UNTETHER.tv

It seems like AT&T gets a kick out of rocking the ‘unlimited data price plan’ boat. At the Milken Institute’s Global Conference last week, CEO Randall Stephenson admitted that he should have eliminated unlimited data plans sooner. Randall said, “I wish we had moved quicker to change the pricing model to make sure that people that were consuming the bandwidth were paying for the bandwidth. And so we had a model where the high-end users were being subsidized by the low-end users.”

AT&T started to roll out its “network management program” in 2011. As part of this initiative, the carrier began in March of 2012 to alert unlimited data plan customers of their usage, as well as throttle their consumption, all to migrate these customers onto tiered data plans. Unsurprisingly, customers were outraged at the move and the resulting spike in per MB costs. To save face, AT&T posted an explanation and defense of its decision online.

Welcome to This Week in Location Based Marketing where we rehash the news that matters in the location based marketing world.

In this episode: Punchcard hits 15m locations but what does that mean? Also, Facebook writes another cheque and acq-hires another team, PayPal puts Where to use and Bravo goes around the world in 80 plates. All this plus our weekly M&A and funding roundup, our resource of the week and special guest Simon Liss, CTO of WeLoveMobile. Enjoy!

 
Your Friday Mobile Pint: the top mobile stories from the past 24 hours, good to the last drop.

iOS app success is a lottery: 60% (or more) of developers don’t break even (via Ars Technica)
Though the survey’s methodology is a bit on the light side, numerous developers that we spoke to agree that the results—59 percent of apps don’t break even, and 80 percent of developers can’t sustain a business on their apps alone—are close to accurate.

Amazon’s Kindle Fire Sales Fizzle in 2012, Market Share Slips to Third
According to IDC, Amazon’s share dropped from nearly 17% of the tablet market to 4%, with fewer than 700,000 units sold compared to Apple’s 11.8 million.

Our very own Jeff Bacon spent the week in sunny Orlando, Florida, for RIM’s BlackBerry World and BlackBerry Jam events. Throughout the week, he’s been sending us brief notes and trenchant thoughts, so we thought it best to compile them here for your enjoyment. Expect a more detailed write up from Jeff next week, but for now, enjoy these Bacon Bits! – Ed.

• The Wi-Fi here sucked ass. How can it be 2012 and no one can invent Wi-Fi hardware that can handle conference load?
• The vibe is night and day from DevCon Americas last Fall. I was seriously worried last fall that the low attendance and negative attitudes on BlackBerry’s future by just about everyone was a sign of the end, but BlackBerry World and BlackBerry Jam are hopping and busy. People seem generally upbeat about BlackBerry 10′s potential.
• I think BlackBerry Jam had a few too many sessions, however, as there were lots with tons of empty seats — just due to splitting the audience too thin I think. I can’t figure out why they spent so much on this event when they are doing a roadshow with BlackBerry Jam in 20 cities around the world. They could have saved travel and hotel costs for people by just doing a smaller Jam here and letting people know the dates for the road show.

I saw my very first cell phone back in the mid 1980′s – I guess it was technically called a car phone back then. It looked like a phone, acted like a phone, and rang like a phone,but I knew this wasn’t just a phone, this would usher in a new world order.

When I finally got my hands on my first real cell phone – a Nokia something or other – in 1995 I was afraid to answer it for fear of the cost: I had a $25/month plan that included 25 minutes of talk time.

Now look at us: 4.5+ billion people worldwide carrying these things around like they have been a part of our lives forever. But this is just the start.

We’ve already seen some of the impact these devices have had on our daily lives: from the farmer checking grain prices in Africa; to under-educated youth learning about their rights in developing nations; to Indian entrepreneurs prospering by renting minutes in remote villages; to relief workers in Haiti being paid digitally without a banking infrastructure. All through mobile.

Mobile has the power to raise economies, combat injustice, extend democracy, destroy monopolies and connect the global population in conversation. We are a small planet and mobile makes it smaller. This global shift, as impressive as it already seems, happened in the blink of an eye. And it has just begun.

What happens when mobile becomes central to education, commerce, and healthcare? What is the global impact when media follows us, or when the term “art” is challenged by the tool we use to create? What happens when mobile is used to fuel election donations and to topple governments. Finally, what happens when the playing field is levelled, and business opportunities that were once first-world only are democratized and accessible to every single person on the planet?

To navigate this incredible period of change and innovation, Douglas and I have put together a summit with the help of some very gracious partners. We call it UNTETHER.talks: two days with the brightest minds in mobile to analyze the present and articulate the future. We hope you’ll come to listen, engage, and learn about this crazy thing we call mobile.

