Google,iPhoneWebDev.com,Skype,Telco 2.0 & Vodafone - What Will Drive Wireless Innovation? (eComm 2008) SD Version - eComm on blip.tv I was supposed to be on this panel, but a vicious toothache prevented me from the long haul flight. Nothing, it seems, to the headache of trying to predict, if we can, what will drive wireless innovation in the near future?

As I didn’t make it, I thought to put my two pennies in here. The respectable Martin Geddes had the unenviable position of pitching first, which isn’t like pitching your tent first in the campsite, where generally you get the good spot. ‘Business models, business models, business models,’ was his suggestion, ‘Not the technology.’

His example was the iPhone. Being controversial, Martin dismissed all the sexiness of the gadget in favour of the business model, which is unprecedented because Apple - a ‘hardware company’ - gets a cut of the ongoing operator revenues. And he also mentioned the upcoming apps store - an ecosystem play by Apple whereby Apple gets a cut of the revenues going through the store.

His point is a good one. Whilst at Motorola, as their Chief Applications Architect, I was involved in a brainstorming session within the first month of setting up a brand new apps solutions service to ask ‘Why buy apps from Motorola?’ My point then, as it is today, was that we had to find ways to create ecosystems, which at the time I called ‘Mobilisation Factories.’ My point was to make it easy to mobilise content and services. Someone needs to take all that mobilisation pain away, which still remains. Whoever does this, if at all possible, could win big!

In a way, this is what Apple are already doing. With the iPhone, all the components are in place. There’s a usable gadget that ticks so many boxes in the list of what it takes to make an utterly compelling user experience (see my slides from MIPS). There’s the flat-rate tariff. There’s the integration with iTunes to get software updates, which I think is a vastly important part of the experience (see the ‘anticipation’ box in my UX narrative slide, also ‘loyalty’). There’s the whole integration with iTunes to achieve a seamless media experience, admittedly more so if you’re a Mac user - and we can’t blame Apple for that.

An ecosystem is a combination of many things. It is not just a set of business models. It is not just a set of operational models and processes. It is not just an infrastructure. It is not just enabling technologies. It is all of these things. Yet, as Martin’s bias towards business models and then Stanley Chia’s bias towards technology showed, most of us are not ‘ecosystem thinkers.’ Our frames are informed by more confined modes of thought. In Motorola, the bottom line was that creating an ecosystem didn’t fit any of the paradigms within the business. It’s not a product. It’s not a service.

Operators have repeatedly missed a huge opportunity. They may have provided a mobile telephony ecosystem, but they have not come anywhere close to providing a mobilisation ecosystem where content, ideas and community can flourish on mobile devices. It’s not as if they didn’t have the potential or the chance. It’s certainly too late to underpin the ecosystem with their networks because Web 2.0 is now the undeniably going to be foundation for the ecosystem. However, the mobilisation problem remains, so the opportunity still exists.

Any technologist listening to Martin’s comments would probably think of multi-touch and other iPhone technological wonders as the root of its success. It’s all about the gadget. They would, of course, be right. Business people, if I can call them that (again, it’s a problem with framing) would think ’spot on M artin,’ it’s all about the business model - ‘that’s what I’m always telling these web-heads and techie geeks.’ They would, of course, be right.

It’s both of these things and more. Ecosystems are products, by which I mean that they are subject to design. The are not evolutionary spandrels. But few of us have this type of thinking. Worse still, I think there are precious few methodologies for thinking about ecosystem design.

Where do we start? If I had to choose one area, I would say that user experience (UX) is an important frame of thought to develop. This seems obvious, and I have winced at just writing it. Nonetheless, I can find very little evidence that this is taken seriously in our industry. UX is not UI design! I don’t want to get into the whole UX definition debate, which might be useful, it might not. What matters here is for those engaged in producing products and services to think more holistically about how the user will receive, use and benefit from what you do. And, how will they feel about what you offer.

It is a multi-disciplinary problem - this is the point. And, thinking properly about UX will inevitably lead to ecosystem thinking. For example, if you’re concern is advertising and models for ad charging, then you can’t do that without thinking, these days, about relevancy. Relevancy can’t be solved without technology. Moreover, what is the measure of relevancy? Sorry to bring up the boring measurements question, but I think that it still matters, despite what new-school thinkers might say about such old-school ways of thinking. Yes, many of the old metrics no longer work, but that doesn’t mean we toss out the idea of measurement. It is not enough to say that the only measurement is the bottom line. Of course, that’s a stark reality. However, that’s like saying throw out all maps, compasses, clocks and speedometers to guide you on your way because all that matters is if you get there or not. Clearly, a glaring contradiction.

User experience precedes ecosystem design. We need methods for thinking about, defining and measuring the user experience. As I tried to say at Motorola, ‘we’re in the experience business,’ which clearly Motorola is not. To their credit, they did allow me to preach this message in numerous workshops, mostly to operators and media companies. I can tell you that the overwhelming response was ‘no we’re not - we’re an operator/broadcaster (whatever).’

I might be wrong. But clearly something is wrong in the mobile industry when, after 10 years of mobile data, it still can’t offer a single compelling ‘mobile-data experience’ until Apple, not in the mobile industry, comes along and shows them how. Apple most definitely is in the experience business - they utterly care about the user’s experience of computing. Why else would Steve Jobs talk about icons so good that you’ll want to lick them?