I have had numerous drunken discussions with people in the industry about the iPhone 2.0 release, and there are a couple of things people miss/assume just happens with an Apple launch. But let’s put the v1/v2 release into perspective.

Apple is one of the best companies in the world at whipping consumers into a frenzy over a product. I remember trawling round London for the iPod gen 1, and the only place I could find one was Harrods, which helped me be one of the first ones in the UK with an iPod, and i LOVED it. Apple makes you want to be an early adopter through PR and marketing, that is brand loyalty.

Now let’s take a look at the iPhone 1 release vs the iPhone 2 release. There are two ways to look at this; Apple made a mistake and placed the consumer price of the iPhone 1 too high, and fixed the problem with v2.

This I think is the wrong way to look at this. I personally think Apple controlled the v1 release to hardcore enthusiasts to sort out major feature requests, and software updates for the Enterprise/Full Consumer Release. Yes, a naive, and trusting perspective, but even if they didn’t do this intentionally, it has provided the fuel for the fire of a major consumer uptake of a still very disruptive mobile ecosystem. There is no joke about this, it looks like Apple is going to cream the industry with fully subsidised handsets and bloody good packages. At the last count according to Techcrunch, Apple has made $55,000 from iPhone Apps, and that’s before any iPhones ready for the apps are available (v2 and v1 Firmware upgrades).

All we need are a few killer apps (can anyone say Facebook and IM), and Apple has the capability to deliver something Microsoft couldn’t deliver in the 70s/80s, a compelling reason to purchase hardware, services and software within 2 years of an official launch.

It wasn’t a difficult thing to do, it just needed a company with the balls to change, or a new kid on the block (mobile wise) to get people queueing around the block/corner for something that is nothing more than a phone, mp3 player, internet device, app device, ahhh hell, a damn sexy piece of kit!

I was skeptical about iPhone v1, but the commercials around the whole iPhone v2 package makes it a truly consumer device with real services based revenues. I am looking forward to the comparisons of ARPU on iPhone compared to your run of the mill “normal phones”…

I wouldn’t call the acquisition a knee-jerk reaction, but I would say that Google going Open with Android would have played a part in something like this happening.

There are many reasons why it is also a good thing; the Symbian codebase is HUGE, and most Symbian developers have well rehearsed workarounds for bugs that exist in the OS. Opening up the codebase will help this, especially with the amount of Symbian developers out there.

Also, look at the success (if you can call it that) of Sun with Open Solaris. That too was a huge amount of work to open source the company’s core product, along with changing the way the company worked, it also gained a massive amount of skill from across the world from people who are passionate about the product.

The problem you have, which we always had with Linux when it started being “Enterprise Ready” was that people need to be as certain as they can be that there is someone that is responsible for anything that goes wrong with the software, and that there is a level of guarantee that problems will be fixed. The risk of relying purely on the Open Source community is that the problem may not get fixed, the system that relies on your software does not work, and the company looses out.

What this means is that some Intellectual Property may need to be used to provide a lever of service that helps with that gurantee. In the case of Linux it could be hardware manufacturer kernel extensions, in the case of the mobile industry it would be the radio chips etc.

If all IP was open, then there would be no problem, but that is never going to happen.

When there is money being made, there will always be a closed element to any Open Source/Proprietory partnership, and I think it is something that everyone will have to get used to.

Symbian/Nokia and Google will get a huge amount of benefit from the going the Open route, and the communities will feel blessed to contribute changes.

The Eclipse and Apache licences are the “Christmas Truce” in the story of Corporate Open Source, or at least the best we can hope for.

This is a very good strategic move for Nokia, as it puts then in direct opposition to Google, and they have experience and existing licensees with the manufacturers and carriers. The problem they will have, which is what happened to Sun when they Open Sourced Solaris was the sheer amount of work needed to cleanup all the code before making it public, as well as maintaining the codebase internally with a new way of working.

I doubt we will see any code for quite a while, but once it is released, I am expecting a good community to form very quickly.

Someone in M&A had their Weetabix this week I think!

and it’s in lights too…

I’ve done the impossible as far as I saw it a few years ago and totally changed careers. Quite a few people who read this blog would come here because of my old posts when I worked as an IT Architect concentrating on Open Source, my time at SUSE and the Linux books I wrote.

