Will Google hit ‘Send’ for mobile, social Gmail application?

The Wall Street Journal reports that Google will tomorrow announce more “social” features to Gmail, such as status updates and sharing content. Considering that Gmail is a primary, free email service, this is a really great innovation for consumers. It also threatens dominant, dedicated social networks like Facebook and Twitter unless they too can be integrated into the Gmail social streams. Hopefully they will be.

What about mobile? Currently, Gmail can be accessed by every major mobile platform through IMAP setting, but I think that a social Gmail would require an entirely new application to utilize more rich functionality. This provides Google an opportunity to differentiate Android with a best-in-class social Gmail experience and extend its presence on other phones like Blackberry and iPhone with must-have social Gmail applications — like it has with Google Maps.

At risk will be those computer and mobile applications like TweetDeck and Tweetie that already aggregate social feeds like a social Gmail would, but don’t provide that core email service to complement. Also at risk are mobile check-in applications like Foursquare, which would have a hard time competing with a social Gmail mobile application that has the same GPS functionality and services (maybe without the gaming/novelty component).

Speaking of services, this is where a social Gmail mobile application could really excel. With its recent acquisition of AdMob, Google is ramping up the mobile advertisement services. By drawing from a pool of data drawn from a connected social network, email and search, the ad services could be incredibly targeted and sink the competition.

Social Gmail may be an evolutionary step for the email platform, but it could be revolutionary for Google’s mobile strategy.

Apple leverages speculation, sensation for iPad launch

Leading up to Apple’s highly-anticipated announcement of its iPad today, virtually every technology and consumer news outlet had produced preview stories. Now that Steve Jobs has confirmed the news and ushered the media into a reviews frenzy, we can extract a few communications lessons about what Apple did right to garner so much attention for a late-to-market tablet device. (For more of a business perspective, I highly recommend reading Michael Gartenberg’s Engadget post.)

1. iPhone success helped  insert Apple into early, competitive tablet coverage. Times Online’s Dominic Rushe and James Ashton had this to say after CES: “TWO years ago, Apple dominated CES by doing nothing. All the chatter was about the imminent launch of its iPhone after the show. This year Apple did it again… The company has said nothing, confirmed nothing, even iSlate’s name is really speculation, but once more Apple was the talk of Vegas.”

Erica Ogg of CNET reported, “A tablet or slate computer from Apple was basically all anyone wanted to talk about [at CES], and it’s not even a confirmed product yet… Apple’s managed to turn the attention of the entire tech world away from tech’s biggest stage without actually doing or saying anything.”

Although Kindle, Nook and a slew of tablet devices have been in the market (Kindle was announced in May 2009), Apple has been able to dominate competitive coverage for months because of its iPhone legacy. The iPad was positioned as an extension to the success of the iPhone, and that only perpetuated the anticipation.

2. Apple let leaks do the talking for them. “Trusted sources” were frequently referenced as sources for news leaks on blogs and in social media, which kept the buzz alive. Reporters and bloggers were reaching to the depths of patent filing and long-lost interviews searching for clues. Everyone loves a treasure hunt, and Apple let the media chase after its own X on the metaphorical map.

On the evening before the announcement, McGraw-Hill’s CEO confirmed that his company has been working on content distribution for an Apple tablet, saying, “We have worked with Apple for quite a while… The tablet is going to be just really terrific.” The leak created another news cycle ahead of the event and only increased the anticipation and fever for Apple.

3. Apple maintained product secrecy. Notice how no preview story ahead of the event featured an Apple spokesperson. Apple never commented on the tablet rumors. Apple’s partners (with exception of McGraw-Hill) never commented on the device. Considering this was probably the most media-hyped announcement since the iPhone, there was a lot of pressure on a lot of people and companies in the know. However, the Apple ecosystem kept the calm before the storm and never put itself in a scenario that compromised the secrecy of the product announcement.

4. Apple delivered a worthy launch event. All eyes were on Apple last week. “iSlate,” “iTablet,” “#apple” and “Apple Tablet” dominated Twitter trending topics ahead of the event. Every major news outlet with access live-blogged or live-streamed the event.

Considering Apple shared the same news day as President Obama’s State of the Union address, the media attention was that much more impressive. And now we know, finally, that we can stream future State of the Union addresses on an Apple iPad.

Apple starts with ‘App’

This week we were assigned to read a September 2008 Seeking Alpha article on application marketplaces. Much of what was speculation at that time has become true. Every major mobile operating system now has its own marketplace for consumers to purchase applications on their devices. This is a good thing for consumers, who can purchase applciations to extend the capabilities of their phones, as well as for carriers and phone makers who have new revenue opportunities.

