Exactly 6 months after my last blog entry I am finding the motivation & time to write another article. It has been a busy time over summer and as I expected when starting this blog, new posts will remain sporadic. During breakfast today I read an Austrian newspaper and it injected me some motivation. Unfortunately the post has to be in German.

“Print is back – Online-Erfolg bescheiden” titelt das von Trend und Bestseller alljährlich zu den Medientagen aufgelegte “Medien Spezial 2011″. Quasi das Stelldichein der österreichischen Medienbranche quer über alle Gattungen (TV, Radio, Print, Online,…). Dieses schöne Beiheft habe ich mir heute durchgeblättert und bin währenddessen immer weiter ins Staunen über die digitale Verzweiflung so mancher österreichischer Printmedien und Manager gekommen. Eingangs ein paar generelle Fakten, um meinen Standpunkt zu verdeutlichen:

Ich denke es ist allen klar, dass die Printbranche vor massiven Herausforderungen steht. Technologischer Wandel einhergehend mit massiven Änderungen des Nutzungsverhaltens, deutlich sichtbar in dieser Studie über Mediennutzung von österreichischen Jugendlichen, macht es absehbar, dass in Zukunft weniger Leute die Zeitung als physisches Produkt (= Print) lesen werden. Das wird nicht morgen sein, auch nicht in 4 Jahren, aber in 10 Jahren wird sich aufgrund demographischer Veränderungen ein Nutzungsrückgang ergeben.

Dieser technologische Wandel ist aber nicht die Ursache des Langzeitproblems der Printbranche. Der Content, der in Redaktionen produziert wird, ist nach wie vor im Mittel einzigartig. In Bereichen wie Politik, Wirtschaft, Sport etc. gibt es auf lokaler Ebene keine Alternative zu unseren Medien und Menschen verbringen über alle Plattformen immer mehr Zeit mit dem Konsum genau dieser Inhalte. Somit ist die Abnahme von Print, das ja nur ein Channel eines Medienunternehmens ist, als Folge technologischen Wandels viel eher ein Problem des Geschäftsmodells. Denn dieses wurde in anderen Channels bisher noch nicht gefunden. Ohne Quersubventionierung aus Print ist es noch nicht vielen Medien gelungen im Onlinebereich positiv zu bilanzieren. Mit noch neueren Medien (Mobile oder Tablet) siehts noch düsterer aus.

Und genau hier beisst sich die Katze in den Schwanz. Neben den gottgegebenen Erschwernissen (Österreich ist ein sehr kleines Land mit vielen, teilweise sehr kleinen Playern) ist das größte Problem, dass in den meisten Medienkonzernen das “Melken” der Cashcow Print oberste Priorität hat. Betriebswirtschaftlich verständlich (und notwendig da Lebensgrundlage), allerdings erschwert man damit alles Neue, das man in anderen Channels aufbauen möchte. Genau diese Notwendigkeit treibt immer seltsamere Blüten und lässt teilweise an handelnden Personen wie Geschäftspraktiken schwer zweifeln. Exemplarisch hier nur eine Auflistung einiger Themen, die bei mir je nachdem Kopfschütteln, Lachen oder Erbrechen auslösen:

