Disruptive Telephony

Only 40% of Canadian cell phone users password-protect their phones or use other privacy options, a survey by Canada's privacy commissioner found. The results of the 2000-person survey were released in August and written up in a Globe And Mail piece entitled "How private is that text message?".

When I saw the headline, I honestly thought it was going to be something about the security of SMS messages... but in fact it was about the security of the cell phones themselves. If the phones aren't secured then someone can go in and look at your text messages. Ergo... the link-bait title of the article. (And yes, it got me to look.)

Still, it had some interesting data points such as the fact that the users from age 18 to 34 were the ones most likely to use privacy tools, which is good to see, since they are probably the ones pumping the most information out online.

Nice to see, too, that 82 percent did not think police should have access to your online usage info without a warrant.

I was surprised, in all honestly, about the 40% number... I actually might have thought of it being lower as I know MANY people who don't password-protect their phones mostly because of the "inconvenience" of having to enter the password to get into the phone.

And in truth the % who password-protect their phones may be lower... the article says that "only four in 10 people password-protect their phones or adjust privacy settings on personal-information sharing via downloaded applications". The number of people who adjust privacy settings - but don't password-protect their phone - may be driving that % up.

I wonder what a survey like this might find in the United States?

Do you password-protect your phone? (I do)

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Did Amazon just fork the Android operating system with their Kindle Fire? That's the question asked at Mashable today in a post "Amazon Kindle Fire Just Hijacked Android where it was noted that all the promotion around the Kindle Fire did not mention Android. The key piece to me is this:

Amazon is not the first company to use Android for its devices, only to customize the UI and add its own App Store...

Still, Amazon’s customization of Android goes above and beyond re-theming the interface. Amazon has created its own apps for email, video playback (using Amazon Instant Video), music and books...

Amazon is using Android 2.3 as its base, not the tablet-specific Honeycomb, and we expect that the company has taken the opportunity to optimize 2.3 specifically for the Kindle Fire’s hardware.

Likewise, instead of applying tweaks to the basic Android web browser, Amazon chose to build its own: Amazon Silk...

The tragedy here is that the Amazon Kindle Fire will undoubtedly be a very popular device. At $199, I can see many people picking these devices up.

And it could be a great opportunity to bolster the Android ecosystem.

To encourage and nurture a further competitive marketplace for apps.

But the challenge is stated well in the Mashable piece:

We expect Amazon to start courting Android developers to make customized Kindle Fire-specific versions of their apps.

It's not an Android device... it's an Amazon device. And though it may use Android as a base, it has a highly customized layer on top.

Do we now have effectively yet another application ecosystem?

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Congratulations (I think) to my friend Alec Saunders for taking a new role as "VP of Developer Relations and Ecosystem Development" for Research In Motion (RIM), makers of the Blackberry line of mobile devices.

Or perhaps condolences are in order... somehow he has to make developing for the Blackberry sexy again to all the app developers who focus these days on the world of iOS/iPhone/iPad and the Android platform.

Alec certainly has his work cut out for him. As he writes in his post today announcing the news:

Over the last few days I’ve been in San Francisco at the Mobilize conference, and speaking with developers. It’s clear from those conversations that the primary problem we face is lack of support from application developers. My team’s job is to correct that – to win the hearts and minds of mobile developers again.

"Lack of support" probably doesn't go far enough as a statement. Any of a zillion charts will show you Blackberry's rapidly declining marketshare (particularly in the US). iPhones are dramatically outselling Blackberries and Apple is poised to launch iPhone 5 / iOS 5 / iCloud next week, pretty much assuring even more of a boost to the iOS platform and developer ecosystem.

On the Android side, recents stats show twice as many people buying Android devices as iPhones... and today's mega-launch of the Amazon Kindle Fire tablet is going to light an even larger flame under the Android ecosystem.

Plus, add in Microsoft and all they are attempting to do with the Windows Phone platform...

And somehow... in the midst of all of this...

Alec is going to try to get developers excited about developing apps for the Blackberry???

