Mobile Cloud Computing As A Disruptive Force

“Mobile cloud computing is poised to become a disruptive force in the mobile world,” with the biggest changes occurring at the intersection of mobile computing and cloud computing, reads the invitation to “The First International Workshop on Mobile Cloud Computing & Services: Social Networks and Beyond.”


By coincidence, this notice arrived just after I completed yesterday’s post, IT's Perfect Storm: Where Smart Phones, The Cloud, and Virtualization Meet. Since our views, while not identical, are in harmony, I was most interested in their rationale and in their suggestions for research.

The rationale: “Mobile phone applications demand greater resources and improved interactivity for better user experience. Resources in cloud computing platforms such as Amazon EC2, Microsoft Azure, and Google AppEngine are a natural fit to remedy the lack of local resources in mobile devices. Mobile cloud computing refers to an infrastructure where data storage and data processing happen outside of the mobile device enabling a new class of applications previously not possible, e.g. context-aware mobile social networks.”

Suggested topics for research and paper submissions are:

• Mobile cloud computing programming model
• Mobile social networks: applications and experiences, system design and architecture
• Data services and architectures
• Cloud-assisted energy management of mobile devices
• Mobile device virtualization
• Fairness and isolation of mobile devices in the cloud
• Large scale mobile cloud applications
• Data privacy and security
• High availability and reliability
• Economic considerations in offering mobile cloud computing services
• Distribution of resources and computation between mobile devices and the cloud
• Data mining and machine learning in mobile cloud computing
• Context-aware services and computing


PROGRAM CO-CHAIRS are Richard Han, University of Colorado, and Li Erran Li, Bell Labs.

Morgan Stanley Acclaims the Mobile Internet

Morgan Stanley has just released “The Mobile Internet Report” containing lots of great financial and market data along with some well-designed PowerPoint slides. For a flavor of the report, here are a few excerpts from a truly extensive document.

Material wealth creation / destruction should surpass earlier computing cycles. The mobile Internet cycle, the 5th cycle in 50 years, is just starting. Winners in each cycle often create more market capitalization than in the last. New winners emerge, some incumbents survive – or thrive – while many past winners falter.

A single galvanizing event – like Microsoft's Windows 3.0 launch in 1990, Netscape's IPO in 1995, or Apple's iPhone debut in 2007 – jolts the industry forward and captures the hearts and minds of consumers;

Make no mistake; Apple (and others) are not just trying to upset the cell phone market. They are aiming to transform how communications works, how entertainment and news are distributed, how goods and services are purchased... and how we control all this stuff from the ever-expanding, rechargeable remote controls we carry in our hands. To date, Apple's products and timing have been impeccable.

The US has grabbed the leadership, after being a global mobile laggard for more than a decade – thanks to the likes of Apple, Google, Amazon.com, and many others (including a bevy of startups)… and Silicon Valley competitive juices show no signs of letting up.

According to Morgan Stanley’s model, tech cycles tend to last ten years. We entered the Next Major Computing Cycle – Mobile Internet – 2 years ago.

Big winners in the four previous cycles include the following:

Mainframe Computing (1960s)
IBM
NCR
Control Data
Sperry
Honeywell
Burroughs

Mini Computing (1970s)
Digital Equipment
Data General
HP
Prime
Computervision
Wang Labs


Personal Computing (1980s)
Microsoft
Cisco
Intel
Apple
Oracle
EMC
Dell
Compaq

Desktop Internet Computing (1990s)
Google
AOL
eBay
Yahoo!
Yahoo! Japan
Amazon.com
Tencent
Alibaba
Baidu
Rakuten

Mobile Internet Computing (2000s)
Still in the early innings; opportunities abound.

Don Dodge on the Future of Computing

Today, in his very influential blog, “Don Dodge on the Next Big Thing”, Don both writes about the work environment at Google and speculates on the future of computing. I’ve known Don for several years; we are both members of the eCoast Angels Network and we have often worked together advising start-up companies such as VKernel. From his post:

“The future of computing – I think Google has made three big bets on the future of computing; Chrome OS (browser), Google Apps (cloud), and Android (mobile). The trends are pretty clear. All the exciting new applications are running in the browser, with application code in the cloud, and the cell phone as the platform. Your cell phone will become your primary computer. I think in the near future there will be docking stations everywhere with a screen and a keyboard. You simply pull out your phone, plug it into the docking station, and instantly all your applications and data are available to you. Chrome OS, Google Apps, and Android make this vision possible.

