Why we created SocialNuggets.Net? Technology behind our analytics on smartphones

SocialNuggets delivers real time market intelligence for fast moving industries by analyzing data from various social media sources. Our mission is to liberate social media data and sentiment analysis for use in real time research of brands, products and features.

This blog post discusses the following:

• Changing landscape of marketing research
• Current approach
• Technology requirements
• How does SocialNuggets work?
• Summary

Changing landscape of market research

In the fast moving markets like smartphones, tablets, apparel and entertainment, traditional market research techniques like surveys and focus groups are just too slow and can’t be relied upon exclusively to make effective business decisions.  Today, most consumers express their opinions voluntarily on various forums, blogs, review sites and social networking sites. This data, if mined correctly, is a goldmine of consumer sentiments and opinions and can serve as a source of real time market intelligence and that  has been a missing piece in the market research area despite many advances in technology.

Current Approach

There are many enterprise software packages available that can be customized with lots of efforts and resources to get the right answers for a particular industry/company. Needless to say, this is expensive, time consuming, generally offered as an enterprise software behind firewall and not affordable even for many large companies.

Technology Requirements

In order to analyze this vast amount of Internet data we call social data, one needs the following tools and technologies

• Focused Harvesting
• Text Analytics
• Natural Language Processing
• Sentiment Analysis

As an example, we analyze over 1M conversations quarterly on the web related to smartphones, get rid of spam using our technology and then extract sentiments by

• Features (like long battery life is positive while long charging time is negative)
• Phone models (like HTC EVO, Apple iPhone 4)
• Brands (like HTC, RIM, Samsung, Sony Ericsson)
• Category (Android, Blackberry, iPhone, Windows Phone)

Our technology, developed over 20 man-years of effort, has been used by many companies for marketing research, customer service, lead generation and brand management.

How does SocialNuggets work?

In order to make our technology accessible to companies of all sizes with least amount of upfront investment, we have started SocialNuggets.net that provides detailed research from social media in various forms as following:

Individual nuggets that anyone can consume by embedding inside of their websites or forwarding to their friends and colleagues – this is free so long as you maintain attribution to SocialNuggets and/or Our partners

Monthly and Quarterly SocialNuggets Index for various markets which can also be used to make purchasing decisions

Data behind individual nuggets that can be purchased for internal analysis

Full data warehouse for internal analysis by companies’ internal business analytics package

Reports and Customized research reports created by our staff/our partners

Summary

We have started this site with research on smartphones and are adding new nuggets daily for anyone in this industry to consume, enjoy, share and engage in making fast but smarter business decisions.

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Mobile, Social & Cloud – How will these three trends of 2010 do in 2011? Part-I Mobile

Mobile Computing, Social Networking and Cloud Computing have been driving tech industry for 2010 and will likely continue to be the driver for this year. What differences, if any, will be felt in evolution of these trends this year. Here are some of my opinions and I sure would like to hear yours on these topics. Part-I of this blog deals with Mobile issues while Part-II will deal with Social Networking issues while Part-III will deal with Cloud Computing.

Mobile Computing Trends

The three big trends in Mobile Computing are:

• Android and Mobile Phones
• Tablets and iPad
• Apps Apps

Android and Mobile Phones

Android was the big news of 2010 and will continue its march into mobile dominance. However, as Android moves more into the mainstream, battery life, fragmentation, usability and app store issues will come in its way of total domination. Apple will innovate again this time improving speech interface and competing with Google on replacing our remotes, wallets and keys with mobile phone. In the mobile industry, the dominance for No.3 spot will be fought hard between Microsoft, Nokia and RIM. Who do you think will be the winner in the end?

Tablets and iPad

Tablet was the big news of 2010 but competition to iPad only arrives this year. Android may take the second spot and battle for third spot will be fought between HP’s Palmtop, RIM’s Playbook and a player we don’t know about yet? Having used iPad for the last few months, I think Tablets have the potential to replace laptops for many users. What are your experiences?

