Mobile Fix: Old technology still contending

In this week’s Mobile Fix, Addictive! founder Simon Andrews talks about the gradual merging of new and old TV, and explains why clever ways of using old technology can be just as interesting as the new ‘in’ thing…

NewTV

Yet more moves in the gradual blending of old TV and newTV. For ages, rumours and speculation of Apple’s move into TV have been swirling around. Whilst some people expect Apple to develop a range of TV sets, we don’t. The economics aren’t that attractive and the replacement cycle is pretty slow.

We think the set-top box and the software is the sweetspot for Apple and it seems it is about to do a deal with Time Warner Cable to stream all its content through the Apple TV box.
The 12 million people with the Apple TV would still need to be Time Warner subscribers but this sort of arrangement helps move Apple TV up the list of options – on the way to becoming a gateway.

One company already committed to making TV sets is Samsung and it, too, is making waves. This week it bought Boxee to help it improve its connected TVs – a company which started as a software business focused on streaming video and then launched its own hardware: a set top box.

With bidding for Hulu coming to a head, we may have a better view on the likely shape of this market in the next few weeks.

New Retail

One of the players with most potential to disrupt TV is Tesco and the interview with its CMO that we featured last week sparked a few interesting conversations.

McKinsey has a very good interview with the CEO of retail giant Ahold, who are big in Europe and across the US. This interview has a big focus on multi-channel and it’s fascinating to hear how it sees online as complimentary to its supermarkets. And its ideas around remote pick up points are really interesting. Of course, they are very focused on mobile.

Still on mobile, this is a good look at how Amazon has put the band back together from dotcom boom and bust Webvan. The Webvan experience of building the first online grocery delivery business (spending $800 million before closing down) is proving very useful as Amazon expands its grocery business – lots of learning for the UK players here.

Old tech players still contending

We have been pushing the GAFA theory for a while now – how nearly all tech innovation either starts (or ends up) within Google, Apple, Facebook and Amazon. Of course, there are exceptions; Twitter has resisted temptation and Yahoo is buying companies like Tumblr.

But the old guys are still pretty influential. Microsoft has now got 100,000 apps developed for Windows phones and it continues to support Bing. One area where Bing is having some success in battling Google is social – where both Twitter and Facebook have partnerships with Bing.

This is a good look at all the things IBM is up to and how that could give it a strong position in mobile. The transformation of IBM is remarkable; back in our Modem days IBM was a client, a partner and a competitor – and it has divested its hardware business and become a major player in consulting.

Old tech still contending

We should also recognise that old tech still has a bit of life left in it. Fix is a great example; back when we were doing mobile and social and content at Big Picture in 2005/6 (not a very lucrative business model then) we used our blog to air our thinking.

It was highly respected and with RSS we got a pretty good readership – and it’s still there and at least some of the thinking still stands up.

But for Fix we went back to email because it still works incredibly well. Wired point out that for ecommerce businesses, email outperforms social and the core part of any digital service remains the email address.

And Bluetooth is about to get another day in the sun – it is starting to look like one of the most disruptive things on iOS7 is AirDrop, which uses Bluetooth and WiFi.

Whilst the new thing is always appealing, clever ways of using old tech can be just as interesting.

End of advertising?

Rei Inamoto of Akqa has written a good piece on the End of Advertising as we know it. He sums up his well thought through argument by saying:

“Brands should aim to solve real problems by providing connected services over 365 days and by inventing new businesses that benefit people, not just the brand.”

This is the sort of thinking that inspired our Skratch project.

On a similar topic, there is an interesting deck on Slideshare on the evolution of advertising – it’s really long, with over 470 slides, but is interesting. It ends up promoting the idea of brands creating their own content.

Which we agree totally with. The question is, where they go help to do that properly…