Category: Analysis

Last week, Epic Games co-founder Tim Sweeney wrote an opinion piece for the Guardian complaining about the Microsoft Windows Store and Universal Windows Platform (UWP). He said the company is trying to create a walled garden that’s bad for everyone except Microsoft. Executives at Microsoft were quick to dispute Sweeney’s argument. In short order, much of the tech press also sounded off. This week, Sweeney wrote a follow-up article in Venture Beat, striking a more conciliatory tone but still pushing for changes from Microsoft. All sides have valid points, but the discussion itself is fascinating as it succinctly reflects the challenges facing Microsoft. Broadly speaking, Microsoft is attempting to transition Windows from the complex and powerful operating system that dominated the world during the boom days of the PC industry to a more modern, secure, and restricted OS in a world where PCs are an important but minority device stakeholder. What’s perhaps the most interesting piece of all of this is how the company’s UWP strategy will impact its big bet on the future: HoloLens.

Understanding UWP

UWP is an extension of work Microsoft began with Windows 8 to enable developers to create modern, universal Windows apps. The idea was that, by unifying the code base between the traditional version of Windows used for desktops and notebooks with that of Windows Phone, the company could incentivize developers to create apps that would, with minimal work, run across all form factors. At the time, one could argue, Microsoft’s primary driver here was an attempt to close the widening app gap Windows Phone faced versus Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. When it launched Windows 10, Microsoft further evolved the model, bringing forward a fully unified OS platform so that every device, from phones to tablets to PCs to even the Xbox will run the same apps, with developers able to easily tailor for the screen size and capabilities of the device in question.

In addition to enabling cross-device capabilities, UWP also brings forth a host of modern OS functions. The most notable being a new, more restrictive set of rules on what apps can and can’t do. Chief among these is security features that effectively sandbox UWP apps, limiting the impact they can have on the underlying OS as well as adjacent apps. In effect, UWP apps act more like apps running on modern mobile operating systems such as iOS. The difference here, however, is Windows 10 also still supports the traditional Win32 system, the underlying platform for Windows going back to Windows NT. This platform supports the legacy apps most of us use daily and is part of what made the PC so powerful, as it allowed programs deep access to the OS and adjacent apps. It also lets users download and install apps from anywhere. Alas, it’s also what makes the PC such a fertile ground for malware along with security and long-term performance issues.

By supporting both UWP and Win32 on Windows 10, Microsoft is trying to straddle two worlds. The traditional PC ecosystem with a long, rich tradition of powerful, backward compatible apps that can, at their worst, bring the OS to its knees, versus the modern mobile world where apps have a more limited impact on the underlying OS, creating a more secure, more stable experience. At present, the success of UWP is hard to gauge. I fully expect to hear more about the platform’s progress at Microsoft’s Build conference later this month.

Sweeney’s Diatribe

In his original piece, Sweeney calls UWP “a closed platform within a platform” that he posits is bad for consumers, developers, and publishers because Microsoft is launching some features exclusively in UWP it won’t enable for traditional Win32 applications. Further, he suggests the company’s long-term goal is to get everyone to develop only UWP apps they sell exclusively through the Microsoft-controlled (and monetized) Windows Store. He argues this is harmful to the industry in general and to developers who sell through their Web sites and that it effectively ends the open PC platform. The company rebutted this accusation, with Microsoft’s Kevin Gallo noting “The Universal Windows Platform is a fully open ecosystem, available to every developer that can be supported by any store.”

Sweeney acknowledges Microsoft’s points in his follow-up piece but suggests UWP is still less open than Win32 because developers on the new platform must become a Microsoft Registered Developer and must submit their apps to Microsoft for approval. If Microsoft accepts the app, it digitally signs it and returns it to the developer, who can then distribute it. He questions whether this is a truly open system, and suggests he would like to see a CEO-level commitment from Microsoft to keeping the PC and UWP open.

Frankly, I’m not sure he can expect such a commitment. As Microsoft moves Windows 10 toward the future, you have to imagine company will endeavor to exert ever-greater control over the applications that run on its platform and the resulting experience for users. And, while it is equally hard to imagine a Windows platform that doesn’t support legacy Win32 apps, it also seems counter-intuitive to assume already ancient legacy apps will run as they do today on all future versions of Windows. Many of these apps, while powerful, contribute to a poor long-term experience for the average user. Sure, the serious PC gamers Sweeney serves want their games to have deep access to the OS to drive better gaming experiences. But the vast majority of consumer and commercial PC users would likely choose the other option — a PC experience that feels more like the one they have on their mobile phones. Fewer crashes, fewer issues when installing or deleting apps, and an operating system that remains more stable over the lifetime of the product.

While Microsoft has addressed Sweeney’s earlier comments, it’s unlikely we’ll see the company specifically address his call for a long-term commitment to his version of an open UWP. But a closer look at another set of developer documentation from the company offers a glimpse of its future.

The Future with HoloLens

As noted previously, Universal Apps and the evolved UWP started life in part as an incentive to get developers creating apps to run on Windows phone, which had fallen far behind iOS and Android in mobile. Bluntly, Microsoft missed the broader transition to mobile. The company has no intention of missing the next big evolution of computing: Augmented Reality. This is evident in its announcements and pending developer launch of its impressive HoloLens product. (Actually, Microsoft calls HoloLens a Mixed Reality product, but that’s a column for another day.) A review of Microsoft’s developer information for HoloLens is telling. The very first sentence on the development overview page states: “Developing holographic apps uses the Universal Windows Platform. All holographic apps are Universal Windows Apps, and all Universal Windows apps can be made to run on Microsoft HoloLens.”

Microsoft obviously sees HoloLens as crucial future technology for the company. It clearly states holographic apps developed for HoloLens will be UWP. That’s not to say the device won’t run Win32 apps but it seems clear the company expects developers to create all new, holographic apps on the UWP. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about Microsoft’s stance on the future of app development for Windows from there.

So does that mean Microsoft will abandon support for Win32 on traditional PCs? Certainly not. But it’s hard to imagine the company maintaining the status quo indefinitely. I suspect at some point we’ll see such support evolve into something different from what it is today. While this will undoubtedly cause a fair amount of consternation among a large subset of existing users, it seems an inevitable conclusion to Microsoft’s current course.

In the next few weeks, Apple is likely to hold an event in which it will announce a new iPhone which, according to rumors, may be called the iPhone SE. This phone is supposed to be smaller (in line with the iPhone 5 models), made from similar materials to the iPhone 6 series, and feature some of the same components. Reporting on the phone has focused on the physical appearance, components, and specs, but there hasn’t been any solid sourcing on the reasons for the phone to exist or how it will be positioned in the lineup. As such, it’s worth thinking through why Apple might want to release such a phone and how it’s likely to fit into the overall portfolio of iPhones going forward.