But others will be here for my posts on BuddyPing and the mobile world, my new job. I moved from big iron, open systems, compute clusters, and DR strategy to the tiny, closed, walled gardens to start a mobile social network. Actually, before that I did try my hand at a social network about London and also becoming an online IT retailer (for God’s sake don’t try it, the margins are too small).

A few months ago, I stopped freelancing (gotta pay the mortgage!) and spent all of my time on Ninetyten (the company I setup). The company recently took some seed funding, and we have seen great growth. I have learnt a lot over the past 2 years from talking to numerous people over beer, building our own social network, and the dreaded conference circuit.

I will be posting over the next few weeks my thoughts on social networking, mobility and the startup space in the UK. And this is the first one…

Social Networking is not just Facebook, Bebo and MySpace. Throw that idea away now, as trying to be the next “big guy” is the wrong way to start looking at a startup in this domain. A rough list of the types of social network could look something like:

Open Social Networks
A perfect example of this is MySpace. An Open Social Network is based on friendships, but sways toward pushing people to browse profiles, and then add that person as a friend. You may never have met a friend in real life on MySpace, and can end up p*ssing people off from the plethora of friend requests they get.

These social networks promote this openness through the user experience, and are sometimes used for vanity purposes (Look how many friends I have!).

Social Graphs
Mark Zuckerberg came up with the name, and it describes this type of social network perfectly. A Social Graph describes your real social network. That’s your real friends, acquaintances etc., and it is the more valuable type of social network from Facebook’s point of view, and also the user.

Because social network sites predominantly focus your interaction with the site on your social network, those links have to be strong. A Social Graph is based on the strongest relationships you have with real people. I am only friends with people on Facebook if I see a value in them (e.g. I want to see how my sister is doing at University, I want to arrange a beer with Andy), and if I know them. Unless I stop talking to my sister, or Andy drive me insane, I will find value in using Facebook to organise my social stream.

Facebook, and Social Graph based networks are utilities, and this should be the goal of any start up. Become a utility that people use, not because they are bored, but because it becomes necessary to use your tool to do something with an action.

Context Networks
A Context Based Network is something that tries to provide your social life (and the objects within it) based on contextual information. I will use BuddyPing as an example here, as it is all about on type of context; location.

BuddyPing uses your location to provide some context to the information you are looking at. At a very basic level, it is a friend finder. By aggregating your social stream’s location, we provide you with a quick way to see where all of your friends are, with maps and all that good stuff. BuddyPing is also an Open Social Network, with the bond between people being their location and distance from each other. This allows me to browse for people nearby, viewing their profile to see if they should join my network. This also works for photos (a live stream of photos being taken nearby), places (create a meetup at a place, and send it to all my friends’ mobiles).

Context is important, especially when browsing and searching for information, but is not a requirement in Social Graphs as the bonds you create are forged from existing relationships.

We chose location as it was something I have always been interested in (I like old maps OK! I’m not proud of it, but I am), and as importantly was something that could be modeled in a system. If you think about it, how would you finitely model the idea of “my mood” in a computer system? Would you browse all the profiles of people who are “bored”? How valuable would the results be?

Using context in a social network is a very interesting subject, and will be where strides will be made in the next few years on using context to personalise content in your network. Context benefits both parties, the user (personal experience) and the service provider (targeted advertising). For example, in BuddyPing we could post an ad to a user whose age and location we know, as well as the time of day. We build up a model of the user to target an ad to them. For the user, the unobtrusive (very important!) ad is content that is relevant to them. An example one of our guys gives is “I don’t want to see an ad about Pampers nappies when I’m a 28 year old beer drinker watching Coronation Street”. Ok, you won’t get the targeting right every time, but it’s a damn sight higher hit rate when you can target on multiple variables.

Push Networks

A push network is something like Twitter or Jaiku. It is a simple idea, that is extremely effective, and it solves some of the problems that come along with Open Networks. I am the root of the social network, and publish status updates, or information into a social stream. That social stream can be subscribed to by another person. When I publish information into the stream, all the subscribers receive that update, usually in an instant medium like email or SMS.

This is very heavily based on RSS, but changing the publisher from mass distribution to personal distribution, and changing the transport medium of the information.

I use Twitter to get SMS messages from the BBC Tech News stream, and it’s useful. I know some people who are constantly receiving SMS messages from the many streams they subscribe to.

It is a great idea, but usually has limited scope for expansion of the service from the basic “push information”.

Different Network Models fulfill different problems, it really isn’t just the MySpace/Bebo/Facebook. I’ll be posting more random thoughts in the next few weeks…