  • Herbert Kloiber, ATV Eigentümer, sagt in oben angeführtem Magazin, das man ihm “im Büro einen PC bereitgestellt hat, der über voreingestellte Webseiten verfügt, sodass ich ihn auch nutzen kann”. Weiters hat er keine Mailadresse und versucht ab und an ein SMS abzusetzen. Und wir melken weiter…
  • Toll auch die Zitate auf der Titelseite. Thomas Kralinger, Kurier, stellt fest “Print bringt Geld”. Im Bildsujet findet sich ein fiktiver Artikel der sagt “Österreichs Verleger haben erkannt, dass sie mit Journalismus im Internet kein Geld verdienen können”. …melken, melken, melken…
  • Erst vor kurzem wurde unserem Bundeskanzler Faymann Unrecht getan, als man seine Praxis der Inseratenvergabe anprangerte. Ein Schelm wer böses denkt. Die Tatsache, dass es einen angenehmen gegenseitigen Selbstzweck in der “Verhaberung” zwischen Printmedien und Politik gibt, weiß aber auch jeder, der mit Medien zu tun hat. Allein ein Blick auf die nackten Zahlen lässt Zweifel aufkommen. 45% des Brutto-Werbeaufwands gehen in Österreich in Print, davon ein bestimmt substanzieller Teil Zuwendungen der öffentlichen Hand, damit sind wir in Europa Spitze. Online? 3,64%. Unter den Schlusslichtern. …gemeinsam melken ist doch gleich viel lustiger…
  • Immer wieder herrlich zu beobachten, wie sich Personen bzw. Medien als digitale Vordenker innerhalb der Medienbranche in Position bringen. Hinter dem Vorhang schaut es dann oft anders aus. Die Presse ist vor kurzem mit ihrer iPad App auf ein Bezahlmodell umgeschwenkt. Dort darf man jetzt 1,59€ zahlen für ein PDF inkl. der Werbung darin. Das nenne ich eine Okkasion! Das Angebot kommt aus dem selben Unternehmen das mir einmal erklärt hat, dass die Sonntagszeitungen in den Taschen in ihren Kalkulationen ohnehin verschenkt werden, da Auflage viel wichtiger ist als Verkaufserlös. Bei 20.000 Unique Visitors vermute ich wird ca. 1% dafür bereit sein, auch zu zahlen. Macht immerhin dann, nach Abzug der iTunes-Gebühren, knappe 200€… Chapeau! Ebenfalls gratulieren möchte ich dem Wirtschaftsblatt zu einer 4-stelligen Anzahl an Abonennten. Ich hoffe man ist ob dieses großen Erfolges demnächst auf die im nächsten Punkt angeführte Presseförderung nicht mehr angewiesen. …nicht jede Kuh will gleich gemolken werden…
  • Auch heuer wurden wieder 12,376m€ an Presseförderung zur Förderung der regionalen Vielfalt an österreichische Tageszeitungen ausgeschüttet. Viele der Begünstigten sind leider nicht in der Lage ohne diese Förderung positiv zu bilanzieren (u.a. Die Presse und Wirtschaftsblatt). Online-Medienförderung gibt es auch keine, obwohl schon 2002 gefordert. Damit aber die Onlinestrategien der Medienunternehmen wirtschaftlich doch noch reüssieren, hat sich jetzt ein breiter politischer Konsens gefunden, “eine Art AKM für Zeitungscontent” einzuführen, damit die Verhaberung zum gegenseitigen Selbstzwecke auch Online weitergehen kann. …wenn die eine Kuh keine Milch mehr hergibt muss ich mir eine andere finden…

Ich würde mir wünschen, dass die österreichische Medienlandschaft nicht in das Melken einer immer weniger Milch gebenden Cash-Cow verfällt und somit immer seltsamere Blüten treibt. Mit neuen Köpfen, Mut, Kreativität und Innovation gibt es mMn ausreichend Möglichkeiten um dem eingangs erwähnten technologischen Wandel nach vorne zu entfliehen. Let’s go!

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Why Android (Market) still sucks

Posted on April 17, 2011 by mPansy

During the last 12 months Google’s Android OS has turned the smartphone OS market upside down and took over the lead if measured by quantity of new devices sold. No doubt that Android is a big success and will continue to be even more success in the upcoming years, but most of its credit comes from low sales pricing compared to its hardware specs and competitors (iPhone), not from superior product execution.

In this post I don’t like to make the 234th comparison between iOS and Android. Frank Meehan has already said all that can be said on that particular point and anything beyond that point is a waste of time because the two platforms are positioned inherently different and you would compare apples with oranges.

But when you compare both native application stores attached to the platform (Apple App Store and Android Market), you compare apples with apples. We have just recently launched our long-awaited iOS-version of mysms. The observations of the last days are really interesting and don’t shed the best light on the Android Market. The Android app of mysms, which has been live since November 2010, has seen more than 20.000 downloads since then. Thanks to 5 months work, some marketing & PR the number of daily downloads is rising from day to day and the app is doing fine. But the iOS version just released 10 days ago is seeing even more daily downloads although we haven’t even started advertising the App. We wanted to wait for some more days and see if first customer reviews are positive and then shout out the message.
I expected the iOS version to perform better, but not so much.