However, now that the field has been leveled and applications are available to all, the quality of applications and application marketplaces have become a key part of the consumer purchasing decision when considering phones and carriers. From this perspective, Apple has set itself apart from the pack. Whereas Blackberry, Windows Mobile and Google have had to offer new application storefronts, Apple has an advantage by servicing consumers via the world’s top digital music store, iTunes.  Their credit cards were already locked in. All Apple had to do was add on the App Store.

How successful has this model been for Apple? Check out this infographic created by GigaOm. Some of the numbers included in the graphic:

• 130,000+ apps available
• 4.8 apps downloaded in December per user
• 280 million app downloads in December

These numbers are staggering.

They should also be intimidating to competitors. Even with Google’s massive marketing campaign for its new phones, including the Nexus One and Droid, it has yet to come up with an applications answer for Apple. Surely, quality apps on any platform will win consumers compared to a quantity of sub-par apps. Apple has both. This application market dominance is appealing to consumers, who have flocked to AT&T and the iPhone in droves.

It’s no longer about the phones anymore, it’s about the experience. The mobile industry should realize that, for now, applications are driving that.

Mobile donations are making a difference in Haiti

Today I donated $10 to the American Red Cross to support the catastrophe in Haiti by texting “Haiti” to 90999. It was that simple (See actual screenshot at left).

As of a tweet this morning (Jan. 14), the Red Cross has already raised $3 million dollars through this mobile donation method.

Mobile phones have already been a prominent way of reporting the event, but they also provide a powerful, scalable way to collect the necessary financial support to aid relief efforts.

According to a NY Times article, the texted donations are being handled by a company called mGive, which started the campaign in a joint effort with the State Department and the Red Cross on Jan. 12. The $10 donation I made via mGive will be charged by my carrier, AT&T, which will relay the donation in full to the American Red Cross. mGive typically charges a licensing fee for its software platform, $4 to $1,500 a month, but has removed all fees for this fundraiser.

Unfortunately, CEO Tony Aiello says it typically takes up to 90 days for the charity to receive the donation, but the mGive is trying to expedite the process with carriers to get the money to the Red Cross as soon as possible. So while it feels immediate to make the donation, the impact of the donation is felt long after hitting “Send.” Hopefully this process will continue to improve.

In another mobile fundraising campaign, Haitian-born musician Wyclef Jean is urging people to donate $5 to his charity organization by texting “YELE” to 501501.

Mobile donations are getting massive support, too. The AFP reports that Secretary of State Hillary Clinton made the rounds of six morning television news shows where she urged Americans to make 10-dollar donations by cellular telephone.

“If you wish to help, you can text Haiti — H-A-I-T-I — to 90999,” she said on NBC’s Today Show.

Additionally, the White House has endorsed the mGive mobile donation as one of three key ways Americans can assist Haitians.

I am impressed by the support mobile donations have received from top US officials, and am even more impressed with how Americans have embraced mobile donations as a primary resource to provide financial aid during a crisis. I encourage you to make a mobile donation and help those in need.

Even in the Android/iPhone era, carriers dominate

The launch and availability of Google’s Nexus One smartphone last week reinvigorated the dialogue about how phone makers are changing the carrier model in the United States.

This is far from true.

Google offered the Nexus at competitive, subsidized prices with contracts with TMobile for $179 (or Verizon and Vodafone soon), and “unlocked” (without carrier contract) for $529. The unlocked offering was a pure marketing play to exploit Apple’s exclusive contract with AT&T, but it’s not unique. Nokia smartphones are also offered unlocked and at high price points in the United States, and every other phone, including the iPhone, is offered at subsidized prices with no contract.

Google didn’t break away from the carrier model, it reinforced it by offering the Nexus One with three carriers off the bat (whereas most phones only launch with one carrier) and selling the unlocked Nexus One at a high price point, driving customers to want to save money upfront with a carrier contract.

What has changed is that the marketing of phones has shifted from carriers to phone makers. Credit Apple. It has reinvented revenue opportunities by offering iPhones through Apple Stores and selling applications through the App Store. It has also shown that a focused phone maker can produce a better, focused marketing campaign for a single phone than a carrier can for its portfolio.

But this too benefits the carrier model.

The service contracts (Read: revenue) for the iPhone reside with AT&T, and operators supporting the Nexus One, whether it be the subsidized or unlocked phone require contracts. Apple has bought no spectrum, nor has Google, and until they do they will not be able to offer service for their phones.

Google and Apple have positioned themselves as thought-leaders and innovators over the past year, just like Microsoft and Palm did five years ago, and like their predecessors they haven’t changed the carrier service model – they’ve only supported it.

(Short) Information wants to be free

Harper’s Magazine senior editor Bill Wasik says short information will always be free.

He’s probably right, but let’s be honest. He has an agenda to say so.

