Ok. Just to be clear, I am not advocating any kind of move on our part to support BTG. It's just something to keep an eye on.
Phil
On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 11:41 PM, Tomasz Finc tfinc@wikimedia.org wrote:
I've talked to mozilla about Wikipedia + Boot to Gecko a couple of times. Happy to fill you in on the detail Phil. I already have ready contacts there.
We passed on it for now as we had higher priorities. On Jul 5, 2012 11:24 PM, "Philip Chang" pchang@wikimedia.org wrote:
Thanks, Amir.
I looked into this some more and started talking with folks at Mozilla. I guess you're one too!
They have been calling this Boot to Gecko but the news story didn't use that name so I didn't make the association.
The current plan is to focus on the Telefonica Brazil release and take it from there. I was concerned that developing an OS involves a lot of stuff beyond web browsing, and even if a company pulls that off (think WebOS) there is no guarantee of success.
It turns out Mozilla and others have been very active on device-level APIs and that will make things feasible.
Let's see if they get a phone out in Q1.
Phil On Jul 5, 2012 8:16 PM, "Amir E. Aharoni" amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il wrote:
Mozilla's idea is to do it, as must as possible, with nothing but web technologies, so there would be little-to-none "native" code, but only HTML5 / JS / CSS. A lot of ideology is involved in it - it would be a lot easier for everybody to simply accept WebKit as the de-facto standard, but de-facto standards is something that Mozilla doesn't like.
Of course, I'm biased, because I'm a volunteer Mozilla Rep.
2012/7/5 Philip Chang pchang@wikimedia.org:
Rupert, thanks very much for sharing this.
This smells a bit like Symbian, which originally was motivated by the
desire
to avoid dominance by any single evil empire.
However, I seriously wonder if Mozilla has what it takes to do
something as
ambitious as a phone OS. I've known of projects with hundreds of
developers
trying to create just a decent mobile web browser - that failed.
It would be great if anyone out there has any insights about this - in particular, rumors about progress at Mozilla.
Phil
On Thu, Jul 5, 2012 at 11:34 AM, rupert THURNER <
rupert.thurner@gmail.com>
wrote:
Telefonica SA (TEF), the former Spanish phone monopoly reeling from plummeting sales at home, is plotting to claw back control from
Google Inc.
(GOOG) in Latin America.
Telefonica, luring first-time smartphone buyers in Brazil, is
designing a
handset software system that is freely available to network operators
and
manufacturers, similar to Google’s Android, the world’s biggest
platform.
For network carriers, it’s a chance to have a say over what consumers
see,
use and buy via their smartphones, lost to Google and Apple Inc.
(AAPL) when
such handsets became must-have devices.
Telefonica has teamed up with Mozilla Corp., the company whose Firefox program challenged the dominance of Microsoft Corp. (MSFT)’s Web
browser.
This week, six additional companies, including Germany’s Deutsche
Telekom AG
(DTE) and Sprint Nextel Corp. (S), said they will use the platform in
other
countries, such as Poland. While Android is free, operators currently
must
accept that the biggest search engine controls the software code and
makes
advertising money from pushing users to take its mapping, e-mail and
search
services.
“We don’t like the fact that one part of the value chain of our
business
is tightly controlled,” Carlos Domingo, director of product
development at
Telefonica’s digital unit, said in an interview. “In the case of the emerging countries it’s worse, because it becomes a monopoly by
Google.”
Tailored Services
By having access to the software and hardware from the beginning, Telefonica will be able to tailor additional services for users in fast-growing emerging markets in Latin America where many subscribers
are
buying their first smartphone. Every second U.S. consumer and 37
percent of
western Europeans already own a smartphone.
Telefonica, Spain’s biggest phone company, will bring the first
Firefox
handset to Brazil as smartphone growth in South and Central America is soaring, with annual shipments climbing to 160 million devices by the
end of
2015 from 31.2 million in 2011, according to estimates from Ovum, a London-based telecommunications industry research firm.
While Google has a head start, Telefonica is racing to compete,
targeting
“double-digit market” share for its low- priced Android challenger in
Brazil
by the end of 2015, Domingo said.
