I’m touched

As a foodie and amateur chef with a passion for Digital, I can’t help but be touched, specially when this comes from one of the biggest talents in my home town.

It is no secret that Digital in general and Mobile in particular are changing the way we understand and consume technology, and it is helping businesses transform their business model by enabling completely new ways of engaging Customers and helping create new products, services and completely transforming the Customer experience.

This photo of Arzak is courtesy of TripAdvisor

I have always believed in Gastronomy being a holistic experience, one that goes far beyond the quality that gets delivered on the plate, but rather comes from every single detail in the venue, the attention and knowledge of the staff and dozens of other subtleties that make up an experience. Everywhere I see the word experience I wonder how Digital can help transform and enhance it, and I have to admit this is just one space where I struggled to find a way for doing so. Until now.

This is just a completely unexpected and lovely way of using Digital to improve the experience in one of the best tables in the world. Arzak, featuring three Michelin Stars, is using iPads to help gourmet diners dive into a more immersive experience by serving culinary creations on tablets showing images that follow the theme. Sea images for food and fire for grilled meat are just two examples.

I’m touched. And booked for my next trip home.

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There is no 2 without 3

Apple iPad

This might be true from multiple points of view when it comes to the naming of the yet to be unveiled iPad 3. It seems that not only will Apple release the 3rd version of the popular tablet as early as in a few weeks time from now, but also that more than one version of it will be available at the same time. This somehow breaks the evolution of the iPad product so far and might be a sign of the popularity the Amazon Kindle Fire is enjoying.

Up to now, the iPad and most of its competitors have been positioned too closely, with this being the reason for the failure of most of them. Kindle, however, is probably on a class of its own. For the moment… Obviously Kindle is not meant to be a replacement to the iPad, as sales figures of the Apple product seem to prove, however, it might have uncovered a gap in Cupertinos product line, where there might be room for a lower spec iPad in between the iPhone and the high-end iPad 3.

Yet to be seen is whether this strategy would pay off for Apple, as Amazon seems to be way ahead covering the low end of the market, with sales figures in excess of one million units per week.

It would also be interesting to see how Apple will approach the developer community, as it looks like now applications will have to be available for multiple screen resolutions and screen sizes.

OS Wars vs Patent Wars

The Patent Wars

The holidays are now over, so time to resume the activity after the holiday break. However, August has not been as quiet as it normally is, at least in the Mobile Industry, well, it was, until Google announced by mid month that they where acquiring Motorola’s mobility to seriously jump into the hardware industry and give yet more power to the Android platform they have been developing over the last few years. Although boosting Android (see stats below) is the main official reason behind the operation, Motorola’s vast portfolio of patents has surely played a role in the decision, specially after the war started earlier this year when Apple and a number of other manufacturers, including Microsoft and RIM teamed to acquire other patent portfolios, something which was publicly criticized by Google.

This comes in a moment where Android is clearly becoming the rival to fear for Apple’s omnipresent iOS powering their iPhones and iPads. While SmartPhone sales rocket literally on every market, Android surpassed iPhone in market penetration on a global basis, after it had already done so in the US in November 2010. If we include tablets into the equation, Apple still leads the way.

But not everything seems to be a honeymoon after Google’s announcement. Even though Google claims to have gained agreement with the main phone makers using Android, looks like behind the lines some of them are not too happy about Google entering into competition with them in their traditional marketplace. Maybe casually, only two weeks later Samsung announced a new set of devices using the Bada Operating System, the Waves Y, M and 3.

Probably this will not mean that Bada will gain enough market penetration to threaten Android’s leading market position, but from an application development and marketing perspective, definitely is something to keep an eye on, as this could potentially degrade into an OS war.

When facing the marketing, product definition and development of a mobile application, one of the key decisions to take is the platforms to support. Every business will have different target audiences, and the multiplicity of platforms has a great impact on the total cost of ownership of the mobile software products companies provide. It is not only the different skills needed for development, but also the different user experiences that each platform provides, as well as the increasing complexity of testing, customer support, incident management, etc. This is clearly being a barrier for some other platforms to gain growth in the number of available applications in their respective application stores and markets, as corporations will need a minimum number of customers to justify the development and maintenance costs for a specific platform.

Time will tell wether this evolves into an OS war, or wether the market continues the consolidation under the two -for the moment- winners.

The impact of the pad

Apple iPad

It has now been a while since tablets made their way through. The concept has been flying around for some time, but only came to become a massive thing in April 2010 after Apple presented the iPad in public. It has been hardly 18months since then, and now the market is fully populated by a number of manufacturers which are pushing different visions of the concept into the market.

When you look at the evolution of the super-sized iPhone, it is really surprising to see how fast and deep it has come into our lives. From the original and probably most widely use of the pad as a browsing device, news reader and of course, gaming companion, there has been an incredible evolution in the uses of not only the iPad but the tablet concept in general.

Now most of the companies publishing consumer applications for SmartPhones are developing specific variants for tablets making good use of the larger screen and interaction capabilities of these devices. Look at Banks and you will see a fierce competition to target applications to their higher end customers based on tablets, where the graphical capabilities and the touch-based interaction model redefine a completely new stage in user experience.

But all of the above is just the somehow natural (although fast) evolution in the usage of the technology. However, there is one other aspect of this technology that looks very interesting to me, and is the impact these devices (and why not recognize it, specifically the iPad) is having in the Enterprise world.

It seems that the way Execs have fallen in love with the device is helping drive the way into the Enterprise at a speed and path that is breaking most of the existing paradigms. The debate is no longer whether a device is appropriate or not for its introduction into the Enterprise, but rather the other way around. And this is happening really quickly. So now employees are allowed to use their iPads at work, capture notes in meetings, read email in their tablets rather than in their corporate laptops and do almost everything except probably content (documents, presentations, spreadsheets) without the need of a full blown computer.

How many laptops could you see in a meeting of the Board?. You would be surprised by the number of iPads. Does this have a real impact in decission making and access to information in these forums? Very probably yes. So this is being a real driver with real examples out there like Standard Chartered Bank.

So this new revolution is bringing to life concepts like Bring your own device and Self Service IT with which large Corporations have been struggling for some time, but all of this seems to be finding a fast track as the demand from the technology comes top down, which is just the contrary to how normally technology gets into an Enterprise. Can this be the next big thing?.