Short information (newspapers, blogs, short video, etc.) is taking away readers from long prose publications publishing online, like Harper’s, that want to differentiate from short information and monetize. Wasik says that Kindle is an amazing device because it provides a new model for long information (Magazines, journals, books, etc.) Short, amateur information isn’t accessible on Kindle, so editors of publications love it because they don’t have to compete with the novelty content that they’re losing to on the Web.

Wasik says there hasn’t been a profitable business model for short content. So long as the majority of short information is produced by amateurs, there won’t be. He speculates that “some of these companies” that host short content “will fail” and create scarcity for the consumer, which may create a value proposition. If he means newspapers publishing online, he’s right. If he means that YouTube and Vimeo and Blogger will fail, he’s wrong. The barriers to creation and publication online are long gone, so people will continue to create short information on those sites, or any other sites that cater to them.

Some long information is also available for free on the Web (Google Books, NY Times Magazine) and that will perpetuate the free model for short content, too. Short information is free because, in large part, people who create that information want it to be free. I know that in America we typically want to monetize everything, but the last couple years have shown that people have other immediate motivators (exposure, notoriety, peer responses) to create. As amateurs continue to create competitive content and offer it for free, the public will accept no higher price.

Hulu is doomed, but that’s a good thing

Hulu is a great idea. Offering free content on the Internet is the only way to compete with, well, free video content on YouTube and available through pirating Web site. Unfortunately, whereas Hulu was positioned to be the Trojan Horse for network television on the Internet, it will instead be the scapegoat for the networks’ failures.

In and All Thing D article, outgoing chief of CBS Digital, Quincy Smith said,

“I don’t hate Hulu. Hulu’s world-class video viewing. What I don’t understand is, why license all that content to something that works that well, that seamlessly, yet–without the economic model around it?”

Smith is mistaken if he thinks the free-for-all market opportunities on the Internet will match that of television. While the Internet provides networks access to broader audiences, it presents a different market where consumers have real buying power in the form of access and choice. Not all products have equal success in different markets anyway. What makes Apple successful in the U.S., doesn’t necessarily make it successful in Europe or Asia. Television networks should recognize that they don’t have an upper-hand on the Internet because they can’t limit access to content the way they do with broadcast scheduling. Hulu is a $700 million market, but television comes in at $120 billion. OK. Maybe $700 million isn’t so bad on the Internet, and the networks should accept that.

Of course, they don’t. They’re greed-driven and blind to the differences between broadcast television and Internet markets.

Here’s a dumb idea (via Chase Carey, chief operating officer of News Corp.) for how to make Hulu more profitable: Go with a mix of paid and free content. Yeah, ask The New York Times about how that worked out. It didn’t. People will continue to visit Hulu, but they’ll just watch the free stuff. At least the Times had an edge in value with its paid content being intellectual property (columns) and access to unique news reporting. Hulu would just be charging for people to watch reruns.

Hulu’s model will likely change to some kind of paid service, because Wall Street said so, and will (unfortunately) fail for two reasons:

Legacy – People who use Hulu today haven’t had to pay before and they like that. Few will pay if they’re asked to because they’re die-hard fans of particular programming or are moralists. The rest will move to a competing station’s free content (Where’s HBO at?) or to the pirated content they probably already consumed before Hulu.

Everyone remembers Napster, right? That little site single-handedly changed the music economy (albeit illegally), and paved the way for online retailers like iTunes to top sales over big box brick-and-mortar stores. Now, iTunes is a paid service, but it started that way. Napster tried to transition from a pirating service to a legitimate paid service and has barely managed to stay afloat as a business or in consumer mindshare. A new service (maybe iTunes itself) can enter the market and dominate television with a paid model, but no free service can make the transition to a paid service and have success. Hulu won’t. Consumers don’t have an appetite for that.

People won’t pay double – You know what consumers really don’t have an appetite for? Paying for the same service twice. Yuck. A lot of people who consume content on Hulu probably already have at least a basic cable subscription. They probably access Hulu to watch a missed episode or pass the time on lunch breaks. These people will not pay to watch NBC of Fox twice over. It’s uneconomical from a consumer perspective. They’ll just be more punctual with DVR scheduling.

It’s too bad that Hulu is doomed to fail because it’s a fine a corporate media service. Its success attracting viewers may actually be reasonable by Internet monetization standards. Unfortunately, the network executives have their broadcast television goggles on and with their false expectations will change Hulu in the direction of its demise.

That’s a good thing though. It took Napster to get the music industry to change (or crash, depending on who you ask), and Hulu will be the scapegoat for networks and sacrificial lamb for a reasonable, mainstream Internet television service.