What is different between the two markets? Here’s my personal explanation:

  1. Customer Base: it is a fact that iPhone owners are more active in using apps than are Android users. 50% of them download apps compared to 19% of Android users. I believe the main reason for that is that phone users generally know little about their phone’s capabilities on the one hand, on the other hand you either buy an “iPhone” or a “smartphone” (people don’t go into shops and buy an “Android Phone”). So complexity paired with branding and price attracts leads to different usage patterns.
  2. Payment: we all know that iTunes is superior to any other mobile payment solution thanks to it’s spread. No need to elaborate that.
  3. Store Navigation: it’s all about app discovery to keep your app ecosystem in motion. Apple’s App Store does a good job in promoting new & noteworthy apps for each country separately (see next point on localization) based on a certain algorithm. On the Android Market homescreen I can see 15 featured apps manually picked by Google’s Content administrators. To see new ones I would have to go into any category, and even then I don’t see the most downloaded new apps, they are showing me chronologically ordered new apps. I would be interested which good apps came out since I last visited the store based on downloads or ratings, but not in chronological order.
  4. Localization: everybody who runs a web shop knows the importance of CRM (showing visitors the content they most probably will buy). For global products the most simple form of segmentation is by country (others would be age, sex, …). When I go to the comics category of the Android Market 2 of the Top3 results are japanese. But I cannot find the app of my local newspaper because it is stuck in some global download rankings (Austria is not the biggest country, so making an impact next to US apps is really hard). It is really a provocation that this happens in a store of a company which servers probably know more about my online life than I do.

From a marketing point of view this is really a joke, a desaster, you can hardly make it worse. It will be interesting to observe how the recently launched Amazon Appstore for Android will be doing. They definitely know how to build stores and master CRM.

I would really like to understand Google’s strategy behind this, because you cannot do such a bad job if it is not on purpose. Any idea?

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On the death of the SMS…

Posted on March 7, 2011 by mPansy

It seems that it is part of my job to get regularly asked how long our company can survive as long as we mainly rely on selling SMS. Not one week is passing by without getting this questioned by either journalists, market players or even friends. Next to mobile e-mail, mobile instant messaging, social networking on Facebook or Twitter, or smartphone applications people tend to think that SMS is an outdated means of communication. While this may be true for some individuals, I fully disagree for the overall market. Here’s why:

  • Consumer Acceptance:
    Thanks to the huge success of text messaging across all different forms of phones SMS has become widely accepted among consumers. Statistics vary between 80% and 90% of phone owners across all age groups who use the SMS functionality. To compare, the same percentage is somewhere around 40%-50% for Social Networks (Facebook) and 50% for mobile e-mail.
    If you now think that younger generations grow up with Facebook and their smartphone and therefore don’t need SMS you’re wrong. Typically teenagers use SMS much more than older age groups.
  • Device support & interoperability:
    Every phone or SIM-enabled device supports SMS. But not every phone does automatically support social networks, mobile e-mail or mobile instant messaging. The more consumers have a phone number, the higher is the value to everybody else to also use text messaging, thus a typical network effect is created. This network effect is strongest for phone numbers, because for the time being, our phone contacts may be the most complete collection of our social contacts (to compare with social networks: only 2/3 of the people I sent a text message in the last 3 months are also connected with myself on FB, 5% on Twitter…)
  • Reliability:
    The very high reliability of SMS compared to other means of communication is a combination of consumer acceptance and interoperability. The delivery of a text message can optionally be confirmed by CODs, but even more important is the behavior of the message’s recipient. For mobile e-mail, you usually don’t expect an immediate reply, neither for direct messages on social networks. Mobile IM probably comes closest and is also made for very short discussions with immediate feedback.
  • Operator pricing:
    Throughout the past 10 years SMS cost has gone down dramatically. Today, in most european markets operators are selling SMS bundles together with voice at fixed fees, which leads to 1000 SMS included or even unlimited pricing plans. From a consumer perspective this has lead to the fact that SMS has become the preferred mobile instant messaging service, thereby circumventing classical mobile IM services like Skype, Nimbuzz etc. This is exactly what today’s teenagers are doing – send & reply very short messages via SMS like chatting.

Though text messaging may not be better than all the other means of communication in every single area or for every individual, on average it does. There is nothing comparable yet available that provides the same characteristics and satisfies consumer demands.
Today, text messaging is still a growing business, and it has become huge in the last years (globally, 7.000.000.000.000 SMS are predicted by ABI research for 2011). We’ve learned from the past that mobile e-mail won’t push aside SMS. According to a survey done by Telekom Austria in 2010 23% of respondents said that they send less SMS since they joined a social network. This means that 77% send equal or even more SMS! So social networking won’t push aside SMS either. This only leaves behind mobile IM. My personal opinion is that mobile IM and SMS have already merged from a consumer behavior perspective and are also going to merge product wise (I can use one app for SMS & IM), especially on smart phones.

