GigaOM » windows mobile

A brief history of Microsoft’s e-reader efforts

Kevin C. Tofel — Mon, 30 Apr 2012 15:57:07 +0000

Although Microsoft invested $300 million in a Barnes & Noble spin-off on Monday, this isn’t the first time Microsoft played the e-book game. Typical for the company, it often has great ideas, but it errs on the timing. In fact, when Microsoft debuted its Windows Pocket PC platform for mobile devices — a precursor to today’s smartphones –back on April 19, 2000, Microsoft Reader was embedded in the platform, allowing you to read e-books on the go.

I owned several Pocket PC devices, as well as the later Windows Mobile ones that followed, and I recall reading hundreds of titles on my handhelds long before modern e-book readers arrived. Microsoft developed its own format called .LIT, which was a HTML-based format similar to that used for Microsoft Windows Help files. And like most of the e-books sold today, Microsoft allowed for DRM, or Digital Rights Management, for device registration — sometimes problematic — and content protection.

Microsoft eventually offered its Microsoft Reader application for its desktop operating systems, starting with Windows 95 support later in 2000. Eventually, all Windows versions save Windows 7 gained the e-reader application. Another fond memory of my Microsoft e-reader experience comes from the Windows Tablet Edition platform: Using a convertible notebook with digital pen support, I could read on a larger screen and take notes. Sound familiar?

Microsoft eventually got out of the Reader business in August of last year, with the decision to shutter its Reader efforts. And why not when the software was then losing to dedicated e-Ink devices and smaller tablets from Amazon, Barnes & Noble and others?

Clearly, the PC route as an e-book strategy has limited upside compared to more pocketable devices such as Kindles, Nooks and smartphones. Just as books are meant to be carried and read, reading on a portable screen is the e-book recipe for success today. One legacy feature of Reader, however, still remains as part of Windows: ClearType. The display function that can add clarity through software (via sub-pixel rendering) debuted in the Reader software and later migrated to Microsoft Windows.

The details on how Microsoft’s new partnership with Barnes & Noble may be sketchy just yet, but Microsoft has a clear history in this space, with a dozen years of experience. Again, the ideas Microsoft had with its Reader platform were solid, but the market for e-books didn’t arrive for mainstream consumers until much later. Perhaps the company can take a page out of its history and gain back some of the e-book momentum it lost in the last decade.

We’ll be talking with leaders in tech, media and investing about how to make the most of today’s opportunities, blurred lines and all, at paidContent 2012: At The Crossroads, May 23, at The TimesCenter in New York. Join us.

Thumbnail image courtesy of SocialTimes

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New challenges for the IT organization

Dow Brook Advisory Services — Mon, 26 Mar 2012 15:38:23 +0000

Cloud computing, mobile computing and the consumerization of IT are combining to create another force that is overwhelming many IT departments: complexity. This report, the second in a three-part series, examines several types of complexity in the business IT environment, including complexity of devices and applications, physical and virtual computing environments, and the related challenges for IT staff.

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Nokia factories shift to Asia: Did it have any choice?

Bobbie Johnson — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 11:42:39 +0000

Nokia confirmed plans to shift the heart of its manufacturing operation to Asia, cutting 4,000 jobs from existing factories and moving their roles to China and South Korea.

Employees at three major plants in Finland, Hungary and Mexico had been waiting anxiously for the announcement, which becomes the latest in a series of massive cuts to the company’s staff as it tries to find around $1 billion in savings to bolster the bottom line. Over the last year as Nokia tries to reorganize around its Windows Mobile strategy, the struggling mobile giant has slashed jobs, outsourced its Symbian development and closed a factory in Romania.

The company said that it reviewed its smartphone manufacturing operations and come to the conclusion that it made sense to move its manufacturing centers closer to the component suppliers, who are largely located in China. Instead, the remaining staff at the three locations would focus on receiving phones made in Asia and customizing them for the European or American market.

In a statement, executive vice president of Markets, Niklas Savander, said it would allow Nokia to act faster and be more responsive — two weaknesses that have been severely criticized as the business struggles to cope with the rise of rivals like Apple and Google’s Android.