“Think about the cell phone you had 10 years ago, in 1999, and compare it to the phone you have today. More power, more memory, better networks, more applications, etc. Now project 5 or 10 years ahead. The vision of your phone as your computer is not far off. You will be able to decide which applications and data you want resident on the phone and which you want in the cloud. You will be able to plug it in anywhere; in an airport, hotel, airplane, office lobby, etc, and have instant access to everything you need.

“2010 the turning point - I think 2010 will be the year that enterprises of all sizes start their transition to Gmail and Google Apps, and take their first steps towards the vision of the future. The move towards Cloud Computing is obvious. Gmail and Google Apps are the easy first steps in that direction. The cost savings are enormous,over $500 per user per year. Compare that to buying software licenses and maintenance from the old style software giants, and add the costs of server hardware, and IT managers to run them.

“The next 5 years are going to be exciting. There will be big changes in the software industry. I am thrilled to be at Google and look forward to being a small part of the movement to the future of computing.”

Don was also interviewed by VentureBeat where he talks about many things, including his new Google phone. Attracting the most vehement comments are his views on Microsoft.

“VB: Now that you’ve left Microsoft, how do you feel about the company’s future?”

“DD: At a high level, Microsoft today is where IBM was in late ’80s, early ’90s. When I was just starting my career, IBM ruled the world. IBM was the dominant computer provider in the world — hardware, software, network, you name it, IBM was king. I think in the late ’80s and early ’90s, we saw that shift and Microsoft became king of the hill. And in 2009, 2010, going forward, Microsoft is sort of like IBM. It’s a longtime company with a great tradition and still very profitable, but it’s not the leader. Microsoft is not making the innovative leaps and coming out with the new stuff. People used to fear IBM and they don’t anymore. More recently, startups and competitors feared Microsoft, and I think over the past five or 10 years since that consent decree, I think that changed the company dramatically. I don’t think startups and competitors fear Microsoft the way they did 10 years ago. Part of it is the natural evolution of companies, part of it is the changing culture from that consent decree”.

Metcalfe’s Law, let me count the ways…

I keep pondering the implications of a billion connected people and a trillion connected devices. These estimates, from my post on IBM and Cloud Computing, originated with IDC market research, predicting that by 2011, there will be one trillion Internet-connected devices, up from 500 million in 2006.

But if that is the size of the network, what is the value of this network?

Metcalfe's Law states that the value of a telecommunications network is proportional to the square of the number of connected users. Using Google, I determined that one billion squared is a quintillion, a one followed by 18 zeroes.

But are users just people? According to the Wikipedia, Metcalfe's Law was originally presented, circa 1980, not in term of users, but rather of "compatibly communicating devices." Is the value of the network going to be a trillion squared, which is a septillion, a one followed by 24 zeroes?

I suspect that if we toss out a quintillion here, a septillion there, eventually it will add up to real money.

For more discussion of Metcalf’s Law and its relevance, read Simeon Simeonov’s “Metcalfe’s Law: more misunderstood than wrong?”

Is Zipcar leading a second generation of iPhone Apps?

Fully one quarter of Zipcar members use iPhones, according to Zipcar’ s Luke Schneider, who unveiled a new iPhone app at Apple's Worldwide Developers Conference. Scott Kirsner reports “it got me salivating (I'm a Zipcar member): it offers GPS help finding cars that are available, and can even honk the car's horn to help you locate it in a parking lot. See the video demo here, wherein Schneider shows off their use of Apple’s 3.0 SDK mapkit and demonstrates the Honk icon to spontaneous applause.

From Kirsner’s Innovation Economy blog: “Zipcar CEO Scott Griffith told me today that he has already been testing the beta version on his iPhone, with a few of the company's cars here in Boston. ‘We're finishing the app now, and then we have to do a complete new software download to our whole car network, so that iPhones will have the ability to honk the horn and unlock the car for you,’ Griffith said. The app will be free. Griffith estimates that it'll be available in about four weeks. Future versions of the Zipcar app, he added, might give Zipcar members discounts on music, or deals on iPhone navigation apps or other travel-related apps.