Slipped Deadline
The deadline has already slipped. With its first phone initially due
at
the end of this year, Telefonica said before its investor conference
in
London today that the first handsets built by Chinese manufacturers
ZTE
Corp. (763) and TCL Communication Technology Holdings Ltd. (2618)
will now
be offered from early 2013.
Telefonica is in talks with six additional handset makers, Matthew
Key,
the head of the company’s digital unit, said at the investor meeting.
“We’re overly reliant on Android and that’s not a strategically strong position to be in,” he said.
To persuade Latin American consumers to upgrade to smartphones, and
not
take an Android device, the devices will need to be priced at about
$100,
Domingo said.
Deutsche Telekom is in talks to offer the handsets in its eastern
European
markets, Thomas Kiessling, the company’s chief innovation officer,
said in
an interview, adding that the phones would cost about 80 euros ($100)
to 100
euros.
Telefonica’s smartphone software drive, overseen by Telefonica Chief Executive Officer Cesar Alierta, marks the latest attempt by
operators to
build out rival services and applications and convince investors that
they
are more than pipes that facilitate the surging demand for data-hungry devices. Their previous efforts to build app stores, send calls and
messages
over the Web, and develop payment systems, have been abandoned or
brought
out long after rivals have stolen a march.
Failed Efforts
“We’ve also been on board of other operator consortiums that have
failed,”
Domingo said, adding that these joint projects were never “as open as
they
claimed to be.”
Telefonica, which has net financial debt of 57 billion euros, in May reported an 8.8 percent drop in first-quarter operating profit after
it lost
customers in its home market to discounters. The shares dropped 2.6
percent
to 10.21 euros in Madrid. The stock has fallen 24 percent this year,
making
it the worst performer in the 19-company Bloomberg Europe
Telecommunication
Services Index.
Telefonica today predicted its digital business to generate annual
sales
of about 5 billion euros by 2015. Revenues of Telefonica Digital,
created in
September 2011 by combining Internet assets over three continents
such as
social-networking site Tuenti and Web-phone unit Jajah, will expand
at an
annual growth rate of 20 percent, it said.
Powerful Player
Google in April reported first-quarter profit that topped analysts’ estimates as CEO Larry Page, who took charge a year ago, has pushed
deeper into display advertising and mobile services.
Android is installed on 56 percent of new smartphones, more than twice Apple’s share, researcher Gartner Inc. said in May. In the first
quarter,
global handset sales declined 2 percent to 419 million, while
smartphone
sales rose 45 percent.
“You need a powerful player to influence the road map,” said Malik
Saadi,
an analyst at Informa in London. “The operators are losing that
battle, even
with Android, and the only way is to create their own brand in the
mass
smartphone market.”
Mozilla, which has doubled its staffing in mobile in the last year, is starting from a low base as it aims to do the same thing with
smartphones as
it did to the desktop with its web browser. Mozilla’s existing mobile browser had less than 1 percent of the market at the end of 2011,
according
to Net Applications.
Failed Rivals
By designing a device where even the dialing screen is a web page,
it’s a
chance for Mozilla to differentiate devices, said CEO Gary Kovacs.
“If you
look at Android and Apple and Windows, a phone in Brazil looks the
same as a
phone in Cleveland,” he said in an interview.
At the same time, the operators are following a path littered with failures from both carriers and manufacturers to come up with a rival platform.
Hewlett-Packard Co. (HPQ) stopped making devices using its open-
source
WebOS software it acquired from Palm Inc. for $1.2 billion in 2011.
Nokia
Oyj (NOK1V) scrapped its own Meltemi platform in June, according to a
person
familiar with the matter.
Domingo is aware of those pitfalls. While Mozilla’s foray into
Internet
browsing made the web competitive, he said, “that is very different
to the
situation we have in mobile.”
“It is all about control, and once you have that control you can open
up
many doors,” said Nick Dillon, an analyst at Ovum. “It’s the ability
to push
apps on the home screen.”
To contact the reporter on this story: Jonathan Browning in London at jbrowning9@bloomberg.net
To contact the editor responsible for this story: Kenneth Wong at kwong11@bloomberg.net
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