The introduction of the MotionPlus has kept sales at a good level for Nintendo.  And even more important that Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 are introducing their own motion control devices this year.  This is all good, however Nintendo needs to do much better for the third-party eco-system around them.  There are tons of game developers and content publishers out there that could help Wii stretch even more their revenues.  A way for Nintendo to unearth new business models.   Third-party Wii titles are not showing up in the top 10 list.  Not good for publishers and not good for gamers that will eventually get tired of Mario, Zelda, etc.

Microsoft and Sony, however, have established a great application store channel for third-parties, developers and content publishers, and they have really done well with that.

My advice to Nintendo is to start opening up their platform to more third-parties.  Yes they’ve sold a great experience to all of us (and I love it), families, kids and adults, but need to open the door to developers and content providers more.  Don’t limit your audience!  The world is moving more and more to a Web 3.0 model.  Get on board and enjoy the ride!

Let this be a prime example that when we’re designing products (software, hardware, services) you need to make sure you understand the addressable market and associated regulations.  Whenever you launch a product and try to target specific market segments, you need to also be aware of all other market segments that can become your target indirectly.  Sometimes we all get excited (rightfully so) about the products we’re designing and the “coolness” factor of our gadgets, but we tend to forget how to ensure we meet the complete market needs.

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Expect to have even more e-readers devices.  I already know about Plastic Logic’s QUE, the Skiff (which seems to be partnering with Sprint for 3G coverage) and even Qualcomm is getting into the mix with Mirasol.  All of this will continue to extend towards video applications trying to enhance your experience.  Of course, we all await if Apple iTablet will indeed come out this year.

Google will continue to push really hard their Chrome browser and several smartphone/handsets with Android.  We can all bet on that.  All of this is to our benefit since we will continue to see all the mobile handset manufacturers come out with cooler devices for all of us.  That is the order of the day.  Oh, and expect to see more feature differentiation competition with social capabilities for you… just to allow you to stay in touch with everyone around you.

I expect Microsoft to continue make one big run at the mobile market to try to resurface from the deeps and counter-punch what Google, RIM, Nokia, and others are doing.  I’m already hearing rumors about them bringing in the Xbox Live experience to the mobile segment.  Just like I mentioned in my post on December 22, 2009.  I expect Microsoft to blend in the social and gaming experience across multiple screens (mobile, TV, gadgets).

Expect a lot of the open source projects to continue to invade your home personal media experience and make your home theater and video devices look shinier!

A great year is ahead of us…

As part of that effort they now acquired Mixer Labs (a creation of two ex-Google employees) in order to bring in location-tracking capabilities to pinpoint the locations of all of us posting messages in Twitter.  Seems that big brother wants to sell our location info to others in order to foster new business models.  And this is what I would like to call “applications enablement”.  This opens up opportunities for developers of all kinds.

Mixer labs seemed to already have a pricing range for the # of queries you place on their “GeoAPI” (although < 20,000 are FREE), which allows you or any developer to take a “latitude/longitude” coordinate and match it to nearest intersections, neighborhoods, cities, state, and country, points of interest, etc.

So many people could now build cool applications via this and mix the Twitter crowd and their location with points of interest or interesting services.  Question is:  will you be OK allowing your location information being shared?  As long as you opt-in it may be quite helpful.  I like this move!  Let’s see where it goes in 2010.

The decade saw major changes at the way people communicate with the creation of social communication sites like MySpace, Facebook and Twitter.  We saw millions of non-technical users become regular users of social networks.

In the early years the user base of social networks was primarily college students and teenagers.  But over the last year or so, “boy”, that user base has expanded immensely from the teenager and college student base to now including parents and grandparents who now use the technology as a primary mode of communication.  Hey, sometimes this could be a bit weird for the tweeners/teenagers since they see surprising invitations or wall messages posted in their walls by a certain parent or grandparent.  Nevertheless the social networking continues to grow!  Hey look.  I’ve even seen my parents, in-laws, and great uncles become Facebook addicts.  I’ve been able to stay in touch with friends I have not seen in years and via Twitter and Facebook plan social dinners while I’m on travel in different cities.

Then, we’ve also seen companies and small personal businesses take advantage of the social community created amongst the people as a direct venue to advertise their services, products, viewpoints, etc.  taking advantage of what we call Web 2.0.

All of this has opened great opportunities for everyone.  Developers have been able to create new apps that you use all the time (remember Farmville?).  There are talks of home and consumer devices working with Twitter’s API to allow you control things via Twitter.  It allows Hollywood stars and former stars stay relevant amongst the people by simply “tweeting” stuff about their lives and allowing people to follow them.  The opportunities have been endless!.

What remains now is how everyone can take advantage of this model and make some money out of it.  We know Facebook and Twitter will get their big payday soon.  Twitter had signed potential revenue generating contracts with Google and Microsoft to help them offer users the ability to get real time results from the Google and Bing search engines.  And Microsoft signed a similar deal with Facebook.

But still the social networking companies need to continue to find ways to generate revenue and profit.  How about the service providers like AT&T, Verizon and others that could look for ways to enable their subscribers to use social networking sites blended with new services (like TV for example) and in the process find ways to share some revenues?

