Modular Mobile Phones

In a previous post, I talked about mobile handphone being an integrated product as we traditionally see it. Personalization/Flexibility and Mobility are the  two significant opposing forces playing their part in shaping the integrated Vs modular architectures. However, convergence of computing and enternatinment into handheld terminals or (most ubiquitous handphones)  bring in a lot of software, content and service performance and quality attributes to be considered hence affecting user needs and in turn designs and architectures by manufacturers.  Therefore HW and SW architectures (let go of services at the moment) are both important in settling the handphones systems architecture.   

Here is one clear exception; a fully modular tiny mobile phone Modu Mobile by Modulmobile based in Israel. An Israeli company (Hmm…I just found it is the same company ) was the first to bring flash memory and similarly modularity in mobiles it can be another disruptive concept.  However, it seems they are still trying as having launched in early 2008, nothing significant is heard on the mobile scene about them. Maybe the global economic crisi has taken its toll on this and scene may change after some time. Check out the product on homepage! it looks sexy, slim, delivers customizable performance and features as per varying user needs then where is the bottleneck. I think it will be on the architecture and openness of content, applications and services as smartphones are also facing pressure towards openness for development platforms… Then what should each module contain (HW and SW) and provide …isn’t a generic PC power in handheld size enough to do anything…. Will we really need modularity in handphones?  

ModulMobile  has recently launched an office in Korea during may 2008, trying to tap “industrial design and mechanical engineering activities, drawing on the large pool of design talent and manufacturing skills on offer in the region. The Korean team will be responsible for all aspects of product design for modu and modu jackets, including user interfaces, industrial and mechanical design, and engineering”, as posted at Businessweek. I am not sure, what do they mean by user interfaces, Whether they are or or they do include the creativity and software design skills which may not be abundantly avilable in the region.

At times, when established players like Nokia, Samsung and others have to follow with similar designs and products after Apple launched the i-phone  a highly integrated hardware and software product (yes we can call it as their software platform is also closed), it will be interesting to see how Modul Mobile will fit in into and affect product/system  arhcitectures of future. Sony Ericsson and Philips already seems interested… Read more on similar topic at BusinessWeek 

Personalized Unified Web Portal and/or Profiling Service

I am a regular and frequent seasoned user of tons of services from yahoo, MSN, google, wordpress, linkedin,  facebook, flickr  and many more persoanlized work palce services yet others which are not very common especially related to academics and research. I have to signup for an endless plethora of websites…have to login twenties of time per day for different services and jump between sites. This makes me wonder:

Does not that bring up need for a global web profiling service where websites can interact with the server to collect and verify information in a particualr format…Yes, there will be authenticiation, verification and security issues but that is for the techies and system arhitects to take care of…

Second, can there be a unique unified web service/portal putting all of these services  together as a personailzed website fro me where i can just click and move between my requirements….Doesn’t that sound effcient? (Don’t suggest… I already run my personal web page containing all the quick links for first clicks ) 

I am not a user of tons of devices so am not going to talk about Ubiquitous or “Anytime, Any Device, Any service, Anywhere”  but what i mentioned above is something primitive to that…isn’t it?

On a separate note, I am sure the servers at many places know my habits and patterns better or more than I do by now, then what is taking them long enough to facilitate the user in persoalization (across the full web space)? Are there probelms with technology or potential cooperative business models … My guess more important is the later one where companies yet have to figure out many things….

East Asian Miracle

The  1993 World Bank Report titled on the subject and its intense criticism on epmirical data and explanations had remained at the centre of debate for a while in mid 1990s. Special attention remained on the government intervention versus free markets  for forming industrial policies or sector specific regulation and controls. Where earlier criticsms had brought out the weaknesses in the report, there were few criticsms in the wake of 1997 East Asian Crises. In this context, following was a very relevant and comprehensive update on East Asian Miracle by Ha-Joon Chang in 1999 at a WB workshop ( a bit old). Worth reading… wbip-pdf

National strategies for technology adoption in the industrial sector

 The subject paper of Sanjaya Lall (2001) was the background paper for UNDP’s Human Development Report 2001 and is the one which presents an excellent review and reference for hi-level technology policy development in developing countires. It builds mainly on data from his 2000 paper referenced below, but concretizes his previous theoretical contributions on technological capability and catching up since late 80s.