Could this be the start of a new wave, the Second Generation of iPhone Apps? It took fifteen years to get to third generation computers (IBM/360). Can an iPhone generation be less than a year?

Skyhook included in Dell Netbooks

Skyhook Wireless Inc. , one of the companies we follow, has closed a deal with Dell Inc. to supply its hybrid Wi-Fi and geographical positioning system for integration into Dell’s Mini 10 netbook.

“I think what’s really neat about this is that this is the first time we have seen this new category of netbooks looked at as a purely mobile device. They look at it as more of an enriched Smartphone” says Skyhook founder and CEO Ted Morgan.

Initially, two Skyhook applications will be offered with the Dell Wireless 700 location solution: CoPilot and the Loki Dashboard. CoPilot is a navigation application that gives turn-by-turn driving directions as well as local search of key points of interest. The Loki Dashboard is a web portal that uses the netbook’s Skyhook-based location engine to customize widgets for news, weather, tweets, photos and events around you.

For more information, try Mass. High Tech. A description of Skyhook’s technology can be found here in my blog.

IBM investing $100 million advancing mobile services

WOW!

IBM just announced plans to shift $100 million investment over the next five years into a major Research effort which aims to advance mobile services and capabilities for businesses and consumers worldwide.

"Mobility and the associated analytics will change virtually every enterprise business process," said Paul Bloom, chief technologist, IBM Telecom Research. "It will change the relationship between enterprises and their customers, their employees and their partners, enabling them to do business in more intelligent, efficient ways."

When I created this blog, I saw little attention being focused on the area where smart phones and business apps intersect. Once again, in our field, change can be rapid. In the future, I intend to concentrate this blog on analysis and interpretation, rather than breaking news. Journalists from the trade press have more timely, complete and accurate information and better access to company executives than I have.

The NY Times broke this story about mobile services this morning, but if you are interested in more details, I’d suggest you read today’s press release directly from IBM.

With its “cloud” announcement tuesday, and its “mobile” announcement today, IBM has once again revised the rules of the industry without consulting the other players. Competitive advantage: IBM. Exciting times lie ahead.

IBM’s “Cloud for Business”

IBM today introduced the industry’s first set of commercial “cloud” services and integrated products for the enterprise, claiming “this will give clients a reliable way to standardize IT functions that are rapidly becoming too costly or difficult to use.”

IBM endorses the prospect of a billion connected people and a trillion connected devices. This estimate originates with IDC, predicting that by 2011, there will be one trillion Internet-connected devices, up from 500 million in 2006.

An early analysis of the announcement, “I.B.M. to Help Clients Fight Cost and Complexity,” appeared in the NY Times yesterday.

This announcement is complex, we’ll all need time to evaluate it, so I’ll just include a few selections from the IBM Press Release, which you can find right here in its entirety, and which contains links to additional material:

Based on nearly two years of research and hundreds of client engagements, the IBM Smart Business cloud portfolio is meant to help clients turn complex business processes into simple services. To accomplish this, Smart Business brings sophisticated automation technology and self-service to specific digital tasks as diverse as software development and testing; desktop and device management; and collaboration.

From utility grids to roadways, water systems and financial instruments, the world’s physical infrastructure is rapidly becoming more instrumented and IT-enabled, and corporate data centers will have to deal with a new flood of transactions and data coming from a billion connected people and a trillion connected devices. These offerings are aimed at helping clients deal with entirely new kinds of tasks and the colossal data burdens facing the data center.

“Cloud is an important new consumption and delivery model for IT and business services. Large enterprises want our help to capitalize on what this model offers in a way that is safe, reliable and efficient for business,” said Erich Clementi, General Manager, Enterprise Initiatives, IBM. “Today’s Smart Business announcement demonstrates that we take this responsibility seriously with cloud investment and solutions targeting the early opportunity. We are responding today as we did assisting enterprises with the shift to e-business and in the embrace of open source and Linux.”