This is one of two devices likely to be announced this month by Apple where the questions of pricing and positioning are at least as interesting as the devices themselves. The other being the new mid-sized iPad, which might well inherit the iPad Pro branding from its larger sibling. But I’ll leave that for another time.

Lessons from the iPhone 5c

The iPhone 5c was announced two and a half years ago and was surrounded by some of the same speculation ahead of time as the iPhone SE is today. Some speculated the C stood for China, others that it stood for cheap, though of course Apple never confirmed either. Opinions on the 5c vary, and I suspect many see it as a flop for Apple, though I think that’s wrong. The iPhone 5c did two things for Apple which were very valuable: at the very least, it served as a useful experiment but I think it also bolstered sales in the quieter spring and summer months when iPhone sales tend to lag. By definition, the kind of people interested in a 5c were not those who needed the latest and greatest device as soon as it was available. So it was a great fit for carrier promotions and other marketing activities in the March-August period. Q2 and Q3 sales are typically off by about a third from sales in Q4 and about 25% from sales in Q1, so boosting sales in this quarter would help even out the seasonal variability.

The iPhone 5c, of course, launched in the standard fall iPhone slot alongside the iPhone 5s, but this new rumored phone is apparently to be the first in years to launch outside that window. I suspect the reason is the 5c sold well during just this time of year, when sales of the flagships were down, and it will help to bolster sales during this off-peak period just as the 5c did before it. If that’s part of the intent, then why not launch it into this window, when it can gain the most attention and feel new and different, rather than getting overshadowed by brand-new top of the line phones?

Bringing 4-inch iPhones back

When Apple announced the iPhone 6, I wrote about how it closed one of the last remaining competitive windows by introducing iPhones with larger screens. But in doing so, Apple also opened another window by discontinuing new 4-inch phones at the same time. I believe Apple wanted to keep its portfolio simple and was also betting no meaningful competitor would take advantage of that window, so it could safely ignore the 4-inch size without losing those customers to competitors. However, what’s happened is many of those owners of smaller iPhones have simply stuck with them, which has also dampened iPhone sales over the last year and a half. By introducing a new 4-inch phone, Apple is giving those customers a reason to upgrade. Of course, many of those holdouts have opted out of having the latest and greatest device already, so they’re a good fit for the mid-year approach I outlined above. Again, this should help to boost Q2 and Q3 iPhone sales significantly.

Pricing and positioning

If that’s the purpose of this new phone, how should Apple price it and where should it fit in the iPhone hierarchy? Here is where I think a lot of the speculation has been wrong. As I’ve already said, I suspect this is far more about boosting off-season sales than it is about introducing a new iPhone at a dramatically lower price point, for example, for emerging markets. As such, I think we need to consider where this new iPhone would fit within the existing iPhone portfolio. Take a look at that portfolio as it stands today from a pricing perspective:

In what’s effectively a three-by-three matrix, Apple has several empty spots, notably in the bottom left corner, where there’s no new 4-inch device. That might suggest a launch price for the iPhone SE of $550, to slot in neatly with the other two new phones. This preserves the $100 price differential between new phones based on size, which makes some sense.

However, there are a couple of reasons to doubt that strategy. For one thing, this new device won’t have all the same top-of-the-line specs as the iPhone 6S line, which that pricing would suggest. For another, this device is launching off-cycle and likely won’t get a price discount come September. As such, Apple can likely afford to sell it for less, and doesn’t want to put it at the same price point at the year-old 6S in September. For these reasons, I wonder if Apple might bring the SE in at $450 instead, replacing the 5S in the portfolio immediately rather than waiting until September to drop that device. It would then likely stay at that price point until next March, when it would presumably be replaced by another phone similarly positioned, assuming Apple deems the experiment a success.

What about emerging markets?

The big implication of all this is Apple won’t actually extend the bottom end of the price spread at all with this new device. In all likelihood, the SE simply takes the place of a device already in the portfolio from a price perspective. So what about emerging markets and the need to bring prices down there? For those markets, I actually expect Apple to continue its existing strategy of selling older phones, but with a new wrinkle: refurbished devices.

One of the biggest problems with the old-phones strategy for lower price points is those phones are likely to stay in market for several years from the time they’re bought. As such. you could easily end up with phones that are 5-6 years old still in market. While a handful of such phones will always remain in use, the risk for Apple is these numbers rise dramatically as it pushes this strategy in emerging markets, which may constrain its ability to move iOS and the iPhone platform forward. So it makes sense for Apple to start shortening the lifecycle of these devices, which is part of the rationale for the new strategy evidenced by the SE.

However, the other part of this strategy has to be putting more used phones back on sale. With the iPhone Upgrade Program, and the less high-profile iPhone Trade-in program, Apple now has a couple of channels through which to acquire used but relatively new iPhones which it can refurbish and put back on sale in emerging markets. Apple has long sold refurbished devices such as iPods, iPads, and Macs through its website, but it hasn’t done this with iPhones until now. Most of those devices will have been returned or replaced devices for which Apple gets no revenue, and yet they’ve still been discounted by as much as a couple of hundred dollars. With the iPhone Upgrade Program, Apple will already have received around $400 or more in monthly payments after the first year from a customer, and so could potentially afford to discount these devices even more heavily when resold.

You could see refurbished year-old devices on sale for several hundred dollars less than retail price for new devices. That could easily get those phones below the $450 floor for new, year-old and two-year-old devices. A price point of $350 for a year-old device seems entirely realistic, and you could even see $250 for a two-year-old device. That suddenly allows the iPhone to hit price points it’s never been able to hit before, which in turn could make it more viable in markets like India.

All this would leave us with a pricing approach that looks roughly like this after this month’s announcements:

Going forward, I could actually see the yellow box eliminated over time, with 2-year-old devices being replaced from a price perspective by the refurbished devices and the smaller new devices. We certainly can’t be sure about any of this, but I’m very much looking forward to Apple’s event in the next few weeks and watching how all this plays out.

HP recently announced its new Elite X3 convertible smartphone that can become a notebook or a desktop through use of smart adapters and wireless technology. Running Windows 10, it’s targeted at enterprise users who want portability but are not able to get all their work done on a smartphone form factor. It sports some impressive technology, including the latest Qualcomm Snapdragon 820 processor with 4GB of memory, a huge 4150 maH battery, a Gorilla Glass 4 9.6” edge-to-edge high res display, full Cat 6 LTE modem, dual SIM capability, and Mil Std 8 durability. To compliment and extend the core device, HP has created a desk solution that allows the phone to rest in a dock and provide connectivity via Display Port and Ethernet to a full size display and keyboard as well as corporate networks. HP also created a mobile extender (called ME-Dock) that essentially coverts the device into a 12.5″ laptop.

HP is going for the Swiss Army Knife approach with this device. It believes users would prefer a single device that can be configured “on the fly” to the user’s needs and circumstances. Such handheld convertible approaches have been tried before (all the way back to Palm days) with limited success. HP is betting this time is different, driven by the adoption and standardization on Windows 10. But there are a few challenges to this strategy.

