Influencer or the King

It is a paradigm change. It's hype with little relevance. It's the future. It's US-centric obsolete technology that the rest of the world has gone past...

The above are some of the comments associated with the iPhone. Which of the above are true? All of them? None of them?

Does the iPhone represent a minority viewpoint (US / IT press) or is it a trend of things to come?

iPhone has been a game-changer with innovations including:

• Native applications that are custom built to take advantage of the platform capabilities (Gartenberg's comments, analyst with Interpret)
• Smartphone platform (App store and iPhone SDK) being an integral enabler of the smartphone value
• Device that lends itself into app download and mobile browsing. Though iPhone has about 10% of the smartphone marketshare, it commands a disproportionate 32% of mobile internet market share (Source: Admob). Nokia has 40% market share of mobile devices and a similar share of the mobile internet market.
  
• Did Apple open the pandora's box with their App Store. Though we've had 1.5 billion downloads to-date, Juniper predicts that the industry would reach an annual 20 billion app downloads per year by 2014! (Source: Juniper Research and Mobile Innovation)
  

On the other hand, iPhone is a footnote in many international markets for some of these reasons:

• Would an audience used to cutting-edge hardware, such as, 12 Megapixel camera, settle for the 3 Megapixels that iPhone offers?
• Would the global market place used to variety of smart phones to select from settle for a model-of-the-year offering from iPhone?
• Can the tail wag the dog? Can US consumers with only 8% of smart phone market share or iPhone with 10% global market share challenge the market leader Nokia
  

Apple and iPhone are today's shiny toys. The question is whether they will continue to change the nature of the smart phone market place while lingering in the back, or will they mount an attack and displace the leader Nokia?

What are your thoughts?

ITSO mobile phones

It was heartening to read about the field trials of ITSO compliant phones (Consult Hyperion) in UK. ITSO is an industry organization to promote interoperability between UK Passenger Transport Authorities / Operators and related organizations.

ITSO was formed to build and maintain a specification for secure 'end to end' inter-operable ticketing transactions, utilising relevant ISO and emerging CEN standards.
[From ITSO - About Us ]

In the contactless space, UK seems to be speeding ahead of the traditional smart card leader, France. The payments cards deployment and now a standardized inter-operable transit solution, UK is putting in place the basic building blocks

It is interesting to note that both the payments space and ITSO provide support for loyalty. However, there is no standard, that I am aware of, for loyalty on smart cards (at least for applet interaction between 'card' and 'reader'). Support for loyalty by both standards recognizes the valuable grease for the wheel. However, lack of standards in the loyalty space might indicate a choke point for commercial scalability.

O2 is the operator who is the common thread for both the payments field trials in London, and the ITSO trials with the NoWcard. It would be interesting if Venyon, the OTA service provider for the London payments field trials, is also involved in the ITSO field trials (though not mentioned in the CHYP website). Finally, it would not be surprising to find out that the O2 SWP phones (SIM as a secure element) used in the payments field trials is being used in the ITSO trials as well.