Apple iOS 5 - To Be or not To Be

In the backdrop of Steve Jobs introduction of the iCloud and iOS 5.0 at the WWDC 2011 conference it is interesting to see the feature set of iOS 5 in the context of the Appstore developer community and the Appstore market.

The primary features of the iOS 5 are, Notification Center, iMessage, Newsstand and Reminders.

Notification center essentially lets you see all the recent notifications pertaining to calls, sms, email all on a single interface and thereby direct access to the respective application. Also twitter messages can be invoked in any interface of the iOS and does not require you to cut and paste the content to the twitter app. Newsstand is a repository of books, papers and magazines wherein registered magazines are seamlessly and automatically downloaded to the Newstand for easy reading. Reminders can be set on tasks which are based on time, place and context and moreover location based reminders can be set using the sensory system of the phone. iMessage gives opportunity to do free messaging across iphone, ipad etc. simlar to Blackberry Mobileme service.

These are some of the 200 odd features of the iOS 5 and further illustration of the features can be seen at the Apple website http://www.apple.com/ios/ios5/gallery.html

All well and good...however as I observe these features or similar type of applications are developed by the Appstore developer community. Eg. ibooks, foursquare and many other messaging and productivity apps. On the one hand Apple kindles the innovativeness by promoting the Appstore and developer eco-system, on the other Apple embeds similar features in the iOS to be in step with the market as illustrated above - thereby stifling innovation. Clearly the iOS has to be a lean and an agile framework, and more importantly Apple should attempt to promote their products and services by leveraging and promoting their best in class apps found in the Appstore. Undoubtedly the 80:20 rule should play in the Appstore market where 20% of the Apps are generating 80% of the revenue.

Google heats up the Game Market

After years of not caring, Google yanked all the console emulators from the Android Market. Never fear, however, you can find them many of them (for free even!) at the off-market Android store SlideMe.

Yongzh, the guy behind some of the most popular Android emulators around–including Nesoid, SNesoid, and GameBoid–dusted himself off after being booted from the Android Market and put his emulators up on SlideMehttp://bit.ly/ioYBg8 (source howtogeek.com).

Where 2.0

In the middle of observations that iOS4 operating system tracks the user location from the Apple iPhone and collects in a database in an unencrypted format, the Where 2.0 conference was held in the Santa Clara, USA last week, which saw giants such as Facebook, Google and LBS providers such as Foursquare, Groupon discussing there strategy in terms of location based services. www.where2conf.com

Despite the downside in privacy concerns in location based services, as enunciated above in the Apple cases (Apple eventually rebutts the claim saying there only collecting hotspot information from phones), there is a widespread traction and relevance to location based services in Smartphones. The location information and the corresponding context of the location in terms of the user preference and social and crowd sourced information surrounding the location presents a value proposition, which differentiates the smart phone from other conventional phones no matter what the access technology is (2G,3G,WiFi and LTE).

Increasingly application service providers will tap this value proposition, to create myraid services for diverse lifestyles, entertainment, productivity etc based on IP technology. I envision there will application specific smart phones having specific characteristics such as sensory, memory, etc. to address a particular need, which would go beyond the need to using the smartphone only for voice communication purposes. The smartphone would progressively be less costly to afford such solutions in the long term.

In this context the service providers thought process and business model would be interesting to see, in how they address this burgeoning market.

The advent of the Tablet PC....

Two weeks back Steve Jobs, introduced the newes iPad, termed the iPad 2. Some of the unique features in the new iPad are the front and back camera support, less weight and form factor, improved pixels density, and improved processing capability compared to the older iPad. However compared to the other tablets in the market such as Motoral Xoom the iPad 2 is still under spec in terms of processing power.

The unique selling point, in the success of the iPad story is the intuitive user interface, which is seamlessly extended from the iPhone to the iPad. This USP and the cloud based Appstore portends a great future to Apple and other similar products.

Almost a decade ago SUN microsystem was promoting its mid range unix variant servers and PC's to the market on the notion of the 'Network is the Computer'. However a decade has passed with the user device taking centre stage with Network being subservient and moulding to the requirement and necessities of the device and content which is delivered to the devices/users.

The Network Service providers delivering internet services to customers has to be conscious of the end user requirements on the one hand, and constantly re-engineering the network to the vagaries and demands these devices pose in terms of the signalling and traffic to the network, on the other. A correct judgement on the user base/applications and device planning will be mandatory for NSP's to the plan their Base station, IP-RAN, backhaul and core requirements. From an application perspective the necessary PCEF and PCRF infrastructure will also be of a high necessity as in the present context The 'Application is the Network'.

Relevance of Policy Server to Mobile Networks

The upsurge of social application on mobile phones, and proliferation of multi media services has created a strain on the mobile network to deliver these services to customers at a required quality of experience. The mobile traffic has increased exponentially and disproportianately compared to the increase in the customer base, thus requiring major investment in capacity and infrastructure (CAPEX). This has in turn eroded into service provider margins. The recent issues in AT&T who are solely delivering 3G services for iPhone customers is a case in point.