First, Windows 10 is not all that good at legacy apps. To fix this, HP includes a VDI environment it OEM’s from Citrix, which it calls HP Workspace. This is more than just Microsoft Continuum, as it is a full VDI solution that can run any Windows app loaded on the virtual server. However, and this is a major issue, it only works in an on-line scenario. If users want to interact with a legacy app, say on an airplane with no WiFi, they cannot. This may be the kiss of death for some users wanting to work with legacy corporate apps, as they can’t be natively loaded on the device (Windows 10 running on a Qualcomm chip only supports the newer Windows 10 native universal app environment).

Second, HP has not announced pricing for any of this yet. Given the high performance features of the device, it appears it will be fairly expensive. And given that a user would have to buy multiple components to make it into both a smartphone and a desktop/notebook replacement, it may be cost prohibitive. HP is betting it will still cost less than buying a feature rich smartphone and a business class 2-in-1 or Ultrabook class machine.

Third, the size of the device puts it squarely into the upper end of the phablet range, not as a replacement for the popular smartphones in the 5-6 inch range. While phablet class devices are picking up in popularity, especially with business users who can utilize the bigger screen, the majority of users still purchase a smaller, more “svelte” device. Can a device, sized in the range of smaller tablets, be competitive as a smartphone communications device with users?

Fourth, many users of smartphone devices rely on a growing list of apps available from the various app stores. Running Windows 10 means this device will have access to far fewer apps, both for business and personal use. This has been a shortcoming of Windows phones for some time and it is likely many potential users would not find this an acceptable substitute for their iOS or Android-powered devices. Even if this is primarily targeted at enterprise users, the availability of personal apps is still a driving factor for device selections (hence the whole BYOD movement).

Finally, to take full advantage of the benefits of Windows 10 requires new apps be compliant across all form factors. However few companies have redesigned their apps for this new universal app requirement. Given the history of business apps, it will take many years before the majority of such enterprise apps are available, hence the need for HP Workspace. But will companies want to deploy yet another infrastructure product, even if it is relatively easy to do?

HP is taking a gamble on an approach that might have appeal to the growing number of users who are burdened with having to use several devices to get their jobs done. Clearly, this is not a device for the mass consumer market. But the price and performance of this product will have a major impact on acceptance.

Bottom line: It is encouraging that HP is trying to regain its reputation for innovation of years past. But this tablet sized device may just be too big for a majority of users replacing their smartphones. Further, the need for convenience apps so prevalent in the Android and iOS ecosystem will be a limiting factor for many mobile users. Clearly this is innovative and a major addition to HP’s product line. But acceptance (and success) is not assured.

Like many others in the tech community, I applaud Apple’s efforts to encrypt the iPhone to protect our privacy. But there’s been noticeably little attention given to the impact of apps on that same privacy.

I’ve always been surprised at how many permissions some apps requests before they can be installed. They typically request access to our contacts, location, calendar, email and sometimes even our mic and camera. Yet, rarely do the apps explain why they need all of this information or what they plan to do with it. In fact, many of the items they ask to access have no bearing on the app’s functionality. I’ve yet to come across an app that allows us to selectively accept or reject these permissions item by item.

So the question is, how serious an issue is this when it comes to protecting our privacy and how do Android and iOS phones compare?

I posed this question to Amit Ashbel, a Cybersecurity professional with Checkmarx.com. The Israeli-based company provides services that review software code for vulnerabilities and has published a notable report on this subject, “The State of Mobile Application Security, 2014-2015”.

He pointed out mobile apps have two main attack vectors: (1) The operating system and (2) The application installed on the device.

Ashbel noted Apple does a good job in securing its operating system and significantly limits the user’s access to core OS level controls. Google takes a different approach and enables more flexibility which, at times, might expose the OS to more risks. Neither Google nor Apple do a good job in securing the apps, because neither company seem to analyze the apps for security vulnerabilities they may expose the user to.

The task to analyze code is obviously immense. The iOS platform alone has more than 1.5 million unique apps, downloaded over 75 billion times!

But according to Ashbel, the vulnerabilities exposed by the apps are less a result of the developers intentionally compromising our data and more the result of poor coding that allows others to attack our phones and obtain that personal data.

The Checkmarx and AppSec-Labs study identified the top seven development sins based on testing hundreds of applications of all types, from banking to games to utilities:

1. Authentication/Authorization – Acting on or accessing data without sufficient permissions, such as bypassing the security pin code and allowing access to personal information

2. Availability – Issues resulting in denial of service from the application or part of it that can result in crashes

3. Configuration Management – Incorrect or inappropriate configurations

4. Weak Cryptography – Breaches related to insecure ways of protecting data

5. Information Disclosure – Exposure of technical information such as application logs

6. Input Validation Handling – Results of mishandling data received from the user

7. Personal/Sensitive Information Leakage – Exposure of personal or other sensitive data such as passwords, documents, credit card numbers, etc.

In comparing iOS and Android, the report finds few differences:

It is a common myth that the iOS development platform is more secure than the Android equivalent for several legitimate reasons:

a) iOS has more restrictive controls over what developers can do and tight application sandboxing
b) iOS applications are fully vetted before being released to customers – preventing malware from entering the Apple App Store

Yet, in the field of pure application security where vulnerabilities are built in the code or into the application logic, the story is quite different.

Our statistics show the distribution of vulnerability exposed by severity is almost identical between iOS and Android applications with a slightly higher percentage of critical vulnerabilities in iOS applications.

40 percent of iOS vulnerabilities were critical or of high severity, compared to 36 percent of the Android vulnerabilities.

The conclusion is there’s more vulnerability from apps, due to the way they are coded, rather than from intention. But, because of poor coding, it’s even more of a reason not to provide access to information not needed for the app to function properly.

What does Ashbel do when loading apps on his Android phone? He reads the permissions carefully and, if they ask for access to information not needed, he says no.

One would think as part of the approval process to allow an app to be sold in their stores, both Apple and Google would require the permissions asked by the apps are just what’s needed. Perhaps they need to begin examining the app’s code in greater depth. After all, Apple has raised the importance of securing the personal information on our phone and that should include all areas of vulnerabilities.

The more I study the consumer landscape for wearables, the more I’m convinced the wrong narratives are circulating about their value. Because the market is so young, most of the use cases being presented skew toward a tech or fitness lifestyle. Consumers see people running or working out as primary advertising angles and most won’t immediately identify with the use case. Or they see and hear about more tech/gadget-centric value propositions being the reason they need a wearable and don’t identify with the use case. This is the challenge of being early in a market. The mainstream value is there. Consumers just don’t see it yet.