“Shifting device assembly to Asia is targeted at improving our time to market. By working more closely with our suppliers, we believe that we will be able to introduce innovations into the market more quickly and ultimately be more competitive.”

Nokia hasn’t actually said how much money it hopes to save through the changes, but it is clearly hoping to squeeze more out of its relationships with suppliers and get products out without the extensive delays they seem to have been subjected to.

In many ways, the move has been a very long time coming — the vast majority of the electronics industry has already moved manufacturing to China, either in-house or outsourced to companies like Foxconn, and Nokia’s decision will add an extra layer to the ongoing question of whether Western factories can compete at all with the Asian market.

That was one of the subjects explored in a recent New York Times series focusing on Apple’s manufacturing operations, which have shifted from American factories to China over the years.

Of course, the job losses will sting — and cuts in Finland will hardly boost its standing at home. But the reality is that the company had few options: inside a generation, China has become not only one of the cheapest electronic manufacturing markets in the world, but also the one that sports the greatest amount of expertise.

Could Nokia have done anything else?

Photograph of Nokia plant in Salo, Finland, used under Creative Commons license courtesy of Flickr user uncle-leo

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12 tech leaders’ resolutions for 2012

Tue, 31 Jan 2012 17:14:37 +0000

Lose your love handles, call your mom more often, get that promotion: If you’re like many of us, you’re already thinking over some New Year’s resolutions that will make you a better “you” in 2012. But how are the tech industries’ thought leaders approaching the new year? We asked 12 of them for their resolutions and published those from Dec. 27, 2011, through Jan. 7, 2012, on gigaom.com. We have bundled them together here in a single document for the convenience of our valued GigaOM Pro readers. Be sure to check back over the coming months for further thoughts and advice from some of the tech industry’s most well-known names. Companies mentioned in this report include Sprint, Facebook and Amazon. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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Mobile virtualization: Another nail in the PC coffin

Kevin C. Tofel — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 20:18:34 +0000

There’s a trend slowly building and it may not be good for the PC industry. I’m not speaking about tablet and smartphone growth — although that’s part of the trend — but virtualization on mobile devices. This solution allows remote PC access from a tablet, for example, and could hurt already slowing PC sales.

I wouldn’t call this a new phenomenon: There have been remote access solutions on mobile devices for several years. Think of Citrix’s GoToMyPC or LogMeIn’s Ignition. These and similar services allow you to use a mobile devices to interact with the desktop of a Windows PC at home, so you could work on a Word document from an Android tablet, for example.

But virtualization is maturing, as are the mobile chips that power smartphones and tablets. This week at CES, I played a graphic-intensive PC game with stunning visuals and fast action on an Android tablet. But the game itself was actually running on a Windows desktop. Using remote access software from Splashtop on the Asus Transformer Prime tablet, you couldn’t tell. See for yourself in the video demo I captured showing the zero-lag.

Connecting a tablet or phone to remotely use your own computer is just one part of the virtualization story. OnLive has a virtualization service that lets you connect a Windows machine in the cloud. That’s not your PC, but a “PC running on the web,” so to speak. I’ve done this myself with EC2 on Amazon’s Web Services and it only cost me a few dollars a month to run an instance of Windows on a PC I can use, but don’t own: Far cheaper than buying, maintaining and powering a physical computer.

Between this new cloud streaming of computer applications and improved remote access apps, there’s less incentive to buy a new computer. Instead, you can either get more mileage out of an old computer or “rent” one that’s available in the cloud. And either of these can now be accessed by a tablet or smartphone that’s far cheaper than a new computer.

I’m not suggesting the PC industry is dead, but it is bleeding: Sales have started stagnating, and last year smartphones outsold computers, a trend that’s likely to continue, if not accelerate.

In this light, it makes sense that Intel is trying to push some smartphone activities to its new Ultrabooks. As PCs go from physical to virtual over time, consumers will have less reason to buy Intel-powered laptops and desktops, provided they have the connectivity needed to remotely access a PC from a tablet or handset.