Not just for the Playbook, mind you, but for the traditional Blackberry platforms of "BBOS" and the new QNX platform. As he says in an interview posted on RIM's Blackberry Developer Blog today:

Developer evangelism is all about personal contact, listening, responding, and educating. We’re going to work very closely with the developer community, expand on support and programs that make it easy and rewarding for developers to create apps, be in the midst of developers to understand their needs and secure a great developer experience, and identify and remove the barriers developers face in supporting our platforms and doing business with us.

It's a tough task, made even more challenging by RIM's recent earnings report (or lack thereof), but if anyone has a hope of pulling it off, it's Alec. He's an exceptional communicator, marketer and salesman... and brings both a great technical depth and ability to communicate in "regular" language.

I do seriously wish him all the best! I've been a long-time fan of the Blackberry, even though I myself changed mine in for an iPhone back in 2008 or so. RIM has done some pretty amazing things in the mobile market, but as Gizmodo recently noted ("How RIM Could Save Itself"), RIM tied itself to the enterprise so tightly that it missed out on the rise of smartphones in the consumer space - and the corresponding move of those "consumer" smartphones back into the enterprise.

What will their future look like? Can they win back developers? Can they make the Blackberry ecosystem sexy again? Can it claw its way back into being a player in the smartphone market?

Alec's got a challenge before him - and I look forward to seeing what he'll do!

P.S. Up to join in the challenge? As Alec notes at the bottom of his blog post, he's hiring developer evangelists...

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Other notes about Alec's new role:

• Jim Courtney at Voice on the Web with a long, thoughtful piece on Alec's past and what this all means for RIM.
• Andy Abramson at VoIP Watch

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Image credit: me. Taken at ITEXPO East 2010 in South Beach, Miami :-)

Good to see that Mitel is joining the iOS application space with Unified Communications apps for the iPhone and iPad. These apps will work with Mitel's "Freedom" architecture to allow people to use their own iPhone or iPad device with the Mitel corporate phone system.

Per Mitel's news release, the app allows users to:

• Search the corporate directory and click-to-dial from corporate contact list to place calls through the corporate network.
• View missed, dialed, and received calls.
• Access visual voicemail from your office extension and manage messages by preference rather than sequence.
• Automatically update presence status and call routing preferences based on your location, or time of day.

Given enterprise users' desire to use their own devices, it is not surprising to see these type of apps coming out from a vendor like Mitel. It will be interesting to see how this helps Mitel in the marketplace.

Kudos to the Mitel team for creating the apps.

Heading to Burning Man this coming week? Would you like to use your mobile phone to connect up with others on the playa in Black Rock City?

If so, check out this video from Chris Pirillo about the work being done by a team of folks to supply local cell phone coverage... the vans with satellite and cell hookups are already enroute... it uses software from OpenBTS and Tropo.com to let burners leave each other voice messages, exchange SMS messages and more. Here's the video:

And here are some blog posts that provide more information:

• The Long and Winding Road to Burning Man
  
  
• Tropo + OpenBTS + Burning man = Awesome
  
  
• Voice Board and Group SMS for Burning Man
  
  
• Papa Legba FAQ (about the deployment at Burning Man and what you need to do to participate)

I'm not personally going to be at Burning Man, but this does sound very cool!

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Interesting piece on the "This Is My Next" site last night about Sprint and AT&T taking to print ads to ratchet up their fight over AT&T's proposed acquisition of T-Mobile:

Sprint and AT&T take merger battle to print: ‘Competition is American, Competition plays fair’

The issue is, of course, that there is a U.S. Congressional hearing on the proposed acquisition this coming Wednesday in D.C. Sprint obviously is opposed to the merger and is pulling no punches in saying exactly what it feels about the proposed merger. I do admit to enjoying one line in their ad:

Competition keeps us all from returning to a Ma Bell-like, sorry-but-you-have-no-choice past.

This definitely IS a concern for all of us as the companies in the mobile space continue to consolidate.

AT&T of course counters with how this will be the best for the country, how it will foster innovation, bring about a stronger network, etc.