Over the past few months, I’ve had a range of discussions with agencies in the healthcare industry. Following those discussions with my own interviews of consumers who don’t own a wearable, I get the sense the health angle is the least understood but also has the most potential in helping wearables go mainstream. Most consumers (74% of our consumer panel) have no immediate plans to buy a wearable tech product and 53% say they don’t see the need for one. However, when you talk them through the health benefits specifically, you can see their attitude soften.

On this note, some research was recently conducted by Accenture. Here are the stats that stood to me:

1. 77% of consumers and 85% of doctors say using wearables helps patient engagement
2. 78% of healthcare consumers wear or are willing to wear technology to track their lifestyle and/or vital signs
3. 40% of health app users have already shared data with a doctor in some capacity
4. When recommended by a doctor, 3 in 4 consumers followed advice to wear technology to track health

Interestingly, the study found that, when it came to whom to share this data with, consumers responded with the following:

In recent Wristly research, we discovered 61% of the panel would consider switching healthcare providers if they offered a subsidized smart watch. 49% of the Wristly panel also said they would be “likely” or “very likely” to share health information with their provider if offered a discount on their bill. (This information and more are detailed in the latest edition of Wristly Pro)

All of this confirming the motivation behind the recent trend of corporations planning to implement corporate wellness strategies to offer employees a subsidy on a wearable in order to motivate them and track their progress toward staying healthy. The benefits to increased health and wellness to the consumer, employer, and consumer/doctor relationship is overwhelmingly positive and can’t be ignored.

We are in the midst of a transition, however. The healthcare IT world is still working out the kinks as they move to a digital world. A specific study done by Accenture with doctors found, “Nearly all US doctors (90%) say better functionality and an easy-to-use data entry system are important for improving the quality of patient care through healthcare IT. Interoperability remains an unmet need.”

When you take a step back and see the foundation being laid right now with the digital healthcare transition and technologies around health apps and wearables, it seems clear where we are headed but not clear how long it will take to get there. The health story is a strong one, as even consumers will agree health is important to them but admit a lack of education is a main reason they feel challenged to get and stay healthy. Technology will aid in this process and that core understanding is one reason I remain so bullish on wearable products. The sensors which can capture essential information in helping us stay healthy will remain unique to something we wear on our person. It remains one of few functions our smartphones will not be able to do. Whether these sensors stay on our wrists, move to our ears, get embedded into our clothing, or something else, we don’t know. But we do know we will wear quite a bit more technology in the future.

Despite all the marketing, TV ads, and even talk about 4G LTE and now 5G, instances of poor wireless coverage remain a common frustration among users. But even where coverage is generally good, the combination of the imperfections of RF, the hundreds of variables impacting radio signals, and sheer economics, it means we will never have ‘perfect’ coverage. In fact, for each incremental improvement in coverage, getting to the next level becomes economically and physically more challenging.

Despite all this, there is a wave of new technology and products hitting the market in earnest, promising to help address some common coverage and capacity challenges, for both cellular and Wi-Fi. We’re not talking about rural or remote areas where, to be honest, if there’s no tower in the vicinity 30 years after the birth of cellular, there probably never will be. The focus here is on filling dead spots and “donut holes” in outdoor areas, and providing deeper and more reliable coverage inside buildings. Let’s divide these developments between cellular and Wi-Fi.

Cellular

Four important things are happening in the cellular realm that could have some meaningful impact this year. First, wireless carriers are starting to deploy small cells in significant numbers. Small cells increase network capacity and provide improved outdoor and in-building coverage. Verizon for example, is deploying small cells in major cities, in order to alleviate congestion issues being experienced in large issues due to burgeoning data usage. So your four bars of LTE will get you the sorts of speeds that feel like four bars of LTE. Sprint, for its buildout of the 2.5 GHz band in major cities (branded LTE Plus), is relying heavily on small cells.

Second, additional spectrum acquired over the past few years is coming online this year. T-Mobile continues to roll out its A-block 700 MHz spectrum, which provides approximately 2x the coverage from a single cell site, and better in-building coverage, compared to its higher band spectrum. TMO’s A-block holdings now cover about 2/3 of the U.S. population. As another example, AT&T is slated to turn on some of its WCS spectrum this year. And 600 MHz auctions are scheduled to begin soon, although services using that spectrum will not be rolled out until at least 2018.

Third, wireless carriers are starting to employ elements of LTE Advanced, namely carrier aggregation, which combines channels across all their spectrum holdings. This “wider channel” results in capacity and throughput enhancements.

And finally, improved femtocell and residential small cell products are becoming available. The most public and notable example is T-Mobile’s residential 4G LTE CellSpot product, which the carrier is basically giving away to subscribers who require improved in-building coverage (read our test drive of the product here). As another example, Nextivity, a leader in the femto market, has introduced a new signal booster for in-building coverage, supporting LTE and UMTS, that provides significant increases in gain and bandwidth compared to previous products.

Wi-Fi

Wi-Fi is another important part of connectivity, of course. What’s always been amazing to me is consumers rush out and buy the latest smartphones, or try to make the most out of their cellular network, while their router hasn’t been updated in five years and sits behind a shelf collecting dust. Well, now might be the time for an upgrade. A new crop of routers is coming to market, promising significant improvements in range and performance. The most advanced 802.11ac routers, such as the D-Link AC3200 Ultra Wi-Fi Router have one channel at 2.4 GHz and 2 channels at 5 GHz and up to 8 spatial streams of MIMO, providing 4x the channel bandwidth of previous versions. And just a couple of weeks ago, Eero launched its new home “Wi-Fi System” to rave reviews. Eero relies on multiple APs in the home connected via a mesh network to deliver significantly improved coverage and performance.

In addition to new and better Wi-Fi network equipment, there are significant efforts to increase capacity in the unlicensed (Wi-Fi) bands. Over the past couple of years, additional capacity has been allocated in the 5 GHz band for Wi-Fi, which has led to a new crop of multi-band routers. There’s also terrestrial low power service (TLPS), which uses a slice of the spectrum that satellite provider Globalstar owns in the 2.4 GHz band, as a supplemental channel for Wi-Fi. Globalstar has petitioned the FCC to allow it to open channel 14, which would add to channels 1, 6, & 11 in the 2.4 GHz band currently used for Wi-Fi, providing a meaningful increase in capacity. Finally, there’s progress being made on LTE-U, which would allow incumbent wireless operators to use up to 500 MHz in the 5 GHz unlicensed band, for mainly downlink LTE services. LTE-U promises about 2x the range and capacity of current Wi-Fi (see my recent piece on LTE-U).

RF will always be capacity-limited and coverage will never be perfect. But 2016 looks to be a breakout year in terms of more spectrum and innovative products and solutions in both cellular and Wi-Fi.