The IBM Smart Business portfolio includes three “on-ramps,” or ways to quickly deploy the cloud model:
· IBM Smart Business standardized services on the IBM Cloud;
· Smart Business private cloud services behind the firewall built by IBM (run by IBM or the client);
· and IBM CloudBurst workload optimized systems, for clients who want to build to their own cloud with pre-integrated hardware and software.

All three offerings include IBM’s service management system – a kind of air traffic control system for IT – that automates self-service, provisioning, monitoring as well as managing access and security for the cloud. This reflects IBM’s leadership and more than $10 billion in investments over the last five years in control and automation technologies, which become critical as the digital and physical infrastructure converge.

Let us now praise iPhone users

Forrester Research says iPhone users are richer, younger, and perhaps even more productive at work than those who use competing smart phones. Few of you will believe that I am richer, younger, and more productive than Dan Bricklin, who uses a G1; although he also has an iPod touch so he can experiment with the interface.

Neil Hughes reports on the study in his blog on Apple Insider:

iPhone users are younger: 30 percent of iPhone users in 2008 were of Generation Y, a larger portion than the rest of the smart phone market,

iPhone users are more educated and affluent: 49 percent of iPhone users have a college education, and 67 percent earn more than $70,000 a year,

iPhone customers spend more on their service: the average monthly phone bill for an iPhone user was $87, compared to $76 for the smart phone market, and $66 for traditional mobile phone users,

Employers are slightly less likely to subsidize an iPhone: 24 percent of respondents with an iPhone said they are compensated by their employer for their phone bill, while 28 percent of smart phone users have their employee pay all or part of it.

Comparing customer Internet usage, the study shows that the iPhone blows away its competitors: 78 percent of iPhone users reported they access the Internet at least weekly on their phone, while only 38 percent of the rest of the smart phone market were on the mobile Web that often.

The study was performed last year, since which I have become neither younger nor more affluent. Disregarding Generation Y, Dan is a Baby Boomer, and I modestly describe myself as a member of the Greatest Generation.

I continue to recommend Dan's book: "Bricklin on Technology." One of his chapters: “What Will People Pay For?” has been reprinted in the Harvard Business Review. You can read an excerpt here.

Itanium Awards: I'll be a Judge

The Itanium Solutions Alliance has just announced my selection as a judge for its third-annual Innovation Awards competition. “We are very pleased to have secured such a strong caliber of judges for this year's Innovation Awards," said Joan Jacobs, president and executive director of the Itanium Solutions Alliance. "The fact that this year's entries will be carefully evaluated and the winners selected by this distinguished panel of industry leaders adds another dimension of credibility to this prestigious awards competition."

The Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Awards were designed to recognize and reward end users and developers for outstanding use of Intel(R) Itanium-based servers in their applications. Individuals or organizations with Itanium-based solutions may enter, at no cost, in one of four categories: Mission-Critical Data, Data Center Modernization, Computationally Intensive Applications, and Humanitarian Impact. Winners will be honored at a special event during the Intel Developer Forum, September 23rd, 2009 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and the winning submission in the Humanitarian Impact category will receive a $50,000 cash award.

The Itanium Solutions Alliance Innovation Awards judges for 2009 are:
Joe B. Alexander, strategy and technology consultant; educator
Ken Cayton, president, Systematic Market Analysis
Jon Erickson, editor in chief, Dr. Dobb's
Sverre Jarp, chief technology officer, CERN openlab
Dr. Rinaldo Jose, president and co-founder, Lakeway Technologies
George McQuilken, co-founder, eCoast Angels Investment Network
Michelle (Mickey) Pierce, senior product manager, Mainframe Migration Alliance, Microsoft
Dr. Andrew Razeghi, lecturer, Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University
Clay Ryder, president, The Sageza Group
Dr. Mark K. Smith, executive director, Universal Parallel Computing Research Center, and managing director, Gelato Federation
Michael Vizard, director of strategic content, Ziff-Davis Enterprise

About the Itanium Solutions Alliance
The Itanium(R) Solutions Alliance is a global community of hardware, operating system and application vendors dedicated to accelerating the adoption and ongoing development of Itanium(R)-based solutions. Formed in September 2005, the Alliance comprises some of the most influential companies in the computing industry with a shared, strategic commitment to delivering mission-critical computing solutions based on the Intel(R) Itanium(R) architecture. http://www.itaniumsolutions.org/

Reading Dan Bricklin on Technology

I’ve been fascinated by a new book, Bricklin on Technology. I’m not the only one. The omnipresent Scott Kirsner tweeted that reading this book “is like downloading a few gigs of Dan directly to your cerebral cortex.”