Finally, besides all the hype around smartphones, apps and mobile internet, this post should tell you that SMS is not going to die any time soon. This is also why we shouldn’t look at SMS as an outdated technology in Europe and therefore lack awareness (the image of SMS is different in the US). SMS still has lots of opportunities to offer, especially in the M2M (machine-to-machine) and M2P (machine-to-person) field. If we miss to go for them, Americans will do, as happened with smartphone OS platforms.

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On Nokia & Microsoft

Posted on March 4, 2011 by mPansy

Please find a comment I have written 2 weeks ago for Horizont about the strategic partnership between Nokia and Microsoft.

Der schwächelnde, voerst noch größte Mobiltelefonhersteller Nokia und der Software-Gigant Microsoft haben eine strategische Partnerschaft geknüpft. Nokia wird künftig für seine Premium-Smartphones statt dem hauseigenen Symbian das noch sehr junge, wenig verbreitete Betriebssystem Windows Phone 7 von Microsoft einsetzen.

Das einstige finnische Vorzeigeunternehmen hat die rasanten Entwicklungen rund um Smartphones und mobiles Internet radikal verabsäumt. Schließlich entscheiden sich Konsumenten nicht mehr vorwiegend aufgrund der Hardware für ein Handy, sondern ziehen das gesamte Ökosystem in Betracht. Dieses wird wiederum primär an der Qualität und Anzahl seiner Apps gemessen. Vorzeigemodell ist in dieser Hinsicht Apple mit seinem iPhone. Hier bekommt man eine eigene App für seine Lieblings-Tageszeitung geboten, hier findet man die günstigsten Tankstellen im Bezirk via App und hier erhält man die aktuellen Angebote des Supermarkts seines Vertrauens.

Apps sind ein genialer und noch wenig ausgereizter Marketingkanal. Umso schneller, billiger und effizienter können heute Marken und Kundendialoge über Apps aufgebaut und gesteuert werden. Was bedeutet nun die gemeinsame Sache von Nokia und Microsoft nun für die Werbebranche?

Sie wird – wie schon bisher – ihre Applikationen für die Betriebssysteme von Apple und Google ausrichten. Gleichzeitig können Applikations-Entwickler Kosten und technologische Komplexitäten weiter reduzieren. Mit Symbian und Meego sind aus heutiger Sicht zwei Systeme weniger zu berücksichtigen. Letztlich wird der Wettbewerb dafür sorgen, dass es zu weiteren Konsolidierungen kommt. Neuartige, leistungsfähigere Software-Plattformen werden herkömmliche Mobile Marketing Konzepte und aktuelle Marktanteile auf den Kopf stellen.

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My first blog entry

Posted on March 4, 2011 by mPansy

It’s done. My personal blog is out and here comes the first entry.

It has been a huge effort and very interesting journey for a non-techie to create this blog. Thanks to the support of some really skilled people I was able to not only do it, but also to learn from it. So meanwhile I can change colors and fonts in html. Let’s see what comes next.

People close to me (for those not, please read here for some more info) know that my time schedule is quite limited with all the things I am going after, so one might seriously ask, why on earth am I starting my own blog and will I post new stories regularly?

There are two reasons why I am starting this blog. Reason one is that from time to time I had the inner feeling to share some news and stories publicly. I don’t have the expectation that thousands of people will ever follow this blog, but theoretically this blog is available to everybody, thus it provides me with a tool to share more complex stories that on 140 characters on twitter.
Secondly, I believe if every human shares his most interesting and relevant (!) news/learnings/wisdom publicly the world will become a better place. With global population continuously growing and more and more people getting the ability to participate in the information economy, there will be almost infinite opportunities to learn from each other. The more intense the network of information is, the lower will be the transaction cost of learning, thus efficiency gains for humankind. With this blog I want to make my micro-contribution.

Concerning frequency of blog updates the key word was already mentioned in the last paragraph. Relevancy (see also the wise words of Laotse in the sidebar). I will only blog if things come up that seem relevant to me for a potential reader of this blog. Because there is no way to schedule relevant news in advance, there will also be no regular flow of updates.

So thanks for reading up until here. Watch out for some further stories in the next months about my profession & passion around mobile internet, smartphones and the web in general or for some abstract thoughts that come to my mind.

Martin

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