These experiences has necessitated mobile providers to rethin their network operational strategy. At central in this would be the service providers requirement to address performance management at the RAN, IP-NW, Transport and Application level. However a 3G provider who buys IP access/transport from another network would have a daunting task in achieving this. Notwithstanding this fact, the providers requirement would be to have Performance Management Systems that integrate with the above mentioned elements to ascertain whether they meet the required KPI's and feed such information to PCRF and Polcy Servers. This action would enable mitigatory steps for optimized 3G channel management, Intelligent load balancing of data traffic to determine traffic management directions/traffic offload, and offload of traffic from 3G to WiFi depending on the customer location. In my analysis Tekelec works in this space

Another important element in the context of mobile internet delivery is what is described as Mobile Internet Gateway. This device which is well integrated to the Policy Servers, enable application delivery optimization on a per App level, Ad-insertion re-purposing and traffic policing and shaping. Some of the products which are provided in this space are by ByteMobile, Openwave, Comverse and Flash Networks. These in most respects achieve the enforcement part in the PCEF functionality.

The Subscribe Data Management functionality forms an integral part in profiling services to customers/subscribers. This has relevance in looking at the attributes in service top up, service enablement, service feature management. What would typically be in this case is an LDAP repositry slaved off the IT/Billing system master, and in instances for green field operators is an HSS providing IFC service definition criterion. The SDM would integrate with the Policy Servers/PCRF to deploy the policies at the PCEF from a per subscriber perspective.

In looking at this, it appears that the dynamism in 3G traffic managementis is highly unpredicateble, and can be influenced by so many factors such as demand for certain killer apps, location and event specific situations, social and demographic conditions. Also for countries where the network is diverse a renewed operational model may need to be looked at where different networks (players) look at a certain niche of the functionality (eg. transport/access/policing and service management) on a well sounded managed service model. With the degree of virtualization at the service and network level this could be a stark reality!!!

Cloud To The Rescue...

To the readers, I recount a real life story of how cloud based applications had saved the skin of my mate in the garment industry, in beating the power cut..and making his day. This is what I mean by the power of the cloud. Enjoy reading.

"It was last sunday evening when a very important video conference was scheduled at 9 pm SL time with me, my designer in SL, and the clients in the US. My designer had finished his layout, and I was busy making the presentation on work/delivery and financial schedule in my PC. Just at around 8:45 pm there was a power cut in our woods, and after many a call was able to get to the Electricity provider call centre. Just the usual, keep your fingers crossed power will be back in no time, was the answer. It was too much of a risk in banking on the guys, and the risk of rescheduling the con-call for another day would have resulted in lost business.

Knowing that most of our apps and data are synchronized in our intranet and with a cloud provider in the US, I had a dart to the local coffee shop (coffee bean) with my laptop and iPhone. Luckily there was generator power. I got connected to the WiFi (free of course), and connected upto the company VPN. Lo and behold I was able to salvage my Sharepoint Portal and power point files and I seamlessly re-scheduled the con-call to start at 9:15pm to recover on lost time due to the power episode. The Webex was hosted in the cloud somewehere in the US.

At 9:15 pm pronto I had a call back to my VoIP client on my laptop. Since my VOIP number was configured on my laptop and iPhone, I had the option of either using the iPhone or laptop, but decided on the latter. The Webex was synched to the cloud based VOIP service provider, for voice/data archival and I was told for company compliance. So there I started my presentation with my designer, and the clients in US, on a wet and quiet Sunday evening in colombo, whilst sipping a Caffe Mocha. The only damage was the Rs. 400/= for the caffe mocha".

Google TV...Is this the next best thing to happen to TV

Google has launched "smart" TV, a service that merges surfing on the Internet with surfing TV channels. The technology company has joined forces with Sony, Intel and Logitech International. Google wants to turn televisions into giant monitors for Internet browsing so it can make more money selling ads (todayonline.com).

Google has built a consortium of key partners, i.e. Best Buy, Logitech, DISH network, Adobe, and Intel to take this concept of the Web to TV a reality, and as per DISH web site, the service with Google integration is slated this fall in the US.

The Logitech Set Top Box receiver presumably having a high degree of influence from Intel ATOM processors, Adobe and the Android OS in the way that the content is presented in an admixture of TV and Web, and further, the google search engine technology giving an interface to search and correlate content of the TV and Web, the question of how Open..Is Open? comes into mind. Where as Apples has been driven by the notion of One device (iphone,ipad), One technology (AMD,xcode,Objective-C), and one Appstore (for third party development)...Google is driven by a philosophy of opening the O/S, and API/SDK centric development environment for third party app developers. Obviously leveraging some of their own core products, such as you-tube, Google Maps, G-Mail and G-Talk etc.

From a TV perspective, how open is this ? In light of the above development the following points in my view is really relevant

(1) How open is this platform, to embrace many other STB and OEM manufacturers (where some of them may be non INTEL based) eg. Ant,Microsoft which are widely used.

(2) Can the search technology be extended at the point of content ingestion. Eg. what your Friends in FB thought about a scene in an on demand movie. Replying your comment back to your wall about the VoD.

(3) How will this influence standards such as IMS, OpenIPTVforum which are founded on voice,video and internet convergence.

(4) Can search be integrated to the MPEG4 meta-data layer.

These are few of the points which lurk in my mind...is this the next best thing to happen to TV...your guess is as good as mine.