Apps Apps

Apps was the big news of 2010 with limited monetization but new business models will emerge making monetization easier. HTML5 will become viable for many content applications and start to become the trend of 2011. In fact, that is the only way Microsoft, Nokia and RIM can neutralize some of the momentum of Android and iOS applications. You can see over 70 conversations on Linkedin at http://linkd.in/h7hhr5 about this topic

Conclusion

Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS will continue its dominance for mobile phone and tablets but battle for No.3 spot will be fought between HP, Microsoft, Nokia and RIM.

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Are you still syncing your Media the old fashioned way?

Like many of you, I have a large selection of music and podcasts that has been purchased/downloaded over the years – running into 30GB.  I used to sync with my iPod using the cable and lot of patience until I got a message that all of my music doesn’t fit anymore on my iPod.  Over time, Android phone, Blackberry, iPhone and iPad have been added to our family’s collection of PCs and Macs.

With my music spread amongst two computers and limited available storage capacity of my mobile devices, I decided to look for alternatives and here is what I found when I evaluated the following:

• Syncing my Music to the SD card/internal memory of the phone
• Radios like Pandora
• Monthly Music services like MOG and Spotify
• Streaming my own music using services like Jam11

Syncing my Music to the SD card/internal memory of the phone

Apple offers an ability to sync iPhone and iPad with iTunes  and many third party alternatives exist on Android and Blackberry phones to sync your library on iTunes as well. If your music library is any larger than 5GB (1,000 songs), Syncing is a bad alternative as there is never enough space left on these devices after leaving room for apps, pictures, videos and other data.  Yes you can pay $99 extra for each 8GB of storage on Apple’s iPod and iPhone or buy a larger SD card but it is unlikely that you can sync all of your music library on it for ever.

Radios like Pandora & Slacker

Internet Radios like Pandora and Slacker are great alternatives and offer a great selection. It is a great way to discover new music. However, if you are in a mood to listen to your Beatles album, Pandora will offer one of the songs from Beatles and then offer you similar songs due to Radio licensing restrictions. There are other Internet radios like SHOUTcast wherein I found a large selection of music, news and talkshows.

Monthly Music Services

There are many alternatives like MOG, Spotify and Rhapsody and cost between $5 to $10/month. The selection varies but I couldn’t find majority of the music that I like in most of these services. Also, I do have problem in paying to listen to the music I already own and hence these choices are not for me.

Streaming my Own Music using services like Jam11

With ubiquitous 3G/Wifi data connectivity, it is now easy to stream all of your music off your computer. Yes it needs your computer to be on but with streaming services like Jam11, I can now listen to my music anywhere from any phone. I can search for my music on my Android or Blackberry phone and listen instantly and make sure I don’t buy yet another song I already own. You can download Jam11 from Android Market or Blackberry App World and give it a try.

Conclusion

In conclusion, there is no one solution for everyone. I settled on using Jam11, have some local music on my SD card and listen to SHOUTcast radios on my Jam11 application. Let me know if you are still not syncing the old fashioned way and buying more iPods.

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Saving money on Wireless Roaming with Android, Blackberry and iPhone from USA to UK

I was planning to go on vacation to the UK for about 10 days and so looked for various articles to point me to the most economical way to roam in the UK for three of our family phones running on Android, Blackberry and iPhone. I didn’t find a lot of useful information before going there but learnt some useful information on my trip that I want to share in this blog and hope anyone traveling from the USA to UK will find it useful. I also think the same information will apply to other European countries as well.

So, here are various considerations in making the right decision on selecting your roaming service provider.

• US Mobile Operator’s Roaming Pricing
• Is your handset capable of Roaming?
• Is your handset Carrier Locked?
• Duration of trip
• Voice Roaming
• Data Roaming – Android and iPhone
• Data Roaming – Blackberry

US Mobile Operator’s Roaming Pricing

AT&T, Sprint , T-Mobile and Verizon Wireless all offer international voice roaming and their rates vary from $1 to $2/minute.  Additionally, data roaming charges are in the range of $1-$1.50/MB. AT&T used to offer $69/Month unlimited data roaming for Blackberry but it not available anymore on its web site.

