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published
8 June 2000
It's the
phone, stupid
by Dylan Tweney
One overwhelming issue seems to dominate the thinking of VCs, members
of the media, pundits, and other assorted riffraff these days. I
can hardly avoid it myself: the wireless Internet.
I was happy to continue blithely along in my wireless ignorance,
when a funny thing happened -- I got buried in cell phones.
Now I'm starting to take the pundits more seriously.
Recent visitors to my house may have been slightly astonished at
the small pile of telephony equipment growing on top of an old sewing
table in the living room. This modest table used to hold, with plenty
of room to spare, a single telephone with a wireless handset and
a built-in answering machine.
Now the table also sports, at any given time, two or three cell
phones in addition to the original telephone. Inside the sewing
table is at least one retired cell phone, from a service provider
I no longer use -- and whose phones are completely incompatible
with the new service provider's network. (Elsewhere in the house
there is another, DSL-enabled phone line.)
The most recent addition to my phone family is a shiny Sprint NP
1000, a Web-enabled cell phone with an unusually big and clear screen.
This phone is a temporary visitor, a loaner from a public relations
firm. It's on the cutting edge of cell phone technology, with a
built-in Web browser, a sophisticated internal processor, and the
ability to store thousands of my contacts and appointments.
Its best feature? The shiny silver color. It's much cooler
than my usual cell phone, a clunky old black model (so 1990's!)
This is a phone I don't have to be embarrassed about using in public,
whether I'm standing in line at a coffee shop or in the middle of
a business lunch. Cell phone etiquette? [1] To heck with that --
this phone will impress people so much they'll forget to be offended.
But the phone's main selling point -- its Web capabilities -- leave
a lot to be desired.
Since the PR firm that lent me this phone represents Yodlee, I
figured I should make some effort to test out the cell-phone-enabled
version of the Yodlee service.
Yodlee [2] is a sort of personal information aggregator -- a
one-stop site where you can access disparate Web services, such
as your email, stock portfolios, bank accounts, calendar, favorite
news sources, and so forth. Once I set up a Yodlee account, I told
it what Web services I wanted it to keep track of. I gave it a host
of usernames and passwords so it could access, on my behalf, my
mail, calendar, and address book on Yahoo; my Wall Street Journal
online subscription; my bank account; and my IRA. Also, I gave Yodlee
the keys to my car and promised to name my first-born child after
it.
The result of all that labor was a single Yodlee page where I could
see, in summary form, a lot of my personal information at a glance.
For more detail -- for instance, to see the actual transactions
behind my current bank balance -- Yodlee lets me click through to
the bank's site, making it sort of a super-bookmark system.
It's what Yodlee is doing behind the scenes that is most interesting.
The company has put a lot of effort into collecting data from disparate
sources, cleaning it up, and rendering it in a consistent and relatively
easy-to-access format. (The company says they have also taken pains
to encrypt and secure the information on their servers.) As a result
Yodlee can, in principle, deliver the information any way you want
to get it -- including over a cell phone.
Using a cell phone to browse a Web service, however, is a pain
in the neck.
A typical scenario: I turn on my shiny silver Web-enabled cell
phone and bring up the Web browser. Then I select Yodlee from the
bookmark list. I laboriously type in my username (using the telephone
keypad, of course), then do the same thing with my password -- no
small trick when you can't even see the password onscreen. On the
third try, I succeed in logging on. Then I use the Yodlee menu to
browse through the menu of information I set up on the Yodlee Web
site. I can see my bank balance (but not the transaction history),
read the first 20 characters or so of Wall Street Journal headlines,
and even glance at my email.
By the time I finish doing all this, the phone is nearly out of
power.
The problem is obvious -- and it's not Yodlee's fault. A cell phone
is optimized for talking and for occasionally typing numbers. Turning
it into a Web browser puts way too much emphasis on the phone's
small display screen and on its tiny keypad.
It could be easier. For instance, why can't I just say "Yodlee"
into the phone to bring up the service? The NP 1000 already has
the capability to dial phone numbers based on spoken commands --
why not link those commands to bookmarks? Also, why couldn't I authenticate
myself by speaking a pass-phrase into the phone, rather than by
typing my password on its miserable keys? Barring all that, why
can't the makers of cell phones come up with better shortcuts for
typing text using 10-key dial pads?
Even with such improvements, however, Web phones will still miss
the mark -- slightly.
The term "wireless Web" is a misnomer, because
it suggests that cell phones will be used the same way as browsers,
and that wireless business models will match the Web's business
models. It just won't work that way. Case in point: How the heck
do you make advertising work on a cell phone, without completely
alienating and annoying your customers? [3]
What's really going to make Internet-enabled cell phones take off
isn't Yodlee, or My Yahoo, or even Schwab [4]: It's instant messaging.
In Japan, the newest generation of cell phones are used more for
sending short text messages, called "I-mail," than they
are for placing phone calls [5]. One reason is that I-mail is cheaper.
Another reason is that in Japan, it is considered impolite to talk
on your phone in public -- for instance, while sitting on a train.
And you can't call your friends in the middle of a tedious management
meeting -- but you can discreetly send them a short message.
Most importantly, I-mail actually facilitates personal, one-on-one
communication. And that, after all, is what a phone is for.
Now: You want to talk business models? Between my cell phone, DSL
line, and second phone line, telephone expenses are probably my
single largest utility expense. That pile of phones in my living
room guarantees a couple of service providers a nice little monthly
revenue stream. Multiply that by millions of customers, month after
month, and pretty soon you're talking real money.
[1] Personal
technology boom finds many fretting over etiquette
[2] Yodlee
[3] What
Will Wireless Ads Look Like?
[4] Schwab
taps Palm for wireless trading
[5] Computer?
Who needs it? Japanese teens have I-mail
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