Human Excellence and Device (Mobile phone) Excellence

Human excellence and Device (Mobile phone) excellence:

Yesterday, I had been to the Ramakrishna Math and brought one book “Personality development through Human excellence”. On the first page of this book there is a quotation from Swami Vivekananda:

“Teach yourselves, teach everyone his real nature, call upon the sleeping soul and see how it awakes. Power will come, glory will come, goodness will come, purity will come, and everything that is EXCELLENT will come, when this sleeping soul is roused to self conscious activity”

How wonderful!

If one has a look around their workplace, government, community etc., they would find that we have so much of potential but no one is willing to realize or exploit it. Still every company talks about human resource scarcity (especially in the IT domain).

Is the scarcity real or is it a delusion persisting for the lack of awakened souls?

Not many organizations or managers of resource pool are focusing on the strengths of resource. Instead of working on the positives of a resource people are too busy worrying about negative points and shortcoming and trying to find a replacement for the resource as whole. Hence starts the cycle of organization searching for that right fit for a position and persons search for the right organization that can exploit his/her full potential.

No wonder the industry seems to be galore of blind dates but no marriages. There hardly are any long-term commitments let alone the lifetime loyalties as in a marriage.

Flourishing Industry is the manifestation of excellence in people- excellence of body, mind and soul. No industry can sustain only on the strength of money or machine sans quality personnel.

For a moment, lets correlate this phenomenon of underutilized resource qualities to the underutilized feature set of the handset devices that the industry is struggling with.

So many phones with so many applications pushed on the baffled user.

There are WAP browsers, Sync software, Email clients, MMS, Video-streaming and Mobile TV. What percentage of phone owners needs these features? Few. How many actually use this feature frequently? Fewer.

Most of the phones currently carry high-end but nobody-uses features.

These are the most expensive software applications in our mobile phones and companies are spending hundred’s of thousand USD on licensing these solutions from 3^rd party software providers and integrating them with their existing solutions.

Does not make much sense to me.

Every mobile phone company is talking about cheap phones but they just want to reduce number and cost of hardware components and software applications from their phone.

But then again, what kind of phone you can sell in the market depends on whether it makes enough economic sense for mobile network operator and answers specific needs of the end user.

Already less then 20 USD phone subscribers are giving a very low ARPU (Average Revenue Per User) and if there are no distinctive features that user needs like option to download ringtone, picture messages, mobile payment, ticket booking, etc. no one will gain.

User will own such a phone but soon desire to throw it away. Operator won’t appreciate such phone much as they will not make any money, unless of-course the prices are very low. (yet again, how low is very low?)

OEMs will squeeze themselves to get the loss making market share.

So what’s the way out?

We’ll talk about some possible solutions in our next blog or all the readers are welcome to put their thoughts and suggestions on this topic.

And as Betaal warns Vikram after the story telling session, “Vikram, if you know the answer to this and you still keep quiet, your head will explode into pieces”.

At Least Lets all strive to be like the awakened and the knowing Vikramaditya.

Sunil

Mobile Software market

A lot of harbinger about emerging market for mobile phones and when it come to developing nations it becomes very important for mobile phone OEMs (Original Equipment Manufacturers) and ODMs (Original Design manufacturers) to keep the cost very low.

Well, How low is “very low”? And just how can the OEMs keep the phone costs down?

Not an easy one!

Primarily two approaches viz.

1. Keep the BOM (Bill of Materials) cost very low.

It mainly depends upon the reference design providers like Texas Instruments, Philips, Infineon, Skyworks and various small vendors. All of them are now talking about single chip solutions for the mobile phone with less number of components. That would lead to lower costs

2. Sleek but rich software solution, which provides differentiating applications and look –n-feel.

How is that possible? When you go for better look and feel and features, memory always becomes an issue and it increases the BOM cost. That is a challenge for the smart software architects and engineers.

Another challenge at the software front it score better on time to market and be dynamic for the fast changing market needs.

There is a growing need for customized solutions for the target market segment at reasonably lower cost, which the bigger players cannot address given their high operation costs and even higher inertia.

What kind of market is available for the ULC phones?

By 2008:

1. India will be having around 140 mn ULC phones.

2. Latin American countries will be having 275 mn ULC phones.

3. Other Asia-pacific developing countries will be having around 210 mn ULC phone.

4. Africa will be having 160 mn ULC phones.

5. Middle east will be having around 60 mn mobile ULC phones.

It shows that market is huge and there is a great opportunity for ULC to mid end customized phone category, where you can provide customized solution for the target segment market.

What are the different features would be need to for these markets?

Let’s take India as an example:

Innovative UI->

The UI is challenging handset manufacturers, as mobile phones are increasingly handling advanced applications and featuring sophisticated functions that support the mobile lifestyles of their owners. This makes the design of the UI increasingly complex, while the pressure to reduce time-to-market has not diminished. Device vendors need to increase their flexibility to better respond to rapid changes in the mobile handset market as the UI has become central to the success of next generation mobile services. Indeed, vendors are facing strong pressure from operators and service providers to adapt the UI with customized features to ease the usability of services and facilitate the promotion of branded content.

For data services->

The slow growth of mobile data services is currently embarrassing major players in the wireless industry. The unexpectedly slow take-up of these services is partly due to poor user experiences with existing handsets, while the new generation of devices has been slated by users because of their unworkable UIs. As such, an efficient and easy-to-use UI is a determining factor for the success of mobile handset devices. It is also vital for the adoption of both operator-specific wireless services and wireless Internet services.

Voice only services->

SMS based value added services->

We’ll add more data in our next blog, so keep watching and putting your feedback/research in to this topic.

Are the software professional ready to take up the challenge?

Sunil and Lekh