Is your handset capable of Roaming?

Most of handsets sold by AT&T and T-Mobile are capable of roaming on most of the networks in the UK and the rest of Europe. For handsets sold by Sprint and Verizon, only quadband 3G handsets are capable of roaming on the European networks.  Both Sprint and Verizon offer some Blackberry handsets that are quadband but none of the Android handsets on Sprint and Verizon websites are quadband and so unlikely to be suitable for roaming on GSM networks in Europe.

Is your handset Carrier Locked?

Most US mobile operators lock handsets in such a way that these subsidized handsets only work on their network. However, many operators offer unlock codes with AT&T and T-Mobile providing it free after 3 months of service except on iPhone. The good news for iPhone users is the availability of many public domain and paid tools to do carrier unlock which is not the same as jailbreak. In London, we could get this service from any of the  shops selling SIM cards for less than $10.

Duration of trip

If you are going on a business trip for a couple of days and not likely to visit the same country anytime soon, go with the plan offered by your mobile operator as the hassle of going on a pre paid plan is not worth the trouble unless you are going to be on the phone constantly.

Voice Roaming

If you only care about voice roaming then the best thing to do is to buy any local SIM card. Insert it into your unlocked GSM phone and you are in business. There are many voice plans with calls within UK costing over 25cents/min but offering less than 5cents/min calls to any international location including the US. The only downside is that you will have a new number but for the savings offered, it was worth taking the chance.

Data Roaming – Android and iPhone

I found T-Mobile SIM cards offering data services at a very reasonable price and configured automatically on all three phones I tried it on. On the other hand, O2 card didn’t work on my Android or Blackberry and every time I called the O2 operator, more money was taken out of my pre-paid account.The pre-paid T-Mobile SIM offered almost unlimited weekly data plan for less than $7.

Data Roaming – Blackberry

Most operators in the UK don’t support Blackberry on prepaid and if Blackberry/Outlook integrated email is needed, you have no choice but to stick with your US SIM card and pay for data roaming. However, I could get Internet connectivity on Blackberry and was able to access my Gmail and do browsing on it with T-Mobile SIM card.

Conclusion

If you are going to be roaming in the UK for more than couple of days, it is much more economical to use pre paid SIM than to pay large roaming fees to the US operators with only disadvantage being a new number. For Blackberry users, you can get voice and data roaming but not Blackberry messaging connectivity on a pre-paid SIM. For Android and iPhone users, pre paid SIM is the best economical option and gives you full connectivity at a very reasonable price.

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Can you survive going back to Blackberry after iPhone?

I liked my iPhone, but for reasons that belong in a different blog, I switched back to Blackberry after almost a year. First, it was difficult but having been used to Applications, I started discovery of app store on Blackberry and was pleasantly surprised and somewhat disappointed. This blog is about my journey back to Blackberry for now.

Gmail Integration

First positive change was recognition of Gmail by Blackberry in the form of a Gmail connector that made it easier to use. On the other hand, native Gmail app from Google still doesn’t work well on Blackberry as delete keys don’t work, it is slow, doesn’t do push and consumes more battery. Similarly, contact and calendar sync work fairly well.

User Interface

Lots of nice icons have been created on Blackberry Curve but their usability is poor especially after working with beautifully designed icons of iPhone. Most of the time you have to read the description of the icons to understand what they mean – case in point Application, Games, Downloads, Setup just look so similar. Finding App Store on your Blackberry is a challenge – It has Applications and then Downloads menus. App Store is hidden under Downloads and that is where Apps come before you decide to move it elsewhere.  I just wish Blackberry pays attention to these details as much as it has paid attention to Email and the curves on its keyboard.

How many Apps does one need?

Coming from Apple iPhone experience, one needs lots and lots of apps and I had over 30 when I switched. However, Blackberry made me realize that I only really used less than 10 apps and so I came looking for applications that I really needed.

Communication/Social Applications

Besides Email, IM, and Facebook, Twitter was the missing piece and Blackberry just released a native app for Twitter that takes advantage of its push technology. It crashes sometimes but does work very well.