Rather than concentrate on one review, I think I will work some of his thoughts into a number of posts, this one stressing the importance of Apps for the PC and the Smart Phone. Then again, perhaps these are my thoughts, but he provoked them.

VisiCalc, introduced thirty years ago this month at the1979 West Coast Computer Faire by Dan Bricklin and Bob Frankston, went on from there to change forever the computer industry. For the arrivistes among us, VisiCalc was the world’s first spreadsheet, progenitor of today’s Excel and many programs in between.

Personal Computers were available in 1979 (though not the IBM PC), but, before VisiCalc, there was no compelling reason to buy one. VisiCalc’s ability to update rows and columns in real time not only gave the user a way to revise financial statements but provided a superior solution to that offered by alternatives such as mainframe-based time sharing systems. Typically, a mainframe would have to upload an entire screen from a remote terminal, perform the update, and then rewrite the entire screen, far less timely and user friendly than VisiCalc on the Apple II.

Moreover, VisiCalc was a tool that could be adapted to many purposes, such as developing a complete financial model of a business. And, as a business tool, the purchaser could likely deduct the cost of VisiCalc and a home computer from his income taxes.

The other general purpose tool introduced at the time was word processing. The Apple II was never a great word processor, due in part to the keyboard and display. The preeminent word processor of its day was the Wang Word Processor, a cluster of microprocessor controlled screens sharing a disk drive. This product line was so successful that, at its peak in the 1980s, Wang Laboratories had annual revenues of $3 billion and employed over 40,000 people.
Enter the IBM PC (1981) with spreadsheets and word processing; exit Wang and the minicomputer companies, DEC, Prime, Data General, Nixdorf, and more.

The great strength of computers is that they are general purpose machines. As such, they don’t really solve any specific problem; it is the software that provides the solution. PC manufacturers understand this. Before the Apple App store, cell phone makers tended to develop proprietary software that served a few purposes, all related to being a cell phone, not a general purpose problem solver.

My conclusion: in the marketplace derby, the general purpose programmable device always comes from behind to overtake and defeat specialized (and therefore arbitrarily limited) implementations. Cell phone manufacturers, beware.

How VisiCalc and the early word processors evolved into Excel and Word is a fascinating story, a business and legal story as well as a technological one, but to tell it would take a big book, not a blog.

Historical footnote. Dan Bricklin received his first IBM PC prototype from my former colleague at the IBM Cambridge Scientific Center, Fritz Giesin. I had left IBM in January, 1981, and never knew this. It was a circuit board on a piece of plywood with sockets to plug in a keyboard, etc.

New England Innovation Month

A flock of unnamed local activists has conspired to designate June as “New England Innovation Month,” complete with a web site. Check out the Innovation Month homepage for a list of events and happenings.

I consider this a great idea, and early responses are encouraging. “ New England’s innovators and innovative companies, we believe, will be key players in economic recovery and the long-term economic strength of the entire country. And forging new connections between diverse people with fresh ideas is a critical part of the innovation process—and a fundamental part of Xconomy’s mission. So we’re proud to be part of a month in which there will be so many opportunities to do just that,” says Rebecca Zacks.

One session I’ll attend is on June 25, moderated by Scott Kirsner: "What's Next in Tech: Exploring the Growth Opportunities of 2009 and Beyond."

“The idea is to provide a picture of the tech clusters that are going to drive the next waves of growth here in Massachusetts, from cloud computing to robotics to videogames to energy efficiency to social media,” says Scott. “Speakers include venture capitalist Bijan Sabet from Spark Capital, iRobot co-founder Helen Greiner, Brian Halligan of HubSpot, and Tim Healy, who runs the publicly-traded EnerNOC.

“One goal leading up to the event is to start some blog conversation about the high-potential areas in tech right now... a discussion we'll obviously continue at the event on June 25th.”

