Global Nerdy

Zuckerberg’s MWC keynote: friendly overtures for the carriers, boredom for the audience

In his keynote panel at Mobile World Congress, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg changed his approach and made friendly overtures to carriers. Their relationship with his company has been a strained one, thanks to free messaging services, WhatsApp and Messenger, which are displacing SMS, and their Internet.org project, which aims to provide free wireless internet to people who would otherwise not have it. It seems that one of the points that Zuckerberg wanted to convey in this appearance was that Facebook was a boon to them, not a threat.

Referring to Android head Sundar Pinchai’s earlier keynote presentation, in which he talked about Google’s Loon and Titan projects, whose goals are to create balloon- and drone-based cellular networks to bring the internet to underserved people, Zuckerberg reassured carriers by saying that they, and not these projects, will actually do the job. “People like talking about that stuff because it’s sexy,” he said, “That’s at the fringe of the real work that’s going on. Ninety percent of the people in the world already live within range of the network. “Going forward the face of Internet.org needs to be the companies doing the work, laying the fiber in the ground, building the infrastructure that’s actually connecting people in the world.”

While Facebook’s free messaging apps are said to eat intro carrier revenue and be detrimental to customer-carrier relationships, Zuckerberg argues that Facebook’s continued growth and Internet.org will be good news for carriers: “The feedback from partners is not only do more people start adopting data, but people use more voice and SMS and pay for that even more. We’ve seen a lot of cases where ARPU [average revenue per user] goes up.”

More reading:

• CNet — Zuckerberg: Carriers will connect the world, not sci-fi
• Re/code — Mark Zuckerberg to Mobile Carriers: Facebook Is Good for Your Business
• Gigaom — Zuckerberg’s Internet.org feels the love (and fear) from carriers
• New York Times — Mark Zuckerberg Goes on Charm Offensive for Internet.org

Some observers noted on Twitter that the exchanges between Zuckerberg and carrier representatives looked like a love-in…

Now the operators are on stage with Zuckerberg and are being all lovey-dovey #yawn pic.twitter.com/HCUL4KSoMD

— Rory Cellan-Jones (@ruskin147) March 2, 2015

…while others thought it was a snoozefest: 

Here is another pic of people sleeping and empty seats at this Zuckerberg “keynote” #MWC15 http://t.co/y1YQipJlaE pic.twitter.com/1FLuO6XTlH — Lisa Fleisher (@lisafleisher) March 2, 2015

Huawei’s watch

There’s a lot of buzz about wearables at MWC, and especially about Huawei’s watch. Described by The Verge as “the most watch-like Android smartwatch yet”, it’s been getting a lot of praise from many quarters. Here’s The Verge’s hands-on with the watch:

See us at MWC!

We’re in Barcelona to see what’s new at MWC, and to talk to people! In attendance are:

• Dan Goorno, our Vice President, Strategic Alliances,
• Bob Herzich, our Director of Business Development, and
• Bob Goulet, our Director of Channel Sales.

Want to meet up with us while we’re there? Drop us a line at info@gsgtelco.com.

First, let’s look at some editorial cartoons covering Net Neutrality in which the cartoonist is either misguided or misleading:

Luckily for us, someone at the editorial cartoon blog A Good Cartoon took the liberty of fixing them:

There are more fixed cartoons in that post, including this one, my favorite:

Here’s something a little different: a “Rosetta Stone”-style poster that shows you how to move from Swift to C#, courtesy of Microsoft. The languages do bear a strong resemblance to each other:

Click the poster to download the PDF version.

Since this came out of Redmond, it’s apparent that the poster’s goal is to convince Swift developers to try out C# for building iOS apps. The interesting thing is that Microsoft is promoting Xamarin — a tool that uses its programming language but isn’t made by Microsoft — and that it’s pushing development across all platforms. That’s something we wouldn’t have seen in the Ballmer era.

While the poster is useful for its intended audience, it should also be useful for .NET developers who want to give Swift a try.

The mobile world’s attention is turning to Barcelona this week, as it’s time once again for the annual Mobile World Congress, where the world’s mobile device and wireless service vendors parade their latest wares to nearly 80,000 attendees who come from all over the world. This week, we’ll keep you up to date on the developments at MWC, so be sure to check this blog daily!