2001_lall_national-strategies-for-technology-adoption-in-the-industrial-sector2

Lall, S. (2000) ‘The technological structure and performance of developing country manufactured exports, 1985-98’, Oxford Development Studies, 28(3).

Mobile Handsets Innovation

If viewed from modularity theory (Clark and Baldwin, 2000) lens, typically, handphones can be viewed as integrated products. There is non-existent possibility and trend for upgrading memory, replacing display or changing its size, adding or dropping user desired features and likes. There are many trade-offs a user may have to  make on features when buying a mobile phone. This mainly stems from the fact that there are fewer loose linkages between assembies and components where as  tight linkages within components on an assembly/component serving certain functions. HW and SW technologies both serve togther to provide the functionality of the mobile phones. However, it seems whereas the HW is nearing its limits or standardization/dominant design  (in terms of product architecture and modules) SW is still volatile as it is intangible.  An increased generic information and media processing capacity within phones can be moulded to provide any features based on differentitaion and strength of software capabilities by vendors ( How do you look at I-phone?). Yet, tightly coupled mobile SW allows limited user selection and usage of desired features. We can say, room exists for architectural innovation (Henderson and Clarke, 1990).  This raises many questions from many aspects with implications for strategy at firm and industry level, which i am not going to raise here now…you may ponder and lets share as and if we progress!…  

These days  one of the areas I am exploring  is modularity vs. integration in mobile handsets especially smartphones. I found an interesting web article from Visionmobile on Mobile Software Management which is not related to what i am doing but is an interested reading… I will try to keep posting…though its difficult to keep up… I know…

Artcile follows from here on….

What if handset features could shape and evolve with the user? the user side of mobile software management by Andreas Constantinou

Today s mobile handsets are highly underutilized; beyond calling and texting, tens of typical handset features go unused. Are handsets over-featured, crammed with capabilities that leave most users indifferent ?

Why can t the user today pick a handset based on style and then choose the features they would like to include, much like choosing the extras for a new car? Why are today s handsets most limited; why can t you transfer a game from a friend s handset? Why can t you get FM radio functionality on a new 400 smartphone?

The answers lie in how the handset software is designed, built and managed through the handset lifetime. Whereas software inside most phones is highly sophisticated, at the same time it is practically shaped into a rigid monolith.

In a sense, the phone software from birth to retirement suffers from chronic arteriosclerosis; for all its PC similarities, the software is mostly immutable and unmanageable, only fit for the narrowly-defined purpose for which it was designed two years before being sold.

At the same time, the user is little interested on how the handset menus can be coloured red, orange, blue or magenta by the mobile operator, but how the phone could be made a bit more friendly and a bit more personalised.

More….

You can read my two cents in this article run by CIOPakistan during Nov, 2008.

Outsource or Inhouse

November 21, 2008 

What role does cost play in the decision to choose one strategy over the other?
Here’s the situation so far: there is a global economic crisis for which companies need to cut costs; the US elections are taking place later this month, which will help to determine a formal stance of US companies on outsourcing and offshoring; Pakistan is going through its own set of challenges and the global sentiment to work with the country or companies in it, isn’t all that positive.

2009 conferences in Innovation, MoT, STI Policy, ICT Policy

Conferences of my interest during 2009… Maybe for you too….I am targetting to submit to PICMET , Asialics and CPRSouth4. PICMET ; 2 abstracts accepted…full papers due…