Navigation Applications

Google Maps is available and works well except that it drains battery if left on for a long time. Needless to say it is not as intuitive as Google Maps on iPhone. There is a good new app called Poynt that gives you neighborhood restaurants, movie theatres, gas stations and white/yellow pages.

Games Applications

Needless to say, there is no match here between iPhone and Blackberry and a lot of it has to do with the touch interface, developers’ focus and the target users. Blackberry now has many more native games besides Brick Breaker and a whole lot of third party apps are also available in their store.

Entertainment Applications

Pandora and Stitcher radio applications are both available on Blackberry and work well. The missing piece is an ability to have Apple’ iPod like functionality that can play the music from my iTunes library.

Conclusion

I am comfortable using Blackberry with my repertoire of  applications but just wish that browser experience was better on Blackberry; a feature I sorely missed in switching from iPhone.

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5 missed opportunities by Google in launching Nexus One

It is no secret that Google’s launch of Nexus One phone was less than stellar. Google had so many opportunities to become a game changer in the mobile phone market but missed most of it either because it was in a hurry to launch or just didn’t think hard enough to be different from Apple’s iPhone and others. Here is a list of my Top5 opportunities they missed. Let me know what do you think?

1)   New Data only Phone – Google was Industry’s only hope for creating a data only phone i.e. a mobile phone that worked exclusively on the data network wherein voice was just a data service running on VOIP (voice over Internet protocol). With Google Voice it had a chance to do so but failed to deliver a new experience and instead chose to just add Google Voice this as another application something Skype has been doing on many phones for a long time.

2)   Worldwide Launch – No mobile phone manufacturer, except RIM in a limited way, has ever succeeded in launching a phone globally on the same day. Google came very close with availability on its web site but missed a part of US, China, India and Korea by not having all GSM and CDMA support at the same time.

3)   Pricing Model – Google had a great opportunity to create a low price smart phone and break the mobile operator’s hold on multi-year contracts in the western world where mobile phone is subsidized by the operator. It could have subsidized the phone for a while and create a new pricing model. It could have become an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) if that is what it took to pay for the phone. Instead Google did whatever everyone else did but settled on taking smaller margin between itself and its partner HTC.

4)   Speech as a New Interface – Google came close but only got to a beta or alpha stage for using Speech as a new interface on Mobile. Another missed opportunity!

5)   Getting rid of Bluetooth Headsets – Despite various new styles, very few people like their Bluetooth headset but are forced to use it due to various handsfree driving laws. Google seems to be getting close to eliminating them with a better audio design but wait -  it does need a Car Kit that according to Google is still not available. Again in a hurry to launch!

Bottomline, Google missed an opportunity to change the mobile industry and just became a me too player challenging Apple’s iPhone. What do you think?

R. Paul Singh

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Confessions of a Blackberry Addict – Two miserable weeks with iPhone and then…

3 Blackberrys, 6 years and time for renewal of contract and hence decision time on whether to switch to iPhone or not! Despite my unpleasant experience at Apple Store, my kids convinced me to try iPhone in the name of coolness. I decided to give it a try for my 30 day trial and here are my findings.

First some reasons on why I even looked for alternatives to Blackberry after 6 years of great friendship

• After switching from Microsoft Entourage to Gmail, Blackberry sort of lost its advantage and got really slow to use
• With 3 browsers on my Blackberry – one from AT&T, second from RIM and third one from Opera, neither one really worked well
• Any third party app I loaded slowed the system dramatically

My first two weeks with iPhone were miserable at best. iPhone is a great platform but certainly not the most intuitive.