My colleague Don Dodge and others have already joined the conversation. Don sees the next big things in tech as Cloud Computing, Mobile Applications, Social Networks, and what he calls “Hyper local News, Search, Community.” Don explains his reasoning in his blog. Read Don’s post here.

Cell Phone Design, 1983 to 2009

Guy Kawasaki sent a Tweet this weekend about the evolution of Cell Phone Design between 1983-2009. The collection of photos is most impressive.

I was introduced to the first of these phones, the Motorola DynaTAC 8000X, by Al Berkeley, then a General Partner at Alex. Brown. Alex. Brown, who had unwritten the first IPO in America back in 1808, brought public some of the most exciting growth companies of those times, including Microsoft, Oracle Systems, Starbucks, and United Healthcare. Al himself was instrumental in creating a public market for software stocks and, later, cell phones.

That day, we were looking for a cab to the airport; Al took us outside and called the dispatcher of an empty cab that was driving by. I’ve never forgotten this particular demonstration.

If this was my list, I would have included the recently announced Nokia 6216 since it is the first commercially available cell phone with Near Field Communications capabilities. You can read about it in Gerald Madlmayr’s blog.

Videos, humor, Ballmer disses the iPhone

It being a dreary Saturday, I’m looking around for amusing items. This brief video poking fun at iPhones, iPhone Apps, and social networks uses language no worse than my Granddaughter uses on Facebook, so it must be OK.

I’m less amused by Steve Ballmer’s recent comments. “There’s still, in my opinion, more venture capital than there are good ideas to support the venture capital,” Ballmer said in a speech to Stanford students studying entrepreneurship as part of the school’s “Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders” series. As the worldwide economy contracts, fewer mediocre business ideas will get funded, he said. That will result in a healthier startup environment than exists now, when “too many companies can hang on for almost too long with too much money.”

Of course, the flaw in his argument lies in our imperfect ability to separate the good ideas from the bad in their early stages. If you would like see an amusing but significant example, look at this video from 30 months ago, Microsoft CEO Ballmer laughs at Apple iPhone. A sample, “We’re selling millions and millions and millions of phones this year, Apple is selling zero.”

Parking, FasTrak, and Wireless Payments

Whereas payments are central to business Apps for smart phones, I thought I’d describe some wireless methods that are currently under consideration. I was inspired to do so by the following news from the left coast.

Parkers at San Francisco's International Airport can now use their FasTrak transponder to pay for their parking. They have been testing it on a few lots at the airport and get about 200 transactions a day. This month, the system will expand to all the parking area at SFO. If it becomes popular the concept will be extended to Oakland and San Jose.

California’s FasTrak system, typically used for highway and bridge tools, is called the E-ZPass here in the East, and goes by other names in other regions. Think of it as an RFID chip used for Transportation payments.

“This is the beginning of the end of cash usage at parking lots, opines John Van Horn, founder, editor and publisher of Parking Today Magazine and blogger at PT’s Parking Blog. “ Soon (five years) cars will have transponders and they will be linked to your credit card, and queuing for entry tickets or exit payments will be a thing of the past. It may be even reasonable some day to not have gates at all, like on many toll roads.”

At least three payment methods are currently being considered for smart phone implementation.

FasTrak (E-Zpass). These and similar systems rely on a transponder in the car and a reader located at the tollbooth, both typically provided by Mark IV Transportation Technologies. The transponder consists of an RFID chip packaged with a battery. When the transponder comes within range of the reader, the ID is transmitted and verified at the reader. Processing is offline. When the motorist purchases the transponder, funds are deducted from her credit card ($30 here in NH) and transferred to the FasTrak operator. Tolls are deducted from this amount until a minimum threshold is reached, when another $30 will be charged to the card by the operator.

Tap and Go. An RFID chip with an antenna is embedded in a credit card. When the card comes in close proximity to the reader, an electrical current is created and the ID (credit card number) is transferred. Further processing, including authorization and payment, takes place online as it does with any credit card. The official name for this is Near Field Communication, as described in my earlier post.

Stored Value. Funds are actually stored on the card, in memory, and the amount is reduced as the card is used. One good example, from the pre-RFID days, is the Parcxmart Card used to pay for parking and miscellaneous small dollar purchases in New Haven and other Cities. Cards are sold and funds are added by participating merchants, paid by either cash or credit.