A picture’s worth the same as words online

I’ve never read graphic novels, but I read my share of comics and comic books when I was young. I don’t at all believe that text is the “currency of storytelling.” Rather, I think that both text and image are equal partners. More often than not text is a more efficient, effective way of telling a story (and more easily distributed, even in the digital age), but that shouldn’t at all devalue the impact of images in storytelling.

When thinking about mainstream forms of storytelling, I see text and images taking different roles. In most online journalism, text drives storytelling while images are complementary. In broadcast journalism, images drive the storytelling while text (as audio) is complementary. The same goes for movies. As distribution methods become more accessible, I believe that images (whether they be graphics, illustrations, movies, etc.) will become more prevalent. Already, the Web’s largest storytelling site – YouTube – is all visual and contains relatively no text.

Drew’s question about how the Web interface affects the user experiences is a relevant one. It allows for infinitely deep, non-linear experiences. Every story can become a “choose-your-own-adventure.” It creates greater opportunities than traditional print storytelling mediums to include imagery of any form.  Amateur storytellers are using photos on blogs, Twitter and Facebook to tell their stories, especially when digital cameras and smartphones provide easy ways to upload photos and share. News sites are creating rich graphic illustrations to explain, for example, urban architecture proposals or the anatomy of a virus.

Graphic novels are a primitive form of telling stories with imagery compared to the possibilities today, but both reinforce that images are a primary rather than secondary force of storytelling.

The future of social media is, well, social

Social media a flash in the pan? Say it ain’t so, Drew.

I believe the opposite will occur. Social media won’t be a flash, it will be a light bulb. Just as we flick a switch and expect a light bulb to turn on, so will we expect social media to be readily available anytime, anywhere when we flick the switch that is our Internet connection. It will become so ingrained that we won’t think of it as any separate form of communication at all.

For years we’ve been able to blog and email and generally leverage digital communications to be social. We’re just now recognizing this activity as a unique phenomenon and branding it accordingly. Twitter, Facebook and the like are just organized, centralized places to have conversations using basic communications forms – digitized type, images, audio and video. The only thing new here is how we can so easily share the conversations.

What does this mean for communications professionals thriving or drowning in what social media is today? The same as if social media went away like a flash in the pan. “Social media” experts will be about as sought after as typists because all digital properties – from news sites to product pages – will soon be inherently social. Especially as social media sites act less as destinations and more as services (The first steps of this evolution are Facebook Connect and Google SideWiki) we’ll rely less on those centralized locations at Facebook or Twitter and look more to have conversations at socialized Web sites (think Web 3.0) that work with what we know now as our Facebook or Google profiles to organize the conversations.

As social media become decentralized and turns the Internet into one huge forum where anyone can comment anywhere, communications professionals will no longer focus on isolated sites and conversations and have to think about broader communications strategies. Businesses will continue to need help navigating a digital communications landscape without boundaries, and communications professionals will have greater opportunities to access consumer perspectives with those walls torn down, which will hopefully result in better products and services to come.

When I grow up, I want to be what I am today, a communications professional. I think what comes of social media will make this career path more steady and sought after.

He’s a columnist, he’s an actor, he’s Pogue

New York Times technology columnist David Pogue provides an entertaining example of how traditional media outlets can deliver video.

Most great columnists have a pronounced tone of voice and identifiable writing styles in their articles. Pogue is no exception, and he manages to translate these qualities into his videos. Each week, he contributes a print column, an e-mail column and an online video, and in my opinion his videos are his most compelling product.

His videos usually weave humor and concrete analysis. He shoots himself in singular locations but with several different angles, limited soundtracks and frequent sound effects (crack, boom, bang). While the quality of his videos is usually low by industry standards, they are wildly popular because of their humor and Pogue’s ability to create engaging stories within the format. The amateurish qualities of the shots actually help the videos as they create a contrast between the professional columnist and his chosen delivery method – akin to a famous chef like Mario Batali filming food tips at a McDonald’s.

Take, for example, his video “The Great Netbook Compromise.” The video features limited locations off a highway, cheesy acting and great comedy. None of this could be accomplished in his written work, and he still manages to educate viewers about the good and bad of laptop form factors. When the iPhone came out, his review of the revolutionary device stepped apart from others’ reviews and even their unboxing videos because he created a larger narrative around the review. In his video, “The iPhone Challenge: Keep It Quiet,” he poked fun at Apple’s secrecy, posturing its PR team like Secret Service agency protecting a device that threatened national security if it was discovered. Viewers enjoyed a short, funny narrative combined with an important device review.

As mainstream media increasingly looks to video to deliver stories, Pogue provides a great example of how to take advantage of the medium. Rather than just retell his written stories, he optimizes what video offers him and actually acts to embellish the story and make it what it’s often not in print – entertaining.