Will there be a market?

Judging by potential features (been mentioned) on these kinds of devices some people may say “Yes, I will buy one”.  Features like sleek small screens (10 inches), Internet connectivity, the ability to run multiple apps, access to your remote work, book-reading abilities, etc.

But there are also several things some folks (I’ve heard) could argue may not be good for tablets.  For example, maybe watching movies can be a bit uncomfortable (meaning you may have to watch the movie looking down).  Although I can argue there are ways to avoid that.  What about typing capabilities? Perhaps a multi-touch device like this is a great idea, but once you start adding to it you will need typing capabilities and begs the question… will they be able to fit a virtual keyboard in a limited screen real estate?  Then, what about providing wireless broadband service with it?  Would this limit the audience.

All I can say is that Apple and Google are great smart companies.  Their creativity is great for the market.  In the end, I think there will be many people that would buy devices like this one (they’ve already started buying e-book readers).  And there will be others that will ignore it.  The key is how will the business model fit the eco-system that can be created around it.  For developers, it will offer another venue to increase the discoverability of apps.

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To help with this kind of decision I saw recently that Android Market announced their new device dashboard (Article here).  The dashboard provides information about deployed Android-powered devices that is targeted to help mobile device developers as they build and update their apps.

Is a good start!  But, still not a lot of data to help developers make better business decisions.

I’m sure Google plans to add-on more valuable features to this.  And that will be a key area in helping the developer community.

The “Business Intelligence” layer as I like to call it, will be key for developers.  You need to provide this business help so they can track services, APIs, and apps built along with tangible information/reports to help identify trends in the business to assist in decision making for both developers and service providers.  The goal should be: provide something that improves the overall merchandising (i.e. content, APIs, apps).

For example, the new market segment being developed by emerging devices (3G, 4G, home).  Some nifty devices continue to come out and will keep hitting the marketplace.  Some of the early ones were the Sony PSP and Nintendo DS platforms.  These two alone opened the opportunity for many game developers.  Then you started seeing things like the Amazon Kindle with its cool high-resolution screen ideally suited for reading newspapers, books and magazines.  We all know the acceptance the Kindle had.  Shortly after that Sony came out with their reader, and Barnes and Noble did the same.  Some of these devices utilize wired and/or Wi-Fi access and others will have 3G and 4G chipsets.

Sprint’s initial modest involvement in the Kindle launch helped them bolster some demand and perhaps contributed a bit to slow down the bad streak of subscriber loss in several quarters.   But it was their strategy of being more open and looking for new models reaching out to 3rd party devices what helped them a bit.  However, they lost it to AT&T recently, which shows how quickly and fiercely competitive wireless providers have been in North America.  AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile all have wholesale reseller groups (MVNO groups) that negotiate access rates with 3rd party providers under white label arrangements.  One good example is AT&T, which has taken this very seriously and created a dedicated Emerging Devices group.  T-Mobile USA has gone very aggressively at Android based devices and it seems they plan to extend even more with their broadband network and tools to be much more web-connected in the way the web 2.0 and web 3.0 will be built.

Cable, satellite and wireline companies are making investments and trialing rich communication concepts and looking for ways to tie-in multimedia and communication devices and capabilities into the home.  This presents opportunities for telecom companies and developers to help enable a service delivery model that offers always-on access to Internet media content, information services and new communication services.

You also have companies like Microsoft, which not too long ago announced the Xbox 360 dashboard update.  Now users can purchase branded clothing for their avatars!  In addition, it improves Netflix streaming, the ability to purchase full games over Xbox Live and play them without a disc, which may prove to be the most forward-looking feature added to the service.  This trend could lead us to believe that Microsoft could be looking to bring the Xbox Live, Windows Mobile, and other similar properties closer together to create more of a casual “social gaming platform” that could be available via more than just one device.  Microsoft has been going after the three-screens: TV (with its Media Room console), the PC (browser), and the mobile devices (phone, portable media players, and perhaps more).

Then you have “qyoo”, which is a technology (uses a label/tag) that allows you to interact with your environment.  By simply taking a picture of a “qyoo” from a magazine, direct mail, newspaper or billboard you are then transported to a world of rich media experiences.  “qyoo” delivers movie clips, music, documentaries, photographs, social media and promotional offers right to your devices.

To be honest, I’m excited with all these market trends.  Still there is a lot to be figured out as far as eco-system is concerned for this new device market segment.  And I can easily see content providers and publishers trying to deliver content but leveraging exclusivity relationships to differentiate devices (like AT&T did with the iPhone).

From Androidandme.com

Motorola is also currently developing a native client for Android called the MotoAppstore.

It appears the site is still in testing, but the store is currently publicly accessible by any visitor.

Features of the SHOP4APPS store include:

• Apps Store catalog is accessible via your mobile browser, a mobile client, or Motorola Media Link (MML).
• MotoAppstore free Mobile Client. This client allows you to download and install your purchases applications.
• MyLocker section – check your download history (name of the application, date of the purchase, version).
• The ability to purchase apps from the desktop site, place them in your MyLocker, and then download it using your handset.
• Automatic notification alerts when a new version of an app is available.
• The ability to re-download and transfer your apps to a new phone.