Smart phones have batteries, have processing power, and have far better transmission capability than any of the methods described above. Smart phones are user programmable, so major portions of the application could be shifted to the phone itself. Moreover, smart phones could allow direct two-way communication between the parking operator and the consumer. So why don’t we have better payment methods for smart phones? Watch this space and ask me later.

Nokia App Store This Month?

Forbes is reporting today that Nokia is preparing an App Store second in size only to Apple's for roll out later this month, thus opening up vast opportunities for a new group of independent developers.

Though Apple, Research In Motion and Google already offer similar services, Nokia's launch promises to be the biggest app store opening yet and could re-shape the mobile applications market writes Elizabeth Woyke,

The store, which the company is calling Ovi Store after the Finnish word for "door," will debut with a catalog of 20,000 items. In comparison, Apple and RIM launched their stores with a few hundred apps, although Apple claims 35,000 apps today. Google's store opened with a few dozen.

“Users can access the store two different ways. It will ship pre-loaded on the company's new flagship handset, the N97, before July, and be included in phones released in the future. Consumers who own other, recent Nokia phones will also be able to download the store from the Web onto their handsets. The idea: People will buy more Nokia devices if they are paired with great services.

“The store is so large because Nokia is stocking it with a broader selection of digital content. The company says there will be lots of entertainment and media files, including an entire category of short videos and "mobisodes." The store's 20,000 items will be across all of these categories, not just apps.”

Making Money Selling Free Apps?

How much money can you make from a free iPhone application? Quite a bit says Jason Kincaid, writing in TechCrunch.

A report from AdWhirl says that applications that crack the top 100 in the Free Apps list make $400-$5000 a day - a wide range, but even at the low end that works out to around $12,000 a month. And while applications that do reach the top positions in the App Store eventually lose steam, after the initial dip revenue tends to remain consistent over time. Of course, making it to the top of the Free Apps list is easier said than done, and most developers make far less than $400 a day. But the same is also true of the vast majority of paid applications - in fact, there’s actually less competition on the Free side of the store.

As for AdWhirl, the company allows developers to tap into multiple iPhone ad networks at once. It is obviously in AdWhirl’s interest to promote iPhone advertising, since that’s their business. But it’s clear that there are definitely quite a few free applications making good money.

Anyway, cheapskates such as myself no longer have to feel guilty about selecting free Apps. And when Blackberry and Nokia open their own App stores, it will certainly unleash the creativity of lots more application developers.

The Smart Phone as your Mainframe?

The emergence of the Mobile Computing Cloud (McCloud) may lead to surprising innovations; here is one effort to give superpowers to your smart phone. Researchers at Intel in Berkeley create a supercharged clone of your smart phone that lives in "the cloud" and lets it do all the computational heavy lifting that your phone is too weak to handle.

CloneCloud uses a smart phone's high-speed connection to the Internet to communicate with a copy of itself that lives in a cloud-computing environment on remote servers. The prototype runs on Google's Android mobile operating system and seamlessly offloads processor-intensive tasks to its cloud-based double.

Of course, one could imagine an alternate implementation including smart phone and cloud based VM hypervisors that shift the workload automatically, no double required.

“But CloneCloud wouldn't just make smart phones more efficient: it could also make them more capable. A test application developed by Chun performs face recognition on photos. It required 100 seconds of processor time on a standard Android phone, but it finished in only one second when run by a clone of the phone running on a desktop computer. Because the software runs on a cloud-computing platform, it can be scaled in terms of the amount of both memory allocated and processing power, both of which increase performance on computationally intensive tasks.”

This work, developed by Byung-Gon Chun, a research scientist at Intel Research Berkeley, and his colleague Petros Maniatis, was recently reported by Christopher Mims in Technology Review and will be presented HotOS XII conference in Switzerland later this month.

Choose the Cloud, Lose Money, Who Says So?

Shortly after blogging about the MIT Symposium featuring Amazon’s approach to cloud computing, I found a report , McKinsey: Adopt the cloud, lose money, in the Register, which I put aside for additional thought and later comment. I had opined that victory in the Cloud market eventually goes to the low-cost producer.