First, what I liked about the iPhone

• One of the most beautiful displays – emails and web pages really come alive and readable much like a laptop
• Best browser of any phone I have ever used – and believe me I have used many phones
• Best conferencing interface of any phone – even my mom can use it

Why was I miserable with iPhone in the first two weeks

• Very difficult to get to the top of the contacts and hence find a contact quickly and call
• Inability to make calls while driving except to the recent calls
• Typing without the keyboard
• Limited battery life

I was ready to return my iPhone until I met some friends who showed me some shortcuts that made things better. So much for intutiveness! For example:

• Right flick that brings search button – a universal search that can search contacts, email or calendar
• Getting used to Voice dialing and calling out names in the way my phone understands – now with 90% success rate of calling someone from my contacts while driving
• Just type and not worry about correcting until much later

Now with 30 days of usage behind me, I am turning to be an iPhone fan not fanatics. It is far from being an ideal phone but considering its other good features, I decided to keep it. Oh, yes I do have a 3GS!

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Should RIMM buy PALM or adopt Android like Motorola or Apple?

RIMM had a great quarter – a time after which companies usually forget to do the right things. On the contrary this is really the best time for RIMM to react now before it is too late. So here goes my thinking on what they should do and soon…

It is very clear that RIMM’s unique advantage of Blackberry push email is not sufficient for it to retain the market leadership. First Apple’s iPhone, then PALM Pre and now Verizon’s Droid are eating at its market share slowly and RIMM has to respond to stay relevant. One thing is clear that current OS of Blackberry has reached its limit and that is one area RIMM has to find an alternative while retaining its unique advantages. It needs developer community and a great web experience to compete – getting to new customer segments will be a nice bonus.

It has four possible choices

• Build a new OS
• Buy PALM
• Google surrender strategy
• Google enhancement strategy

Build a new OS

Building a new OS will not bring developers easily to Blackberry and so that choice seems impractical. Yes I know Samsung went against the common wisdom and introduced Bada its new OS but got a big yawn from the market so far.

Buy Palm Inc.

Buy PALM which is currently at a market cap of $1.65B and would probably cost close to $2B. What would RIMM gain is WebOS, a great Web experience but not necessarily developers. Yes it will get access to a younger market segment that PALM manage to penetrate but RIMM could put the $2B elsewhere for a better return.

Adopt Google’s Android

RIMM can finally eat its pride and make the right business decision by adopting Google’s Android. There are two ways to adopt this strategy

• Follow Motorola’s Lead or Google surrender strategy wherein the handset vendor just builds the hardware and adopt Android as is  – kind of like what Motorola did with Droid for Verizon Wireless ( In all fairness, Motorola did some work on its Cliq for T-Mobile)
• Follow Apple’s Lead or Google enhancement strategy wherein the handset vendor not only builds hardware but adds its unique values and controls the end to end user experience. This is similar to what Apple did with BSD UNIX and created Mac OS X.

Conclusion

RIMM should adopt Google Android and add its unique push email, sync, security and other goodies while continuing to control end to end user experience.  This will give RIMM a better OS, developers and continue to maintain its unique advantages.

What do you think RIMM should do? Share your opinions here.

R. Paul Singh

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Did your application get rejected by an App Store? Is it a monopoly case worthy of DOJ and EU?

App Stores – Rejecting many apps
The rise of app Stores like Apple’s AppStore, Microsoft’s Windows Marketplace, Nokia’s Ovi and others from different mobile platform companies has been a boon to software developers as it offered a cheaper way of distributing applications. With 25,000 apps approved by Apple, I hear a very large number of apps are also stuck in the Apple approval queue.  How big is this issue – worth 3M pages on Google. I came across one great postindicating all the unofficial reasons for rejection of iPhone apps. In this business, application delayed is application rejected because the more you are delayed the more the chances of a competitive app being in the store and hence negating your app.

App Store rejections – Is there a reason?
Is there a criterion for rejecting an application? One common cause for rejection seems to be that it competes with what is already bundled with the platform like a dialer or browser. None of the vendors are explicit about the criteria they use for rejecting apps until Microsoft took the lead and actually published its criteria. Bravo, Microsoftand hope others will follow you so that some of the arbitrary rejections can be controlled. Google, with its Android is an exception as it seems to accept most apps but that might change over time as Android becomes more popular. Has your app been rejected by an app store and do you know the reason for it? Please comment here for others to understand and see.