Image credit: OnLive

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My 6 mobile productivity strategies for 2012

Kevin C. Tofel — Tue, 03 Jan 2012 20:43:19 +0000

The last four years have shown remarkable growth in smartphone ownership, which has changed the mobile landscape. Prior to 2007, few folks had smartphones, and if they did, their handsets ran on PalmOS, Windows Mobile, Symbian or BlackBerry.

These days, BlackBerry is still around, but stumbling, while Symbian is no longer a viable future platform. Instead, iOS and Android are the predominant players while Microsoft tries a second shot at this market with Windows Phone. I’ve used smartphone since before this shift and see both positive advances and new challenges. As a result, I’m rethinking my mobile toolset for 2012 using these ideas.

Cross-platform apps are now a must for me. These days I’m using both an iPhone 4S and a Galaxy Nexus. Both have pros and cons, and both are very capable devices. But I’m now at the point, where using two platforms daily is causing more stress and hassle due to apps supporting one or the other OS. I’ll still be looking for the best software solutions, but now more than ever, I’ll be more interested in an app if it runs on both of the top two mobile platforms. I loved using Instagram when my 4S arrived, but now that I also have a Nexus, I stopped using the service. I like Instapaper too, however, Evernote Clearly lets me clip or read web pages across multiple platforms.
Cross-platform apps are also a must for my family. When I was the only smartphone user in the house, app choice had no impact on my family. Now I have two kids Android smartphones and my wife totes an iPhone 4S. This scenario will become more common in the near future as household members all get smartphones and use them as “collective tools.” We need apps and services that allow us to collaborate on shopping lists, our locations, and our finances, with apps such as Cozi, Glympse and Mint.
Centralized notifications are more important than ever. With my two phones, two tablets, a laptop and desktop, the number of notifications I see daily is getting out of hand and a huge waste of time. A task reminder or bill payment alert, for example only needs to be seen one time, not once on every single device. In 2012, I’ll be searching high and low for apps that use centralized server-side notifications over client-side reminders.
I only want to read a message one time. This idea is similar to the prior: There’s simply no need in this day and age to be reading the same things over and over. We generally don’t do that with email — thank goodness — and we shouldn’t be doing so with other mobile communications methods. One of the reasons I’ve long used Echofon as a Twitter client on iOS and OS X is because it syncs tweets, DMs and mentions. Meaning: if I read those on my iPhone and later log on to Echofon on the Mac, I don’t have mark all those DMs as read again, for example. Of course, there’s no Android client for Echofon, so it’s not yet a perfect solution for me.
Continue to follow my 7 mobile mantras. I wrote these in October 2009, but they still hold true. Some are common sense, but as they say, common sense is often uncommon. Over the holidays, I ordered a spare battery for my Galaxy Nexus, I’m heavily leveraging cloud services for nearly all of my data, and I always have a backup mobile broadband solution at the ready to make sure I have access to the cloud.
Learn to get my devices to do the mundane. I don’t just mean phones, tablets and laptops; instead, I’m now looking to get these to work with other connected devices. My smart home project consists of several web-connected light switches, a thermostat and webcam. I’m now looking at apps like Tasker and Locale on Android to work with my smart home: Why manually lower the thermostat, for example, when leaving the house? I often forget to do so, but my phone “knows” I’m leaving thanks to the GPS radio, so it should do the mundane for me. I started to learn Python scripting late last year — you can learn it for free via M.I.T. — to help with this effort. There’s a wealth of opportunity here.

In the early days of smartphones, having a great software solution was good enough. And for some, it still is. But the smartphone is becoming the tool of choice by a greater number of people each day, both at the family level and beyond. As a result, the best mobile apps and solutions going forward will need to be cross-platform, collaborative and offer centralized notifications to keep us all productive without overwhelming us with too much information.

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Forecast: the future of near field communication

Thu, 22 Sep 2011 18:46:32 +0000

By 2015, the worldwide sales of NFC-equipped handsets will reach 263.6 million units, with the cumulative total at more than half a billion compatible devices. This report covers the current landscape for NFC, examines the technology’s different forms of deployment and forecasts its future. It also examines the various deployments of NFC technology — mobile payments, point of purchase, augmented reality — and the challenges businesses, carriers and handset makers face moving forward. Companies mentioned in this report include Google, TapIt, Amazon and NTT DoCoMo. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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MobileTechRoundup podcast 243

Kevin C. Tofel — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 16:50:00 +0000

CLICK HERE to download the file and listen directly.

