How to really piss off a college basketball fan

One of the stranger rituals of American sports is the country's affection for the annual college basketball championship tournament. Why this country is so obsessive about college basketball and football, when every other college sport is completely ignored, is a mystery that the nation's greatest sociologists and standup comedians have never been able to explain.

But there it is. If your alma mater's basketball team is participating in "March Madness," as we call it, it's mandatory to watch the games on TV. Unless, of course, you have to take your son to a futsal game.

Futsal is a separate story in itself, basically the bastard spawn of soccer (what the rest of the world calls football) and basketball. In the US it's about a million times more obscure than college basketball, but my son likes it and his team had a game scheduled for the exact same time as my college was playing in the tournament. So I did the dad thing and drove him to the game.

But I also did the Silicon Valley dad thing and took my notebook computer with me. The high school where the game was played has a fully open WiFi network, and I had registered to receive a live streaming video feed of the basketball tournament from the CBS television network. Finally, a practical use for Web video!

So I sat down in the gymnasium, started up my notebook, logged into the network, went to the CBS website, and selected my team's game. Excitement building, I clicked on "Watch now," waited a few seconds for the feed to buffer, and...



In case you can't read it, the message said I was "prevented from accessing this game due to local blackout restrictions."

Bastards!

Here is the deal, CBS. If I had access to a TV, do you think I'd be trying to watch your crummy, pixelated, low-res, business card sized video feed? The only people interested in watching online video of a sports event are those who have no access to a television. There is absolutely zero chance of cannibalization of the TV station's audience.

Besides, think about it for a minute. Who are the people most likely to want to watch that feed? People in the school's home town who can't get to a TV. But that's exactly where the game is certain to be blacked out. So CBS has created an incredibly elaborate system to systematically tease and frustrate its most enthusiastic customers. You can't see the game you really care about, but you're welcome to watch the games that are meaningless to you.

The word for this, folks, is "perverse."

I know why CBS did the blackout. Its contracts with local broadcast stations prohibit it from streaming games they're airing. CBS had the same problem with last year's tournament -- meaning they have had more than a year to fix this thing, and failed to do so. Instead, CBS and its local stations are once again missing a great chance to build customer loyalty and develop a nice online business.

I did try out an interesting feature that CBS allowed me to access, called a "glog" (I guess that stands for game blog). It's basically written commentary on the game, streamed live. Unfortunately, if you look closely at the first and last comments below, you'll see that the commentary got caught in a loop and repeated endlessly. I was confused when the teams started running the same plays over and over.



This mess is typical of the foolishness that often happens when old line companies try to deal with the Internet. They spend millions setting up an elaborate technological tour de force but neglect to take care of the basics, like letting fans actually watch the games they want to see, and making sure all the features work.

The lesson: The product you deliver through a website isn't a bunch of HTML and Java code, it's a solution to the problem of a user. Unless all of the elements of that solution line up properly, your product is a failure.

I know CBS's online coverage isn't a total waste; some people do get to some games they want. But if you'd like a taste of what CBS is doing to a lot of fans, check out this message board where fans of Georgetown University tried to figure out how to access the online feed. It's pitiful.

As for me, I was reduced to watching the scoreboard thing you see below, and waiting for it to refresh every 15 seconds or so.



A hundred and sixty years of telecommunication progress, and I'm reduced to watching a basketball game by telegraph.

PS: My son's team lost, although he did score a booming goal from beyond halfcourt. He's always wanted to do that.

Suggestion Box

I thought it would be good to add a suggestion box to Mobile Opportunity. Here it is. If you have any questions, comments, or suggestions about this weblog, please post a comment here. I'll link to this post from the sidebar, so you can get to it easily.

Thanks in advance for your feedback.

eTel: The open source phone crowd talks to itself

The Emerging Telephony (eTel) conference brings together the open source and web telephony community. It's a bit of a geekfest, with a lot more focus on technology than on business issues, but some of the trends and ideas I saw at it this year are worth sharing.

I wrote a business-oriented summary for the Rubicon weblog, focusing on three issues I saw at the conference that I think have broad relevance to tech companies: the emerging standards for identity management, the vulnerability of mashups to unexpected failures and security holes, and the integration of voice services into websites. I won't repeat that discussion here; you can click here to read that post. What I'll do here is go into more detail about the other interesting things I saw.