Criteria for Rejection
In studying through Microsoft’s criteria here are a few key themes that emerged
If you compete with what we have bundled, no matter how bad, we can reject your application – last time I checked Microsoft went to great lengths to defend a law suit like this for Internet Explorer’s bundling on the PC.
If you compete with the channel we aim to please, we can reject your application. Is that legal?

Is it time for DOJ and EU to step in?
I am not a believer of wasteful regulation or litigation but it does smack of anti-competitive behavior against smaller companies/developers and above all for consumer who are deprived of many choices. Do you agree? I just hope that platform companies publish their criteria, act fairly and swiftly now when it is too early in the cycle so that we don’t see waste of our tax dollars in DOJ, EU and other authorities bringing law suits against these companies like it has happened to IBM, Microsoft and Intel.

Let me know what you think?

R. Paul Singh

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Blackberry Email, Yahoo Mail or Google Gmail? – Experience of a Blackberry (BB) User

RIM’s Blackberry was only an Enterprise cell phone and so most people used it with Blackberry Enterprise Server which provided over the air sync of Emails, Contacts and Calendar events with Microsoft Outlook and Lotus Domino. In the era of iPhone hype, many people like me still use Blackberry to stay in sync and so I went exploring many choices for users without an Enterprise Server and/or Microsoft Outlook and here is what I found. I had to spend days researching these choices and hope this blog will help save time for many others and also wake up Google, RIM and Yahoo to act to make their products better.

Criteria

My criteria was simple – an ability to automatically sync our Email, Calendar and Contacts over the air preferably without paying any more than $30 we were already paying AT&T.

Blackberry Client

I could get a hosted BB Enterprise Server solution but most of them cost in excess of $10/month – this alternative was very familiar but I wanted something free and so didn’t go with this choice. Despite marketing towards consumer markets, RIM has sadly not provided any over-the-air solution to the sync problem outside of Microsoft Outlook.

Yahoo!Mail Client for Blackberry

I was using Yahoo! Mail as my personal email so that was my first choice. I downloaded Yahoo’s mobile client for Blackberry. The installation was simple and did sync my emails well except that its sync was delayed many times by much as three to four hours. However, trying to sync Contacts and Calendar proved to be too difficult and after repeated attempts and reading lots of documentation I decided to give that up. One good thing or bad thing is that this email client looks just like the Blackberry native email client and seems to be very CPU efficient and didn’t change battery life.

Gmail Client for Blackberry

My next choice was Gmail even though I still don’t like Gmail’s presentation of email in conversation threads. Downloading Google’s mobile client for Blackberry was easy enough though not as easy as Yahoo. Once I downloaded the Gmail client, I realized that it had a different user interface – similar to one on the PC. It was much better than BB Email client for reading newsletters as it cleared all kinds of web links and made emails lot more readable on the phone. Is someone from RIM listening?

Sync client from Google choked couple of times as I had too many contacts and it took a very long time but once it synced, it got better for any other changes.  While I was on Google site, I also downloaded Google Maps. Pretty soon, my Blackberry Curve started becoming slow and battery life reduced. So, I uninstalled Google Maps even though I really liked the app. Now, my Blackberry is still not as fast as it was with native Blackberry Email client but I can live with occasional slow downs and reduced battery life. The one thing that Google ignored is the delete key on the keyboard and for anyone used to that key it will be sorely missed. Also if you have many contacts, Gmail takes a long time in bringing up your contacts and seems like it goes to the network to fetch contacts unless you only keep most used contacts which are cached locally.

Conclusion

In short, I use Gmail on mobile and desktop and it automatically syncs everything well for me between my desktop and Blackberry. I have still kept my Yahoo client on the Blackberry for those times when Gmail slows down my Blackberry. Hopefully Google will fix this problem one day or Yahoo will wake up and do a good job in syncing Contacts and Calendar or better still RIM will wakeup and provide this service for all the non-enterprise customers before their value is completely diminished by Google.

Did you have different experiences. Share here in comments sections for others to benefit from!

R. Paul Singh

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