If you were to ask the question, “what is Facebook?”, you might get a variety of different answers: a social network, a communication platform, a content aggregator, and so on. Yet one thing Facebook isn’t – yet – is an e-commerce player. But it’s arguable that much of what Facebook has been building over the last several years amounts to a Trojan horse strategy to become one. Rather than entering Amazon’s market directly, Facebook has been building the scaffolding around its e-commerce business and doing everything but actually introducing ways to buy things across Facebook. Given how Amazon tends to respond to direct threats to its business, this may be one of the smartest things Facebook has done in its history.

What then, is this e-commerce scaffolding Facebook has been building? Think about what you’d need to have in place to build a successful e-commerce business:

• Goods – either goods procured directly or close connections with companies that could be suppliers of such goods
• Potential buyers – as large a number as possible of potential customers for those goods you have to sell
• Signals – ideally strong signals about which goods you’ll offer will be of interest to your potential customers
• Customer service infrastructure – ways for your buyers and sellers to communicate with each other before, during, and after the sale
• Marketing tools – both above-the-line advertising and word-of-mouth tools for making potential customers aware of the goods on sale

Facebook, at this point, has all of this and more. With over a billion and a half users and masses of businesses who already run Pages and buy advertising on the site, it has well beyond a critical mass of potential buyers and sellers. Every company of any size in the vast majority of the major countries in which Facebook operates has a presence on the site and a relationship with Facebook, and a majority of individuals in many of those countries do, too.

Facebook already knows a great deal about your interests, and indeed, serves up targeted advertising for those products already, even though today the purchase flow that follows a click on one of those ads is completed outside the Facebook walled garden. In the form of Messenger, which was recently expanded to allow businesses to communicate with customers, Facebook has a customer service infrastructure and communication medium to allow buyers and sellers to interact throughout the purchase cycle. And through both paid advertising and the social connections and ability to amplify messages through social sharing, Facebook has a variety of tools to get the word out about products. With the M virtual assistant, Facebook even has a discovery mechanism for connecting potential buyers with sellers that may meet a particular current need, combining timeliness and relevance in a way only search engines have previously achieved.

The next interesting question then becomes where the Buy button shows up first. It clearly has potential in the context of advertising but, given the emphasis on Messenger as a channel for B2C interactions, it seems likely it will have a role there, too. Ultimately, Buy buttons should pop up in appropriate contexts throughout Facebook, probably even inserted automatically by AI that recognizes product names in status updates and Messenger conversations and recognizes the products themselves in pictures and videos users share. Of course, all of this will spread to both Instagram and WhatsApp (perhaps even Oculus) over time as well. At this point, it’s far less a question of whether Facebook will embrace commerce and much more a question of when.

One of the biggest determinants of Facebook’s ability to finally pull the trigger on commerce will be its ability to solve its biggest and thorniest problem — payments. For all the information users have willingly handed over to Facebook over the years, the one vital piece of information it hasn’t asked for or received is the 15 or 16 digits on the front of users’ credit cards. Yet having some kind of payment infrastructure in place is an essential piece of that commerce scaffolding. David Marcus, who now runs Messenger, obviously has a long history in this space, but so far all we’ve seen along these lines is peer to peer payments in Messenger. When that product launched, I surmised it might well be a way to break through the payments barrier but it hasn’t exactly set the world alight since. Using partners that have existing payment systems would be one option, but many of the most obvious partners have become direct or quasi-competitors to Facebook over recent years, including both Amazon and Apple. Once a user’s first transaction is completed, the rest is straightforward, but it’s that first transaction that’s going to be the hard part. Crack that and Facebook should quickly become a major player in e-commerce, adding yet another arrow to its quiver and opening up a whole new set of revenue streams.

The non-smartphone owner — you know who I’m talking about. You may even know or be related to one of these people. You may even be one yourself. We spot them every now and then in the wild using these ancient devices and we are bewildered.

In the US, roughly 15-18% of the mobile market still uses a feature phone. Personally, I find this fascinating and I’d like to share some insights we uncovered in our latest US smartphone market study.

I take nearly every opportunity to talk to a consumer who is doing something interesting whenever I spot them in public. Often these conversations happen in a line, at a gas station, while waiting for my wife outside the bathroom at a movie theater, etc. One thing I learn when talking with these non-smartphone folks is how it all boils down to them simply not wanting a smartphone. Sometimes this is out of principle, sometimes cost, sometimes they don’t want to learn something new or be bothered by technology. But I decided I’d ask questions specifically to those in our mainstream consumer research panel who say they don’t own a smartphone. Here are some of the things I uncovered.

The top answer from the non-smartphone owners of our panel was “no interest in capabilities of a smartphone.” I added the “I like my basic cell phone” in order to capture sentiment. This mentality is exactly the one I encounter whenever I get a chance to interview someone who doesn’t own a smartphone. They simply aren’t interested. They understand the benefits, they don’t find them too hard to use, they don’t want to be bothered by the costs and, when it comes right down to it, they don’t believe they are worth it.

They skew older with 50% of them saying they were in the 60+ demographic. They skew slightly more male than female. Here is the really crazy part. Most non-smartphone owners in our panel have owned their current feature phone for 3-4 years and said they have no intention of replacing it for another 2-3 years. Does a Samsung or LG (the most popular brands owned by this cohort) last for 6 to 7 years? Remarkable if so.

Out of curiosity, I wanted to gauge what brand of smartphone they may lean toward should the dark day come when they can no longer get their precious feature phone. Samsung, Apple, Motorola, and LG were the top five answers with Samsung among the top with just over 50% of the responses. Interestingly, this cohort tends to lean more Android if they had to choose a smartphone and lean toward a similar brand of feature phone they previously had like Samsung or LG.

It intrigues me that price comes up as much as it does, given it seems US carriers are penalizing those who don’t yet have smartphones by charging them more in various ways on their bill than consumers who do have smartphones. We see this often on family plans where the kids with the smartphones pay less, either per line, or something else, than the parents with feature phones. So you would think at some point in time the cost issue goes away and it just becomes a principled stand against smartphones themselves.

Around the same time we did this study a few weeks ago, I also did one on the PC/Tablet market to gauge where the market is currently leaning with purchase plans for 2016. Those non-smartphone owners also skew toward Windows desktops from brands like Dell or HP. They purchased their current machine 5-6 years ago and paid less than $400 for it. Most don’t own a tablet of any kind, most don’t plan to and the small percentage who do plan on buying an iPad. Over 60% have no plans to buy a PC/laptop of any kind this year while 12% said it they would “possibly” buy a new PC this year and only 10% have definite plans to buy a new PC in 2016. And when they do, the majority of respondents said they plan to spend in the $400 range–again.

They spend most of their PC time doing social networking, a list of things that qualify under file management, and streaming videos. Nothing which requires a high-priced PC and, since they don’t have a smartphone or tablet, it is their only product to do such things.

The picture is clear, after both studies, who this type of customer is, what they own and don’t own, their primary use cases and behaviors, price bands, and sentiment toward the smartphone. While interesting, and rare, these customers are unique in many ways and represent a part of the market many of us who live and breath tech find hard to comprehend.