MoTR 243 is 61 minutes long and is a 51.3 MB file in MP3 format.

HOSTS: Matthew Miller (Seattle) and Kevin C. Tofel (Philadelphia)

TOPICS:

Hands-on thoughts of the HP TouchPad webOS tablet, myTouch 4G Slide, HTC Status Facebook phone and Nokia E6
Experiences with WP Mango on a Samsung Focus and HD7
Spotify comes to the USA
Nosh launches from Grand Central founder
Looks like 2 incompatible LTE networks in the U.S.
Which tablet/platform looks to be the best challenger to the iPad?

CONTACT US: Email us or leave us a voicemail on our SkypeLine!

SUBSCRIBE: Use this RSS feed with your favorite podcatcher or click this link to add us to iTunes

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Waze prepares for its closeup with Carmageddon

Ryan Kim — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 18:00:56 +0000

While almost no one is looking forward to Los Angeles’ so-called Carmageddon, an upcoming weekend closure of one its busiest freeways, crowd-sourced traffic app Waze sees a big opportunity to shine. The Israeli company is teaming with the local ABC affiliate, which will use Waze to beef up its real-time traffic information for drivers hitting the road.

ABC will be able to tap the movements of some 180,000 local Waze users, using their information to highlight alternate routes around the 405 freeway in West Los Angeles, which is scheduled to close July 15 for construction for the entire weekend. This will supplement ABC’s existing traffic data, which uses road sensors and cameras, providing real-time information for areas on less-traveled routes which aren’t covered by ABC. Waze users agree to let their location be used by the service, which helps route people turn-by-turn around slowdowns and accidents and helps predict the time to a destination. By opting in, users not only get traffic information, but also contribute their data to the larger group of users, who can benefit from the pooled information.

Waze currently has almost 5 million users in 45 countries, but the Carmageddon partnership with ABC could be a break-out moment showing its value to not just L.A. users but consumers nationwide. The company is planning to extend its citizen journalism program, which lets news companies reach out to users in the field to ask them for data and pictures about breaking events. If Waze can prove to be valuable to both users and news stations during the Carmageddon weekend, this could convince a lot of people of the worth of crowd-sourced data and citizen journalism, and it could help Waze extend beyond its roots as a traffic tool.

The Waze partnership, however, has some limitations for ABC users. They’ll need to get their information on TV or the web before they leave, because there’s no radio component for broadcasting the ABC traffic information when people drive. ~~And the partnership seems one-way right now so Waze users won’t get ABC traffic data on their app, they’ll just be contributing to ABC’s information.~~ Waze said it’s pulling in data from the Los Angeles County Metropolitan Transportation Authority and the state Department of Transportation. And ABC will be reliant on the cell networks to bring back information, which could be loaded up if a lot of users broadcast their real-time information with Waze. Also, running the Waze app could also be a battery suck on a long ride.

But Waze, which is available on iOS, Android, BlackBerry, Nokia and Windows Mobile, is helping show how crowdsourcing and community-assisted information and opinion gathering can be a useful tool in the real world. Examples like Carmageddon can also help convince people of the benefit of sharing their data for the good of the community. Apple is interested in a similar crowdsourced traffic feature, which it mentioned during the recent location privacy issue. Waze may find Carmageddon is an opportunity to shine, but if it does really well, don’t be surprised if more competitors line up with similar services.

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The rise of tablets in the enterprise

Tue, 21 Jun 2011 07:01:01 +0000

Tablets have gone mainstream, and now those devices — from the iPad to Research in Motion’s new PlayBook — are headed to the enterprise. This trend is largely driven by end users who prefer to bring their own devices to work, which is creating a fruitful marketplace for both hardware manufacturers and app developers. This report examines the current state of tablets in the enterprise, from use cases to market drivers, and analyzes which players will be worth watching in the coming months. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Apple, Google, Samsung and Nokia. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial.

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