First, a couple of overall comments about the conference:

We're breathing our own exhaust. There were about 280 people on the attendee list for the conference. Several speakers asked for a show of hands from all who worked at operators and handset vendors. Virtually no hands went up. Looking through the attendee list, I saw one or two people each from BT, Sprint, DoCoMo, and Vodafone. France Telecom/Orange had several people and was a sponsor. On the handset side, there were individuals from Nokia, Motorola, UT Starcom, and Palm. But absolutely no Verizon, TMobile, Cingular/ATT, Samsung, LG, RIM, SonyEricsson, etc. Basically, the conference consisted of open source telephony enthusiasts and Internet companies speaking to themselves and confidently predicting the downfall of the operators.

In Silicon Valley we call this "breathing your own exhaust" -- you bring together a bunch of people who already agree with each other, and they reinforce each others' opinions. A lot of conferences are like that, and I don't want to ding the O'Reilly folks who ran the conference because they can't really control who comes to their events. But it was symptomatic of the lack of communication between Silicon Valley and the operators. That missing dialog affected the presentations of some of the speakers.

An example: An otherwise excellent speaker on identity, Kaliya Hamlin, tried to suggest some potential win-win strategies in identity management that would help users while still enabling the operators to make money. She suggested that the operators offer identity services and tie them to a commerce engine, so users could buy things and charge them through their wireless bills. It's a great idea, and the Japanese operators are already doing it. But I know from personal experience that as soon as you mention "billing" to most of the US and European operators they run screaming from the room. Their billing systems are already too complex, held together by chewing gum and spiderwebs, and the thought of making a big change to them is terrifying. Kaiya gets an A for effort, but in a forum that had a balanced representation her idea would have been discussed and debated rather than just tossed out there.

Somewhere, sometime I'd like to see a forum where the operators and the Internet folks could engage as equals and attempt to find common ground. Agreement might be impossible, but at least it'd be fun to watch.

The ideas for mobile social communities give me the creeps. People who go to conferences tend to be outgoing; one of the reasons they go is because they enjoy interacting with other people. The O'Reilly folks cultivate this attitude very well, with a lot of breaks and discussion sessions that run late into the night. The energy level is great, and reminded me a bit of some of the early Mac and Palm developer conferences.

But when you take those same extroverts and ask them to design social networking software, the results are creepy. Don't get me wrong, I think online communities are one of the building blocks of the future economy. But the type of community I prefer is one where you interact only on particular topics that you want to share. What the extroverts are designing is communities in which deep knowledge about everyone else is a goal in and of itself.

Case in point: Jyrki Engestrom of Jaiku showed an S60 presence client designed to "bring your address book to life." What it does is collect information about your current status and relay that to everyone else on your contact list. Jyrki showed us the status report on his wife -- at the time of his presentation, she was asleep, with the ringer turned off, at home (the software picks up where the user is through location services). He could also check his wife's calendar to see who she's meeting the next day. In the future, the client will be extended to show what music the user is listening to, and will use Bluetooth to report on anyone else who's nearby. The client also has an API, of course, so we can all extend it to give even greater layers of intimacy.

And of course it'll all be paid for by (drumroll, please) advertising that gets tailored to all that personal information the phone is collecting about you.

Jyrki says the effect is like having a blog, but with smaller chunks of content -- a lifestream, a "living address book." To me, it was more like a system for making everyone the star of their own little reality TV show. Think about it, an entire world that works like LiveJournal. I've got no problem with the folks who enjoy that, but I suspect this will be yet another mobile feature that cuts the mobile market into segments -- some people will like it, and some people would rather bodysurf in a gravel pit.

(For the record, I'm the only luddite who thinks this way. Check out this amusing rant from Steve Bryant regarding Twitter.)

Yahoo is more fun at a conference than Google. If you're ever at a conference and have to choose between attending a talk by a Google exec and one by a Yahoo exec, go to the Yahoo one. Yahoo people sometimes (not always) share ideas and interesting projects they're working on. They seem to hold the same philosophy as many web app companies, that if you share good ideas you'll get back more benefit than you give away. Google, meanwhile, is tighter than Spandex jeans on a 16-year-old. They don't share information on any unannounced projects, so about the only thing they can do at a conference is talk about work they already completed. At a conference I attended last year, a Google manager gave a talk on how they created Google Calendar. Get this -- they interviewed users. Oooooooh. The Google speaker at eTel, Chris Sacca, was much more entertaining. But as expected he talked about history -- Google's work to build a WiFi network in Mountain View, California.