It will be interesting to see how this all plays out. For me personally, the proposed merger offers very little. AT&T has poor coverage where I live (Keene, NH) and T-Mobile has even worse coverage of the area... so I don't expect that we'd see any improved coverage here.

On a macro level, the consolidation is concerning... it will be interesting to see what happens in DC this week.

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Where did I travel with my iPhone? Given all the recent kerfuffle over the logging of location data on an iPhone, I naturally had to try it out. First stop was getting the Mac OS X app at:

http://petewarden.github.com/iPhoneTracker/

The app itself is super simple... simply launch the app and it goes off and finds your iPhone backups, extracts the location data and shows you a map.

In my case, the Mac I ran the app on only had data from my iPhone 3G and only for the period of time from when I updated it to iOS 4 in July 2010 through when I stopped using it in September 2010 (because I replaced it with an iPhone 4). Still, the data is kind of fun to see. Here's what it looked like overall:

During that time period, I traveled down to Voxeo's corporate office in Orlando, went to a SIPit test event over on the New Hampshire seacoast, and spent a chunk of time in New York City attending SpeechTEK 2010.

Diving into the data a bit more, here's a close-up of the northeast. It's amusing to see the train trip I took down to NYC (for SpeechTEK) as well as the corridor of travel I take from Keene over to Manchester, NH, to fly out of the airport there:

It's curious to see that it shows me wandering around Vermont. We did make a number of day trips around that area and I do carry my iPhone with me (even though I often don't have coverage in some of those areas). No clue what those icons are out on Long Island as I never traveled out there. Obviously the phone must have picked up some signal from towers out there or something like that.

Zooming in on New York is also interesting because you can see, I guess, where AT&T towers must be:

Zooming in on Orlando also shows where I traveled in that region:

Now, it would be great if Apple would get around to telling us WHY they are collecting all this data... but in the meantime it's also quite fascinating to take a look at it and see where my phone thinks I've been. :-)

Another day, I'll have to run this app on my laptop where I sync my iPhone 4. Should have lots more interesting data.

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Everybody loves an infographic, right? Earlier today Mashable ran a Microsoft infographic about the state of the mobile market. The numbers are quite powerful (click the image to see the full version):

I had a huge personal disconnect with one of the stats showing that so many people use their mobile phones for games, simply because I almost never use my phone that way...

Yet I know that many people do and I see that when I'm out and about.

All in all some interesting stats, even if they do have the inevitable promotion of Microsoft Tags, since that was the sponsor of the infographic. (Microsoft Tags being their proprietary mobile tag solution versus the QR codes you see in many places.) Not a bad technique for Microsoft really... create a great infographic with lots of compelling data... and then insert a few little tidbits and links that promote your story.. and then...

... people like me will write about it. :-)

Regardless, there are some good stats there... kudos to the MS team who put it together.

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Want to know what the combined coverage of AT&T and T-Mobile would look like on a map? By way of a tweet from Todd Carothers I learned of a post at Fierce Mobile Content that uses maps from AmericanRoamer.com to show what the combined coverage map of the United States would look like. Click on the link or image to see all the various comparison maps:

Interesting to see the spectrum holdings of the two companies as well.

Alas, my little pocket of southwestern New Hampshire doesn't stand to gain much out the merger... we're still stuck with the limited AT&T coverage we have. At least, though, we're not up in Montana, where it would appear coverage is close to nonexistent... (and yes, I know that population is minimal up there, too).

Interesting charts...

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Multiple people have pinged me asking if I was going to weigh in on the news last night that AT&T is acquiring T-Mobile USA.

Seriously?

It's been ages since I've seen this kind of online and offline media feeding frenzy[1] ... I mean, look at Techmeme this morning:

Pretty much everybody and anybody who writes online with anything remotely to do with communications has generated posts on the topic.

I think at this point all we can really do is watch what the regulators say... and realize that this will take a year or more to actually happen. I'll perhaps have more to say at some future time, but right now I'm just reading Om and all the many other comments out there...

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[1] Well, okay, maybe we haven't seen this kind of media feeding frency since, oh, the iPad2 launch ;-)

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