I want to leave you with this key understanding as to why I bring up this customer. In many of the consumer market and device usage studies we have conducted in the past year the same glaring evidence stands out. We can directly tie price paid for a PC/Smartphone/tablet to usage of the product. Simply, those who pay more for their computers use them more. For a consumer who is very price conscious like the non-smartphone owner, they have no intention on using the increased capabilities so see no need to pay for it. Similarly, those who buy lower end smartphones, PCs, and tablets are less engaged with the device and the surrounding ecosystem. This insight helps us understand the surrounding ecosystems, and engagement levels around hardware prices. Anyone in the software (apps) or services ecosystem needs to understand this dynamic as it relates to their business focus and customer priorities.

When it comes to developing new products, I’ve always found the idea to be the easy part. It’s the execution that’s really the hard part. Execution requires implementing all of the tiny details to get everything just right. Miss one important detail and it can lead to failure.

I thought of this same issue with regards to Uber over the past several days with it being in the news. The Uber idea is brilliant, one of the best to come out of the tech industry since perhaps Facebook. The company has gotten most everything right, except one: its approach to the safety of its customers. Does that make Uber vulnerable?

Now, Uber is not going to fail but its success can seriously be affected if customers begin to worry about their safety. Even when the odds are tiny, consider how many people are afraid to fly after a serious plane crash.

Had I not covered two incidents of Uber customers this past summer for the San Diego Transcript, I might have felt differently when reading about how an Uber driver in Kalamazoo, MI was charged with gunning down a half-dozen people at random. I found Uber brings some of this on itself with its own indifference and stubbornness. They are not doing everything they can to protect their customers. That was my conclusion after covering these two events and interviewing the victims.

A friend of mine, a female Silicon Valley executive, experienced a harrowing experience when she took an Uber on what should have been a ten-minute drive from one part of San Francisco to another. The driver took a long route onto a congested freeway, even though the driver’s GPS suggested a local route, and then went into a frenzy when she questioned him. The driver sped down the breakdown lane past stopped traffic to his left and cut across several lanes of traffic, threatening to let her out on the freeway. She was fortunate to get out when the car stopped several blocks from her destination.

A second victim called right after this first story ran. Her Uber driver took her in the opposite direction to where she was going and told her he was going to show her “a good time”. She only got the driver to relent when she started filming him and threatening to call the police.

In each instance, neither was able to reach Uber to report these incidents. Uber has no phone number to report problems.

The first victim was able to reach Uber only by tweeting. The company’s response was to send a link to fill out a form and a $5 refund. The second victim called the police and, when she finally was able to reach Uber, they said the driver has a known hearing problem and blamed her for misunderstanding him. She also discovered when she tried to give the police the driver information and license number from her phone, the Uber app deletes that information once the ride begins.

In each case, the victims felt Uber showed indifference and denial.

Think about this. In each case, a life was put in danger. Yet, Uber did not react as any of us would if we saw a person in harm’s way. It’s lunacy that Uber does not provide a phone number to report incidences of this type. You would think the company would want to know whenever such incidents occurred.

Any company experiencing the rapid growth Uber is going through can’t possibly prevent the hiring of problem drivers. Some bad ones will get through their screening system. And proper vetting is likely one of their biggest costs, perhaps next to legal.

But even after the killings in Kalamazoo, Uber insisted they plan no changes to their screening process, which currently requires that an applicant submits their name, birth date, social security number, vehicle registration, insurance, license, and a vehicle inspection report.

Yet, they are facing lawsuits from several cities, including San Francisco, for not doing enough to screen drivers, exaggerating how safe they are, and allowing convicted felons to become drivers. Uber does not do any face-to-face screening nor do they do fingerprint checking, something most law enforcement agencies recommend.

Uber just settled one lawsuit for $28.5 million for, among other things, claiming it was “the safest ride on the road”. Clearly Uber can do more to protect its customers.

Being a device vendor in 2016 is hard. Former high-growth markets (smartphones) are slowing or declining (slate tablets). The traditional PC market continues to struggle to find its new normal. And nascent categories such as wearables, virtual reality, and augmented reality are more future promise than shipment drivers today.

For all but a few, the march toward commodity status is relentless. The result: Competition among hardware vendors to find new segments and areas of growth is becoming ever-more fierce.

Such competition was on display at the Mobile World Congress this week, where we saw several vendors known for products in one category launch new products into adjacent categories. Now, it’s important to note that increasingly the lines that distinguish one device category from another—a smartphone from a tablet, a tablet from a PC, a PC from a smartphone—will continue to blur. At IDC, we track device shipments and we need clear product categories to enable accurate counting. So this makes our job harder. But consumers and business buyers don’t care about such labels. They just want the right device for the job. As a result, the fact more vendors are playing in more categories should lead to better products for end users, which is, of course, a good thing.

Huawei Launches a Windows 10 Device

While the broader tablet market has experienced steep declines (down nearly 10% worldwide, YoY in 2015), the detachable segment—those devices with first-party detachable keyboards—has been growing at a fast clip (albeit, from a small base). In 2015, worldwide detachable shipments increased to 16.6M units, up from 7.9M in 2014. IDC expects that strong growth to continue in 2016. Now, back in 2010—2012 when Apple’s iPad and later Android tablets started gaining steam in the market, there was much discussion in the industry about tablet shipments cannibalizing PC shipments. What our research showed however, was that very few people bought a traditional tablet back then with the specific intention of using it to replace a PC. There was plenty of usage cannibalization with people using their tablets to do more things, which ultimately resulted in them using their PCs less. Less usage led to extended PC lifetimes. But few people swapped a tablet for a PC outright.

This time, however, it’s going to be different. Today’s detachables are increasingly capable. When Microsoft launched the first Surface products, the company proudly proclaimed them to be no-compromise tablets and PCs when, in fact, they compromised on both counts, leading to devices that weren’t particularly good tablets or PCs.

Today’s Surface Pro 4—and competing products from all the major PC vendors—are very different machines fully capable of replacing most traditional PC user’s notebook. As a result, consumers and companies will increasingly purchase detachable products to replace traditional PCs. Real cannibalization is happening and, as detachable growth accelerates, those unit volumes will increasingly come out of traditional notebooks.

Looking to capitalize on this opportunity at MWC, Chinese smartphone giant Huawei launched its first Windows 10 product, a detachable tablet called the MateBook. By all counts, it’s a solid first offering that leverages the company’s mobile design prowess. It features a 12-inch screen, is just 6.9-mm thick, and includes a battery the company claims will run for up to 13 hours. Also, Huawei embedded the same fingerprint sensor from its Mate 8 smartphone into the device’s volume rocker, which should make locking and unlock the device easy and fast. It runs Core M processors with an optional stylus. The company didn’t announce final pricing on the device but it will likely range from $599 to $1699.