Other highlights

Microsoft has fun with SMS. Sean Blagesvedt and Rajesh Veeraraghavan of Microsoft Labs showed off an experimental project that lets someone send instructions and database queries from a mobile to a PC via SMS. On the PC, you use an Excel template to control how the system will respond to the SMS commands. The PC can send messages back to the phone via SMS. The whole system is effectively a tiny command-line interface between the phone and the computer.

That would be an interesting but not-too-compelling experiment in the US or Europe, but they're aiming it at developing countries where it's difficult for a small business to set up a separate web server, and 3G connections are rare or expensive. Using the existing 2G infrastructure and a low-end PC, a company could set up a basic information access system. I liked the idea.

Coincidentally, Don Norman just wrote an article pointing out the rebirth of the command line in search engines interfaces and in computer operating systems. So this stuff is popping out all over (thanks to David Beers for the link).

Universal identity. I mentioned Kaliya Hamlin's talk above, and I hope it didn't sound like I was picking on her, because I thought she did one of the best talks at the conference. She described the efforts that several organizations are making to create a single, unified system for verifying your identity online. The goal is that you log in once per browsing session, and after that you're automatically logged into every site you visit. There's a lot of work going into making this an open standard, so various competing identity services can operate underneath it. I was impressed with the work that's going into it, and I think it'll be useful infrastructure for the industry, even though I'm not sure if it's solving a burning need for the average user.

Tidbit from the front lines in a municipal wireless deployment. Chris Sacca of Google said the WiFi network it installed in Mountain View, CA, is seeing steady growth. One notable statistic: in any given day, about 90% of the base stations get some traffic. All of them get traffic in a given week. Traffic is highest in the lowest-income parts of the city. That sounds strange, but think about it for a minute -- the rich people all have cable or DSL already. Municipal wireless is often depicted as a benefit for rich people, but maybe by democratizing access to the Web it actually helps poor people the most.

(Of course, "poor" in Mountain View is a relative thing. Maybe "less well off" would be a better term.)

He also showed a lot of amusing pictures of dinosaurs, a pointed reference to the operators. That pretty well reflected the attitude of most of the speakers at the conference.

Progress reports on open source mobile devices. A couple of companies showed works in progress on open source mobile devices. TrollTech demonstrated its Greenphone, which is prototype hardware of a phone running its QTopia Linux (demo devices are, unfortunately, what you have to produce when you don't have a local licensee shipping your latest stuff). Fonav showed a new UI and PIM suite built on the Greenphone, and OpenMoko discussed the Linux phone it's developing. All of the products were interesting, but I kept wondering what unique problems they would solve for users. It was hard to tell, because the time available for demos was very small.

I don't think open source phones that do the same things as the smartphones already on the market are going to excite many users. The thing holding back smartphone adoption isn't the proprietary nature of their operating systems, it's their lack of compelling functionality for most users. If the open source phone guys could turn their energies loose on that problem, I think they'd have a better chance of changing the world.

What you read in the news (and in blogs) isn't reality: An example

I scan a lot of technology weblogs, and it has been fascinating to see how the recent New York Times report on the hiring of Paul Mercer by Palm has been echoed all over the blogosphere. The story seems to have some sort of special iconic importance to a lot of people; they view it as a response to the iPhone, or as a milestone indicating trouble for Palm.

Paul's a good guy, he had a nice reputation at Apple, but it bewilders me that the Times picked up on that particular hire. There has been a ton of change in Palm's marketing and product marketing organization in the last year, starting long before the iPhone. Two of the leaders in the team left, and Palm recently hired Brodie Keast to run the whole thing (Brodie is a very senior, longtime veteran of Apple, Tivo, and a bunch of other places). Brodie reorganized marketing, some iconic Palm veterans have left (including Rob Haitani*), and Brodie has brought in some new people. There hasn't been a peep about any of that on the New York Times, or any blog I read. But Paul's hiring gets a ton of play.

We're told that blogs act as a supplement to the mainstream press, digging out the real stories and adding lots of missing detail. But sometimes the press and blogosphere together are just a big echo chamber. In this case, I think everybody has missed the real story, a longer-term changing of the guard at the company. Weird.

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*That's what I was told by a Palm employee, but I haven't seen an official announcement, so please view it as a strong rumor until there's confirmation.

Can we please stop talking about convergence?

I know, I'm having a fantasy. The term "convergence" and the idea behind it -- that various industries in technology and entertainment are gradually merging -- is pervasive online and in the popular press. Nothing I write here is going to change that.