For more information about UNTETHER.talks, visit www.untethertalks.com and register today. Can’t wait to see you there.

 
Your Thursday Mobile Pint: the top mobile stories from the past 24 hours, good to the last drop.

Apple Rumor Patrol: The Next iPhone Is Coming Soon–And It’s Skinnier Than Don Draper’s Tie (via Fast Company)
Jeremy Horowitz, editor of iLounge.com says the new phone will indeed be a radical overhaul in design, sporting a taller chassis and being skinnier in depth with an overall size of 125mm by 58.5mm by 7.4mm–a centimeter longer and 2mm thinner than the current one, which is about a 20% drop.

You’ll never believe how LinkedIn built its new iPad app (via VentureBeat)
Only one screen in the entire LinkedIn iPad app is actually native. The rest is good ol’ HTML5-based mobile web technology, running in the browser and leaning heavily on Node.js.

This is a clip of a future episode of m-Pulse that features mobile ambassador and soothsayer, Tomi Ahonen. I asked him what the future looks like for RIM.

This is a part of his response.

Enjoy!

Welcome to our NEW newest show: “Where’s The Money?”. It is here we try to decipher the way some of the more popular mobile applications and services will generate cold hard cash. The industry is full of promise but only a handful of companies will crack the buck. “Where’s The Money?” is where we put them to the test.

Today’s show was a tough one. As one of the first great ‘mobile first’ apps, foursquare is everything UNTETHER is about. It’s fun, beautifully designed, and changed the way the tech industry thought about location, gamification, and social. We LOVE foursquare.

But it’s obvious that the company is at an inflection point. Replaced by Instagram as mobile darling of the moment, news of it’s growth in users and check-ins have been replaced by hard questions of revenue, which may be prompting rumours that foursquare is launching a paid ad service this June.

Is this the right revenue path for the location kings? Has foursquare focused too much on serendipity and not enough on social? Why aren’t they acquiring Localmind? Are they seeking to become the feature of someone else’s product? If every mobile app is becoming an LBS app, is it possible that location is simply too big for any one company or service? These are the questions we seek to answer on WTM, while posing a few new ones to you, the audience. Check it out and don’t forget to post your thoughts in the comments.

m-Pulse is the show that provides companies with everything they need to know to encourage users to engage with their apps.

Episode 14: We have special guest Tim Bishop, CTO of Prezence Digital all the way from Cape Town South Africa. Rob explores if marketing matters in mobile app development and Peggy defines the mobile shopper and what are some key baviourial characteristics of in store app users, plus the Goblet of Rock.

Our Goblet of Rock goes out to the launch of MEF’s App Privacy Initiative

 
Your Tuesday Mobile Pint: the top mobile stories from the past 24 hours, good to the last drop.

Samsung now No.1 in smartphone share, but Apple owns revenue (via BGR)
Apple’s iPhone revenue was $22.7 billion in the first quarter of 2012, $29.3 billion if you were to include the iPad, compared with Samsung’s $17 billion from its entire mobile division.

How Apple will become a mobile carrier (via GigaOM)
First, Apple will sell data packages bundled with iPads. Then it will sell data and international roaming plans to iPhone customers through the iTunes Store. And in time — sooner than many think — Apple will strike wholesale deals with several mobile operators so that Apple can provide wireless service directly to its customers, as Apple Mobile.

Sometimes the blindingly obvious is often the most overlooked advice you will ever get. If you are in a long line for something and you see the person servicing the customer is getting hammered, smiling and being nice almost always gets you better results. Blindly obvious but many people ignore or forget only to have crappy service just like the other people in line.

Investment professionals see a million deals a day while on the tennis court. Between sets, trust me, it is a mad dash to go through all those requests for meetings, feedback, pick-your-brain sessions, and cash. Nobody works harder then your tennis focused VC.

With the VC short attention span theater concerns in mind, here’s my blindingly obvious advice on the pitch:

• Four (4) slides
• 8 minute total pitch (120 seconds per slide)
• Demo
• This is a giant duh, right? So why did you ask for an hour? Let’s take a quick look at each point.

What does it take to launch a mobile application successfully? Forget the corner cases like Angry Birds and Instagram, most apps out there get released and wallow in obscurity. How can they break through? What needs to happen before, during and after the ideation, conceptualization, development and launch?

This is what John Casey, founder of FreshFluff, talks us through based on the successful launch of the children’s book app “David and Goliath” created by Jumping Pages. This is the story of how John’s team changed the shape of the marketing efforts, launched this app to thunderous media coverage in non-tech press and learned some valuable lessons along the way.

What does St. Louis Cardinals World Series MVP, David Eckstein have to do with this? It’s all in here.

Enjoy!