Naysayers might suggest that traditional PC vendors, and Microsoft itself, have little to fear from Huawei entering this market. But the company is a serious smartphone powerhouse, with strength both in China and at the worldwide level. Its design capabilities, scale, and channel partnerships make it a legitimate contender out of the gate. I fully expect other major Chinese smartphone players to enter the Windows 10 market later this year, but the industry will carefully watch Huawei’s success or failure here.

HP Launches a Smartphone

While many expected to see a Windows 10 device from Huawei at this years’ show, it’s safe to say few expected PC giant HP to launch a Windows 10 Mobile-based smartphone. Fewer still would have expected it to be so notably good. As noted in a Bob O’Donnell’s column earlier this week, the X3 is a robust, 6-inch, Qualcomm Snapdragon 820-based device. But what makes it interesting is HP has launched a product it clearly hopes will eventually cannibalize some portion of the PC market where it is currently the second-largest player (behind Lenovo). The product’s optional desktop dock turns it into a full-fledged desktop and its Mobile Extender dock turns it into a notebook (albeit one with a phone dangling from it). As a result, HP envisions enterprise using the device to replace, not just a person’s existing smartphone, but their notebook and desktop, too. It’s an audacious move and one that’s going to be very tricky to pull off, but you have to give them credit for trying.

Part of the risk here for HP is they only control part of the X3’s destiny, as the company is entirely dependent upon Microsoft fulfilling some key Windows 10 Mobile platform promises. Specifically, the Universal Windows Platform (UWP) has to gain traction and attract enterprise app developers. And MS must deliver the promised experience within Continuum, the feature within Windows 10 Mobile that transforms the interface of the device depending upon whether the user is on a 6-inch phone screen, a 12-inch notebook screen, or a 22-inch desktop. That’s a lot of things that have to go right — only a few of which HP controls. The product is still months away from shipping, and HP hasn’t announced final pricing and channels.

Complicating matters further is the presumed existence of a future Microsoft Surface smartphone. If such a product exists, it may well do all the things HP has set out to do with the X3 with the added benefit of being more tightly integrated with the OS, since Microsoft would be making both the software and the hardware.

Yep, competition is hard.

This week has seen a slew of announcements from major smartphone manufacturers in conjunction with the global mobile industry’s annual event, Mobile World Congress, held in Barcelona, Spain. All the usual suspects, except Apple, have introduced new phones or other devices at the show, including a number of the flagship phones these vendors will sell over the coming year. You’ll find reviews aplenty elsewhere, so I won’t attempt another here. There are several themes that emerge from these device launches, which are symbolic of changes in the smartphone market and its competitive dynamics.

Android vs. Android, not iPhone

One of the biggest changes in the competitive dynamic is the largest Android vendors are now competing against other Android vendors more than they’re competing against the iPhone. Though the Android vs iOS and Samsung vs Apple rivalries have dominated coverage of the smartphone market over the last few years, focusing on these today misses some of the broader movements in market share. Though Google’s latest Android ad campaign continues to fight the platform wars, most of the individual vendors on the Android side are more focused – rightly so – on differentiating themselves from their Android siblings.

The simple reason is the differences between iOS and Android are clear and have been so for years now. Most people with the ability to buy either have long since made a choice and, although there are always some switchers, most of the switching is going from Android to iOS, especially in mature markets. At the same time, premium Android smartphone makers are suffering much more from the encroachment of hitherto low-end competitors also running Android into their target markets. Competition from smartphones with similar specs and running the same version of Android is tough and as such, these vendors have to demonstrate how their implementation of Android is different. Hence, you see Samsung focusing on things like its always-on screen, its improved camera, water and dust resistance, and the inclusion of the Vulkan APIs for graphics.

Beyond the phones themselves, several major vendors also pushed accessories, including Samsung’s Gear 360 camera, LG’s swappable Friends modules, and Sony’s Xperia Ear wireless earbuds. Each of these companies is attempting to build its own ecosystem of devices independent of Android, to try to drive user loyalty to its particular brand rather than to Android in general. Although Xiaomi’s focus at MWC was another implementation of its vision of high specs at low prices, with a Snapdragon 820-based Mi 5, it has long offered a wide range of other consumer electronics products under the Xiaomi brand.

Enterprise an increasing focus

Though these companies are all trying hard to differentiate themselves, they’ve gone through several interesting cycles in this regard. Samsung focused overly much on gimmicky features a few years back, turning its annual keynotes into litanies of features and UI elements no one would ever discover or use. Somewhat chastened by its slowing growth, it then dialed back these customizations but, in the process, went from meaningless differentiation to little differentiation. Over the last couple of years, we’ve seen an increasing emphasis on premium hardware paired with more meaningful innovation in software and that’s definitely an improvement. But many other Android vendors are arguably heading in the same direction and that’s where Samsung’s enterprise strategy comes in.

The enterprise is one area where no other Android vendor has a serious standalone strategy, despite some efforts a few years back from some of them. Samsung’s Knox solution has turned into a really solid offering for enterprise customers who want to offer their employees Android devices without sacrificing security. Knox allows Samsung to overcome many of the inherent weaknesses of Android from an enterprise security perspective while adding additional layers on top to provide businesses with better manageability and separation of consumer and enterprise data. This year at MWC, it added its Enterprise Device Program and a connected vehicle solution to the mix. The EDP builds on Samsung’s work to bypass the standard Android update program to provide faster patches for security issues, as well as guaranteeing longer life cycles for enterprise buyers of Samsung smartphones. The connected vehicle solution will certainly have a service-oriented consumer solution too, but will also be part of Samsung’s expansion into enterprise services beyond the smartphone. Samsung is here extending its lead in the enterprise in a way no other Android vendor can match and this is differentiation that will stick. The other benefit is enterprises will be willing to pay a premium for these features, helping Samsung to maintain margins.

Samsung wasn’t the only smartphone vendor to target the enterprise at MWC – both Vaio and HP announced business-centric smartphones running Windows around the time of the show. However, in both cases, businesses would be wise to exercise caution about jumping on board with vendors that have shown little commitment to enterprise smartphones in the past. It’s clear that, as Windows on mobile devices becomes ever less relevant in the broader smartphone market, it may well find refuge in enterprises looking to commit to an end-to-end Microsoft solution for their devices.

Xiaomi – disrupter turned disrupted

I’ve mentioned Xiaomi briefly already, but I’ll just close with this thought: it’s intriguing to look at Xiaomi and what’s become of it over the last couple of years as a lesson in trends in the Android market. Xiaomi broke into the market during a brief window of opportunity when it was the only Android vendor offering iPhone-like products at much lower prices. It did very well during that period, growing rapidly off the back of a mix of truly cheap handsets and competitive priced mid-range handsets and both Xiaomi and many observers expected it to continue to do so. But that window of opportunity began to close as a number of other manufacturers adopted a similar strategy but without the flashy marketing, thereby disrupting Xiaomi much as Xiaomi had intended to disrupt others. Having originally set a target of 100 million smartphone sales in 2015, it ended the year with just 70 million. It’s not clear things will get much better in 2016. The Mi 5 is more of the same, though now with a Qualcomm processor, but even as it seeks to undermine Samsung and other premium Android vendors, its own strategy of cheaper but serviceable alternatives is likely to continue to come back to bite it both in China and in other markets. The Android market is essentially eating itself, pulling down the premium vendors and depressing margins, even as Apple continues to plough its own furrow without anything like the same threat of disruption.