But let me say this for the record anyway: The problem with convergence is that when you look closely, it's not happening.

Markets aren't converging, they're diverging. The web deconstructs mass markets, by making it economically attractive for a company to address narrower market segments. Online marketing can be targeted at much more specific demographic groups than mass media could reach, and online communities help companies to talk directly with their most important customers. I've already written about this happening in mobile devices, but if you want another example, look at television: the mass markets are slipping away from the big networks, eaten by a gazillion cable channels. Or look at newspapers, chewed down by a blizzard of websites.

"Convergence" is definitely not the right word for what's happening to markets.

Are the industries converging? If the markets aren't converging, then maybe it's the industries that are doing it. The computer industry gradually merges with telecommunications, which seamlesly blends with entertainment. I can kind of get into that, except for phrases like "gradually merge" and "seamlessly blend." They sound far too gentle. What's actually happening is more like they way they make steel: coal, lime, iron ore, and oxygen get fed into a blast furnace and utterly consumed by unearthly fire. If that's what you mean when you say "convergence," then yeah we're converging.

OK, so what should we call it? I kind of like "spontaneous combustion;" it captures the spirit of what's happening. But I can't picture the Economist running a 16-page special section on the spontaneous combustion of the mobile phone industry, so we need to come up with something snappier. Maybe "deconstruction" or "re-forging." "Collision" might do the trick, but it doesn't sound quite violent enough.

I don't know, what do you think? If you have a better term for it, please post a comment.

What we're learning from Web apps, part two: Community = shared obsession

I recently wrote that the argument over the viability of Web 2.0 applications misses the point -- most of the applications on any new computing platform die. What matters are the innovations and new business models that we learn from them.

One of the things we're clearly learning about from Web 2.0 is how to organize an online community.

There have been obsessive communities in society for thousands of years: dog breeders, fraternal societies, Amiga users, and so on. What the Web has done is make it much easier for those people to find each other and hang out together. Although most people will tell you that a good online community is motivated by passion or enthusiasm, I think it runs a little deeper than that. The best Web communities are about shared obsession. They're run by people who share the community's obsessions and celebrate them together.

Ted Rheingold, founder of dogster.com and catster.com, is one of the best explainers of the whole online community phenomenon. If you get a chance to see him talk, don't miss it (you can listen to an MP3 of one of his speeches here). He gives a lot of sensible rules on how to manage an online community, the most important of which (in my opinion) is to let the users lead, but always moderate the community to weed out antisocial people. If you want to see a great example of his philosophy at work, look at the company weblog to see how the obsession with pets permeates everything the company does.

Because community members are self-motivated, it's possible for groups to exist online solely through volunteer effort. The work they can do together is often very impressive. One example I've mentioned before is that a volunteer group called the Pacific Bulb Society is gradually using a wiki to create a very comprehensive reference work on species flower bulbs. (Yes, it's esoteric, but remember what I said about shared obsessions.)

Although volunteers are great, a community can do a lot more if there are full-time people working on it, and that means forming a company and bringing in revenue. Many online communities charge money for special services, but advertising can also play an important role because for almost every community there's usually a company that wants to market to them. This is another area where the Web 2.0 companies are learning a lot. The original assumption was that it'd be easy to advertise on a community site -- just put up a banner offering a product that's relevant to the community. As Rheingold points out, that doesn't work well. People reading a community site aren't there to buy something, they're there to hang out with people who share their interests. The advertising that works best on a community site is subtle brand building tailored to the community's interests, rather than traditional offers. Basically, the advertiser needs to join the community. Because of this, Rheingold strongly urges community sites to develop their own ad sales teams, rather than working through an ad sales syndicate, because a syndicate can't fully represent the community to the advertiser.

Communities don't have to be built around a particular subject, like cars or computers. Any shared enthusiasm, emotion, or identity can be the basis of a community if it bonds people together and gives them something to talk about. For example, one frequently cited community is the photo site Cute Overload (#114 on Technorati). The obsession that ties those people together is their shared love of fuzzy animals that have pudgy faces.

Another popular site that's intended to be a community is Digg. That came as a surprise to me, because I thought of it as a collaborative news filter, a kind of group effort to replace the New York Times. (At least, that's what some folks said online, producing quite an argument at the time.)