Samsung Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge unveiled at MWC

As expected, Samsung unveiled their newest flagship phones at MWC, the Galaxy S6 and S6 Edge, which show the mobile giant switching to an all metal-and-glass body. The Edge is notable for a curved screen that wraps around the phone’s left and right edges, which allows for some interesting user interface ideas, including a mode that lets you read it from the side (very useful, if like me, you use your phone as your bedside alarm clock):

A number of early reviews have already been posted at Ars Technica, BGR, CNet, Forbes, TechRadar, and The Verge. For those of you wondering whether to get the S6 or S6 Edge, Gotta Be Mobile has put together a list of the six key differences between the two models.

Ars Technica notes that some of the more technical users aren’t all that pleased with two things that Samsung took out of their latest flagships: the removable battery and the MicroSD slot.

Android head Sundar Pinchai’s keynote at MWC

The Verge liveblogged the keynote of Sundar Pinchai, Google’s head of Android, Chrome, and Google Apps, and whom Brad Stone of Bloomberg Businessweek called “the most powerful man in mobile”. He talked about:

• Google’s take on mobile: “We don’t just see phones, we see powerful computing devices. They are devices that connect to the cloud, which is where Google comes in.”
• Google Translate on mobile. “We serve over one billion translations a day.”
• Mobile, in general: “People spend more than 10 million hours on their phones a month. On Black Friday, 40% of transactions were done on mobile.”
• Android, of course. 8 out of 10 phones shipped run Android, which he owes to its serving “an entire spectrum, all the way from entry level to high end.”
• More than just phones: “We’re working on Android beyond phones and tablets, watches, televisions, cars. VR is going to be a hugely important area that’s using Android as its foundation.”
• Extending the cloud: “There are 4 billion people in the world that don’t have access to connectivity. We want to do better with this.” He talked about three Google projects that aim to solve the connectivity problem:
  • Fiber: Municipal broadband internet and TV
  • Loon: A balloon-based network to create a mesh of flying cellular towers
  • Titan: A network of solar-powered drone aircraft to create an even more ambitious mesh of flying cellular towers

For more, see The Verge’s liveblog.

Lenovo showcases new tablets

Lenovo used their time at MWC to showcase their upcoming Ideated Miix 300, an 8-inch Windows tablet with slightly better screen resolution than an iPad Mini that’s expected to retail for about US$150. It currently runs Windows 8, has 2GB of RAM, 64GB of storage that can be extended with a MicroSD card, and is said to have 7 hours of battery life.

See us at MWC!

We’re in Barcelona to see what’s new at MWC, and to talk to people! In attendance are:

• Dan Goorno, our Vice President, Strategic Alliances,
• Bob Herzich, our Director of Business Development, and
• Bob Goulet, our Director of Channel Sales.

Want to meet up with us while we’re there? Drop us a line at info@gsgtelco.com.

Click the cartoon to see the source.

Today’s daily cartoon in the New Yorker will resonate with more than a few people. As for whether the emoji is a booty call or death threat, I say “Why can’t it be both?”

I saw the sign pictured above yesterday while biking and had to take a picture. Signs like this are common in suburban Tampa, where I live, but they’re usually to announce that they’re hiring employees at the nearby fast food place (like the other signs in the photo), or a garage/estate sale, a foreclosed house that’s going for a ridiculously low price, or the services of someone who’ll fix or clean up your house or yard. This is the first time I’ve seen such a sign used to promote app development.

A quick search on the phone number led me to a local company’s website, which closely follows the template used by this site, this site, this site, this site, this site, this site, and this site. If you want to find even more sites using the same approach, formula, and even working, just do a search with this query: “bar & club apps” examples. They all promote a service that purports to enable you to build a beautiful mobile site or app without having to do any programming, available in three monthly plans — mobile site only, native app only, and both — all of which go for less than $100/month. All of the apps they use as examples have functionality that you can cobble together after reading “Teach Yourself Mobile App Development in 24 Hours” and appear to fall on the bad side of Sturgeon’s Law.

The existence of so many of these crap-app franchises suggests that there are opportunities for indie app developers in small- to medium-sized markets.

We’re still at the point where it’s unusual for a local business to have its own app and where an app would make them stand out. If you can:

• Build a set of modules that would serve the needs of most local businesses — a “how to find us” screen, a “contact us” screen, a “menu of our products/services” screen, and so on (look at any of the crap-app sites if you need ideas) — so that building an app for them is largely assembling and customizing these modules,
• do better application, user interface, and graphic design than what you see coming from those crap-app factories (not that hard), and
• reach out to local businesses (this is actually the hard part)…

…then you’ve got the makings of a killer side (or main) business that these crap-app makers would be hard-pressed to beat.

Click the photo to see it at full size.

He’s got that mix of love for mobile, cleverness, and laziness that the job requires.