When virtualizing private data centers, a company takes a powerful server and subdivides it into many servers to increase efficiency. This consolidation provides the necessary cost justification for the switch to virtual machines, leading to the current great success of VMware and others. This is the approach favored by McKinsey. Google, in contrast, does the opposite by taking a large set of low cost commodity systems and tying them together into one large supercomputer. At this level, the Amazon and Google approaches are similar.

Recently, the Official Google Blog helped clarify the issues. “While most discussions of cloud computing and data center design take place at the hardware level, we offer a set of scalable services that customers would otherwise have to maintain themselves in a virtualization model. For example, if a company wanted to implement a typical three tier system in the cloud using virtualization, they would have to build, install, and maintain software to run the database, app server, and web server. This would require them to spend time and money to acquire the licenses, maintain system uptime, and implement patches.“

In contrast, with a service like Google App Engine, customers get access to the same scalable application server and database that Google uses for its own applications. This means customers don't have to worry about purchasing, installing, maintaining, and scaling their own databases and app servers. All a customer has to do is deploy code, and we take care of the rest. You only pay for what you need, and, with App Engine's free quota, you often don't pay anything at all.”

My view so far: the benefits of the Cloud cannot be beat for new companies and new applications. For legacy applications McKinsey may have a good point, but the data is unclear. So for now, I agree with this approach:“As companies weigh private data centers vs. scalable clouds, they should ask a simple question: can I find the same economics, ease of maintenance, and pace of innovation that is inherent in the cloud?” asks Rajen Sheth, Senior Product Manager, Google Apps.

What is Near Field Communications?

Near Field Communication or NFC is a short-range high frequency wireless communication technology enabling the exchange of data between devices over about a 10 centimeter (around 4 inches) distance. NFC is primarily aimed at usage in mobile phones. The technology is a simple extension of the proximity-card standard. An NFC device can communicate with existing contactless smartcards and readers, and is thereby compatible with the contactless infrastructure already in use for security, public transportation, and payment.

Plenty of applications are possible, such as:

Mobile ticketing in public transport — an extension of the existing contactless infrastructure,
Mobile payment — the device acts as a debit/ credit payment card,
Smart poster — the mobile phone is used to read RFID tags on outdoor billboards in order to get info on the move.

Future applications could include:

Electronic ticketing — airline tickets, concert/event tickets, and others,
Electronic money -- stored on the card and used like cash,
Travel cards—parking, museum discounts, tourist passes,
Identity documents -- student IDs, recreation pass, dump sticker,
Mobile commerce -- ads, coupons, payments, gifts, loyalty programs,
Electronic keys — car keys, house/office keys, hotel room keys, etc.,
NFC can be used to configure and initiate other wireless network connections such as Bluetooth or Wi-Fi.

The MIT Mobile Experience Lab recently issued a 45-page report on NFC and student life:

“We developed the following directions in which new innovative ways of using NFC with the mobile phone could be developed: Ubiquitous information, Health/Safety, Networking, eMoney, Smart Mobility, Entertainment, and Smart Objects. An example of ubiquitous information would be a virtual tour guide where the user could tap his/her phone on the tags as they toured a place, and thus consult the information pertaining to the site, as well as receive information about next items on the itinerary, where to eat/drink, and also the main commercial activities in the area. This system could easily be ported to libraries, museums, stores, etc. In regards to Health, a person could easily use NFC to record their workout data from exercise machines, as well as monitor their daily calorie consumption when ordering from smart menu boards. With this information, your phone could give timely diet suggestions, gym programs, and doctor alerts.”

The hot application for NFC, which some believe will be the killer app, is using the cell phone as a credit card. VISA and MasterCard have both recently announced a number of large-scale pilot implementations worldwide. Nokia has announced new NFC enabled phones. Blaze Mobile has announced the Blaze Mobile Wallet as an iPhone App, while also announcing a joint effort with MasterCard Worldwide to promote an NFC based mobile payment sticker that can be affixed to any cell phone, allowing “Tap & Go" purchases at any of the over 141,000 merchant locations currently accepting PayPass. To my surprise, there are already 20 PayPass locations in Portsmouth, NH, and 30 in Portland, ME. You can search for merchants in your own town here.