1. EuroCPR, 29-31 March, 2009, Seville, Andalusia
2. IAMOT , April 5-9, 2009, Orlando Florida, USA,
3. Asialics , 6-7 July 2009, Hong Kong University of S&T, HongKong
4. PICMET, August 2-6, 2009, Portland, Oregon, USA,
5. Globelics , October 6-8, 2009, Dakar, Senegal
6. CPRSouth4, Dec, 2009, Colombo, SriLanka (To be announced)
7. IEEE International Technology Management Conference (ITMC 2009), July 19–22, 2009,Waltham (Boston), MA, USA (to be announced)
8. IEEE Technology Management Conference—China (TMC-China 2009), September 13–16, 2009
   Location: Shanghai, P.R. China (to be announced)
9. IEEE Technology Management Conference—Japan (TMC-Japan 2009), October, 2009, Tokyo, Japan (to be announced)
10. ICIMT 2009 : International Conference on Innovation, Management and Technology 27 May 2009, Tokyo Japan
11. IEEM 2009: IEEE International Conference on Industrial Engineering and Engineering Management, Hong Kong Dec 8-11, 2009.
12. ICIGTI 2009: International Conference on Industrial Globalization and Technology Innovation, Xian-China, Aug 19, 2009.
13. EuroMOT 2009: European Conference on Management of Technology, September 6th-8th, Glasgow, Scotland.
14. CINet 2009:  Continuous Innovation Network (CINet) Conference, Brisbane, Australia, 4-8 September, 2009. 
15. 2009 ISPIM Conference – The Future of Innovation  , Vienna, Austria on 21-24 June 2009

Grad Students; Three laws of graduation

Funny! Enjoy the following…

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics/archive.php?comicid=221

Standardization in a networked world…

What are the strategic options and business models that are going to work? Prof. Rebecca Henderson at MIT talks about ”Dynamics of the strategic space” in this video lecture.

http://mitworld.mit.edu/play/272/

I found it pretty interesting and useful to develop my understanding about linking firm strategy to standardization in the ICT domains. The relavant slides are also avialable from her Technology Strategy Course at MIT Open Courseware.

If the world is flat then it is a multi storey world.

Thomas L Friedman’s 2005 book title “The world is flat” is too good to be true. He insisits that a level playing field is being offered by the forces of globalization. In his article for NYT he quoted as oen of the exmaples  where InfoSys can access its global supply chain within a video conferencing room and threatening to provide every service in Bangalore for a customer in USA. Further, he well describes Gloablization 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0.

Quoting Marc Andersson of Napster he is too excited to mention the power of nfomation access and usage by everyone having a laptop : “Andreessen is touching on the most exciting part of Globalization 3.0 and the flattening of the world: the fact that we are now in the process of connecting all the knowledge pools in the world together. We’ve tasted some of the downsides of that in the way that Osama bin Laden has connected terrorist knowledge pools together through his Qaeda network, not to mention the work of teenage hackers spinning off more and more lethal computer viruses that affect us all. But the upside is that by connecting all these knowledge pools we are on the cusp of an incredible new era of innovation, an era that will be driven from left field and right field, from West and East and from North and South. Only 30 years ago, if you had a choice of being born a B student in Boston or a genius in Bangalore or Beijing, you probably would have chosen Boston, because a genius in Beijing or Bangalore could not really take advantage of his or her talent. They could not plug and play globally. Not anymore. Not when the world is flat, and anyone with smarts, access to Google and a cheap wireless laptop can join the innovation fray.

When the world is flat, you can innovate without having to emigrate. This is going to get interesting. We are about to see creative destruction on steroids. “

This is the point where i think he goes wrong by oversimplifying. Globalization is enforcing appropriability and IPR regimes as well. Sharing what level and type of content or knowledge is important. The access to core technological and design knowledge is being restricted and controlled tightly as a natural requirement for the market forces because knowledge has the characteristics of a public good.  At an individual level yes it may spur some process or incremental innovation but radical innovation (the very desirable incentive and output for entreprenuership) is being locked by national, international and regional regimes.

source: http://www.globalcultures.net/worldblog/

If the world is flat then,  it is a multi level/storey world where nations are at differenet flat levels needing ladders to climb up to higher levels.

In, ”Kicking away the ladder” 2002, Ha Joon Chang  has preseneted this vew of globalization where advanced nations having used inteventionist regimes are now opening it up and promoting free market so that laggrds cannot climb up.

On top of that in my opinion the biggest kick to these ladders (including access to knowledge) is opening up markets yet strengthening the IPR regimes. This way the followers markets can be accessed but they cannot access the knowledge necessary to make use of their increased access to advanced markets. Obviusoly, I am not talking of your individual access to Wikipedia and Google.

Who do you beleive and agree with is your prerogative…. I go for Ha Joon…