Historians of the technology industry observed a pattern that was predictable with regards to new computing platforms. In the early days of a computing segment, like mainframes, minis, and desktops, there was a great deal of platform fragmentation. These early computing systems often ran proprietary software and operating systems with little interoperability. Eventually, a standard emerged — Windows. Even though Macs stuck around, their market share stayed well below 3% for much of the build-out of the PC era. Here is a visual to show how platforms started fragmented and then standardized around Windows.

What you are looking at is operating system share of devices sold annually. Of computing devices sold for most of the time period above, Microsoft was the standard. Fast forward to today and we see a slightly different picture emerge. Windows runs on PCs and Android and iOS run on mobile devices, giving us three primary operating systems occupying the bulk of computing devices sold each year.

You can see as the pie went from several hundred million computing devices sold each year to now almost 2 billion computing devices sold annually (when you add up PCs, tablets, and smartphones), the pie has gotten much larger but the landscape has also changed. While Android has the largest chunk of the pie, they do not have the 97% share Microsoft once had. The size of the pie and the global diversity of the consumer market brought with it the opportunity for several computing platforms to exist simultaneously.

If we take a step back and look at the installed base, we see an even clearer picture of the diversity in computing platforms in use today as well as the size of the market.

There are now well over three billion active computing devices in the world with five primary operating systems/computing platforms — Windows, OS X, iOS, Android, and AOSP (non-Google) Android running in China. The key point here is, with the addition of scale in mobile and the inclusion of the global consumer market, there is no single standard computing platform. The question then is, what will happen with things like Virtual/Augmented reality platforms or artificial intelligence platforms? Should we expect VR/AR or Artificial Intelligence to unify and one single platform emerge like during the enterprise PC days or will many different platforms exist as we see today in consumer computing?

I tend to lean toward the latter. While VR/AR will start off segmented with Oculus having a platform, Sony having a platform, Microsoft having a platform, Google having a platform and even Apple having a platform eventually, it may also stay segmented rather than consolidated.

The global consumer smartphone market has shown us it can sustain many platforms so perhaps whatever comes next will follow the same paradigm. As I’m observing with wearables, where the market is actually developing into a rich segmentation, perhaps VR/AR or artificial intelligence will do the same, adding new layers of computing platforms onto the existing ones rather than consolidating into a single one.

One of the most popular buzzwords in tech is something called Big Data. However, trying to get a straight answer as to what Big Data is can be difficult. In fact, as I looked into this deeper, I found at least 20 different definitions of what people believe Big Data means.

The fundamental concept of Big Data is that all types of computing devices — computers, smartphones, cars, fitness trackers, bar code scanners and even your TV and other IoT devices — are creating data and, in most cases, sending that data to the cloud.

Once it is in the cloud, data is stored and collated. Using various analytical tools, companies or individuals can mine that data to get answers to all types of questions or learn important things through statistical analysis. Using Big Data, one could study people’s habits and look at global health information in search of patterns that could help create new drugs or treatments in the medical world. It can be is used to find the latest fields for drilling oil and, in one example that impacts all of us, it gives advertisers a glimpse into what people are thinking and what they want in order to create better targeted ads for their clients or customers.

However on the surface, Big Data is all about numbers and number crunching. If looked at in these terms, Big Data seems cold, calculating and highly impersonal. A friend of mine, Rick Smolan, who is considered one of the great photographers of our time, looked at this idea of Big Data about five years ago and wondered not only what it means, but how it looked in terms of people creating and using it in real life. The result of this quest was a coffee table book entitled “The Human Face of Big Data”. Rick and a team of photographers, researchers and bloggers went around the world to photograph people using technology and put a face to this idea of Bid Data.

Ted Anthony of the Associated Press defines what this book is about:

“…an enormous volume… that chronicles, through a splash of photos and eye-opening essays and graphics, the rise of the information society…. a curious, wonderful beast — a solid slab that captures a virtual universe… This is one of those rare animals that captures its era in the most distinct of ways. It’s the kind of thing you’d put in a time capsule for your children today to show them, long after you’re gone, what the world was like at the beginning of their lives.”

When Rick sent me a copy of the book three years ago, it was a real eye opener for me and I suspect for anyone who reads it since it demystified the idea of Big Data and put a human face to it.

I recently found out Rick and his team were not content with covering this topic in book form alone. Last week, I was invited to the West coast premiere of a new movie on this topic directed by his brother Sandy Smolan and executive produced by Rick.

The movie is called, “The Human Face of Big Data-The Promise and Perils of Growing A Planetary Nervous System”. The hour long documentary premieres nationally on PBS Wednesday, February 24, 2016, at 10:00 p.m. ET (check local listings.)

Narrated by actor Joel McHale, the award-winning film features compelling human stories, captivating visuals and in-depth interviews with dozens of pioneering scientists, entrepreneurs, futurists and experts to illustrate powerful new data-driven tools, which have the potential to address some of humanity’s biggest challenges, including health, hunger, pollution, security and disaster response.

Some interesting tidbits from the pre-movie briefing I had as well as from the movie itself:

“The average person today processes more data in a single day than a person in the 1500’s did in an entire lifetime” Mick Greenwood

“Big Data is truly revolutionary because it fundamentally changes mankind’s relationship with information.” Michael S. Malone

“We’ve reached a tipping point in history: today more data is being manufactured by machines-servers, cell phones, GPS-enabled cars-than by people” Esther Dyson

“From the Dawn of civilization until 2003, humankind generated five exabytes of data. Now we produce five exabytes every two days. And the pace is accelerating.” Eric Schmidt

“As we begin to distribute trillions of connected sensors around the planet virtually every animate and inanimate object on earth will be generating and transmitting data, including our homes, cars, our natural and made environment and yes, even our bodies.” Anthony D Williams

This documentary looks at how people all over the world are using technology and, in turn creating, collecting and communicating data that, in most cases, goes to the cloud and can be used for all types of purposes. The movie itself is very positive about the potential impact of Big Data on us but it is also very realistic and shows the dark side as well, since it can be used by hackers and criminals against people and mankind.

I see this documentary enlightening to anyone that watches it since it succeeds well in defining Big Data — what it is and, more importantly, how it can and will impact mankind in the future. It also makes the concept of Big Data more personal as it puts a face on it and makes us realize that, while data itself in computing code is just numbers, it is people who create that data and are really at the heart of it.