But despite the posturing, the New York Times and Digg are doing entirely different things. The Times is hoping to be the dominant online news source in the US, funded by advertising and supplemented by fees for access to the archives, columnists, and whatever other souvenirs they can sell you. The Times says its online revenues have been growing, and publisher Arthur Sulzberger has taken to saying grandiose things about the website totally replacing the print edition: "I really don't know whether we'll be printing the Times in five years, and you know what? I don't care either."

Digg, meanwhile, is a leader in a category called "social media," with an emphasis on the word social. It's really a community site, explains founder Kevin Rose. He says his long-term intent is to use Digg's user ratings of news stories and other web content to assemble communities of people who have similar interests. Digg's system for commenting is also intended to help build the community feel. He says one of his favorite features is the ability for users to rate each-others' comments. That reinforces the community dynamic; and besides, Rose says, it's fun to use. He likes to peek at comments that have been buried by the community, just to see if he agrees.

So the news is just a vehicle for Digg to assemble communities.

True community is almost impossible to fake, because obsessive people can instantly spot anyone who's not also obsessed. If your company is setting up a community website, make sure the people running it are as obsessive as the visitors you're recruiting, or the site won't work. In fact, all it will do is make you look bad.


Mobile communities

One area where we still have a lot of learning to do is the role of communities in the mobile world. The mobile industry is very enthusiastic (you might say obsessive) about moving online communities onto mobile devices. I think that's going to be a lot trickier than it sounds. The assumption made by the mobile industry is that since community members are obsessed, they will want to carry their obsession with them at all times. But check out one of the community sites, and look at all the features that make the community work. Let's jump back to Dogster for an example. Here's their home page:



Ladies and gentlemen, that is one of the ugliest home pages on the web, and it's packed with about ten times more links than Web design principles say you should ever put on a single page. That's entirely deliberate; the site is laid out like a giant box of Valentine candies, so you can't resist trying at least one link.

How in the world are you going to deploy that on a mobile device?

You'll redesign the page. You'll remove some features, and most of the pictures. You'll make the type bigger and you'll put the most popular features up front. In other words, you'll display Dogster Lite on the phone. And that changes the user dynamic. Now instead of visiting Dogster, they're visiting a limited subset of the site. The opportunities to disappoint people are enormous.

I'm not saying a mobile version of a web community can't succeed; I'm sure a lot of them will. But it won't be easy, and it won't be straightforward.

I've been at some telecom conferences where speakers said the operators had an opportunity to create and lead new communities on the mobile Web. That's twisted thinking in two ways. The first is that communities are led by people who share obsessions with their visitors. Unless the operators are forming communities on cell tower placement and the details of FCC regulatory compliance, I don't think they are well suited to lead user communities.

Second, there is already a huge supply of vibrant communities online. It's far too late to displace them. I'm sure there will be some new communities created that take special advantage of mobility, but for the most part the challenge for the operators is not creating new communities, it's inviting the current communities in. That means giving them the opportunity to run experiments in how to format their sites for mobile, and letting them lead the resulting communities. In other words, the operators need to establish an open garden for communities, and we all know what an uncomfortable issue that is.

Finally, there's the question of revenue. The whole reason the operators want mobile data is to increase their billings. But most online communities are very low-revenue, if they bring in any money at all. There isn't a big revenue stream for the operators to tap into. They can certainly use online communities to increase the amount of traffic on their networks, but with more and more operators moving to flat pricing for mobile data, increasing traffic isn't necessarily a goal.

Unless the industry is careful, the operators could end up with a situation similar to what happened with cameraphones -- the users like the feature, but it doesn't actually generate a lot of revenue.

Next time: How the Web spawns new forms of media.

Jeff Hawkins will show the new baby in May

In case you missed it, there's a long interview with Jeff Hawkins of Palm over on PalmAddicts. In the interview, Hawkins hints very strongly that he'll show the company's new "third category" device in May.

"We’re going to be announcing something…but I won’t tell you what it is…we will be launching this year, not in the distant future. I’ll give you a much bigger hint: I’m going to be speaking at Walt Mossberg’s D Conference in May. It’s a high-end industry conference. Anyway, I’m going to be giving a talk there, and that would be something for the Palm fans to keep a close watch on."

That should be enough to get the rumor mill cranked up again.

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By the way, I apologize for the shortage of posts recently. I had the opportunity to work on a couple of papers with Prof. Joel West of San Jose State, discussing the iPhone and some other interesting subjects. They ate into my blogging time. I'll let you know when the papers are available.

Joel has an interesting blog on open strategies. It's worth checking out.