I got back from Barcelona yesterday. First (and short) child free vacation my wife and I have taken (translation - 2 years). What can I say? Barcelona is a fantastic city, with flamboyance and excellent all around tempo. It even makes me look forward to 3GSM!

A few recommendations, some are my own and some I borrowed, used and am relaying:

1. The Beach. First of all, I was totally not aware topless was back in style. And the little cafes right off the water got me to spend an unplanned, half day there. I lost at least 20 points off my blood pressure. Fun and therapeutic.

2. Cal pep on Plaça de les Olles is the best Tapas place ever. Not very expensive and well worth the 30 minutes wait.

3. The local version of the Buddha Bar is sleazy. But fun. No point in arriving before 1:30 though.

4. Camp Nou! Sorry, folks, I’m done with local soccer… 100,000 fans go in and out in less then 30 minutes, parents and their children enjoying a game without violence, tradition and excitement mixed with a hell of a game as well. Velencia and Barca drawing (1:1) in a hell of a game. I got to sit in the 8th row (78 Euro…) and could actually hear Ronaldinho, Deco and Et’o communicate. Check out my seat! That’s Ronaldinho!

5. Palau Sans Jordi is a beautiful arena in a breathtaking location, but for a basketball game, less for a rock or pop concert. We went to see George Michael’s first concert in 15 years as he kicked off his “25 Live” world tour. I grew up on Wham! and George, and I have lots of sentiments, but 17,000 fans expected some more energy and some less main stream repertoire.

6. The Metro. It rocks! no need for cabs plus you won’t find them easily. The metro is easy, cheap, clean and efficient.

7. Can’t sign off without the techie point. MMS is here to stay. I hardly took my camera with me and was still able to tease my buddies with real time, live, pictures from Camp Nou. Decent pictures, easy experience. I’m optimistic.

      

I participated as panelist at this year’s Journey by Ernst & Young and Globes in Tel Aviv. The panel, which was organized by Eyal Kishon from Genesis was about The Future of Mobile Applications. Everybody agreed that the near term (2 years) primary focus of the industry is with mobile content. Getting it off the ground and further used, through additional services and through fine tuning existing services. It’s the longer term focus that got us puzzled a bit.

I, personally, feel very strongly about 2 future directions for the mobile industry.

The first one is personal entertainment. Phones and MP3/Video players WILL converge eventually and the walled gardens will continue to erode. People will face the need to manage mobile media from a variety of sources and then access it on their mobile in a number of ways. The spaghetti of content (user generated vs. commercial), media types, DRM, standards, media delivery alternatives and business models is guaranteed to produce some very successful start-ups.

The second growth area is with mobile commerce. I do believe that in not so long, I will be able to flag a product a like, scan it’s barcode (or RFID) with the phone’s camera, get multiple price offers directly at my phone, pick one and have it delivered with a click of a button. Oh yeah, I will also get a discount from my operator for making a purchase and settling it through my phone bill.

That’s right,  Operators are about to become the new age retail chains, but that’s not where it ends. I don’t think a Walmart MVNO is a far fetched concept. I happen to think billing relationships happens to be the Operator’s most valuable assets. With Operators turning to supermarkets, it is only natural retails chains will look to level the plain field. And why not? If Walmart offered a sponsored mobile phone and then put on top a discount for purchases made via the phone, don’t you think they have just as good a case as Disney or ESPN?

      

There is an interesting theory going around. According to that theory, a company will basically make roadmap decisions based on what the employees need at work. The inverse side of the theory is that a company will not develop what the employees do not miss at work. Paul Graham and Nick Carr try to predict the future of Google, Microsoft and the companies that surround and are impacted. On a Techcrunch interview, Paul Graham analyzed how to go get in the Google mindset as an innovator:

I wouldn’t advise competing with Google in things they’re good at. So what is Google good at? As a first approximation, making things their own developers use at work. So they’ll do a better job on an online calendar than a video sharing site, for example, because their employees are probably not supposed to be sitting watching videos at work.

Nick Carr then addresses Microsoft’s suspiciously-laid-back approach to web apps:

It’s been widely assumed, among the tech-forward Web 2.0 crowd, that it will be the end users who will drive the adoption of purely web-based office apps - and that corporate IT departments will be the obstructionists. I think it will actually play out in the opposite way….

…Whatever the flaws of Microsoft Office, most end users are comfortable with it - and they have little motivation to overturn the apple cart. What is absolutely unacceptable to them is to take a step backward in functionality - which is exactly what would be required to make the leap to web PPAs today. Web apps not only disappear when you lose an internet connection, they are also less responsive for many common tasks, don’t handle existing Office files very well, have deficiencies in printing (never underestimate the importance of hard copy in business), and have fewer features (Microsoft Office of course has way too many, but - here’s the rub - different people value different ones).

In fairness, Nick Carr probably referred to corporate workers in general, but the theory still applies. In short, we should all pay much better attention to how we configure our corporate firewall and what kind of desktop we create for our employees!

      

This essay / post is about a theory that has been gathering dust in my drawer for a while. A recent post by Philip Wilkinson in Crowdstorm’s blog “The Feature War in Social Shopping” made some of my crusty memory cells spring to action…yada, yada, yada - I am writing this post. Its still work in progress but I prefer releasing these raw thoughts and creating a discussion rather then to continue to dwell in this with myself. Once completed I believe it may offer a different way to analyze current trends, services, consumer psychology in the digital consumer industry.

What is Digital Zen?

Digital Device:A device that can read, write, store and transmit information

Zen: enlightenment that can be attained through meditation, self-contemplation.

Thus, Digital Zen can be defined as a feeling of calm and satisfaction, attained by using digital devices to help live life. No fuss, complications, frustrations, where is the dam manual?, what format does this support? Need to restart, Its only for Windows, Its not available in this network etc. etc. Rather use the most basic intuition to operate, upgrade and connect.

The Digital Life Scale

The digital life scale is a theoretical map that describes different stages a person my be in vis-a-vis his interaction with digital products and services. Not just one product or service but rather his over all experience, expectation level, satisfaction level and most important digital life journey.

STAGE #1 - Digital Denial
Won’t use digital devices, don’t want to use them, feels the world is too dependent on them and wants to live like ‘it used to be’.

STAGE #2 - Digital Puberty
Start using digital devices and services such as cell phone and email and feel contempt. Some people at this stage are not hungry for more and others, out of positive experiences look to grow their usage.

STAGE #3 Digital Life

A regular consumer / user of digital products and services. From music storage devices, emails, IM’s and PDA’s – the digital life feels connected …yet at times not effective and time consuming.

STAGE# 4 Digital Zen

A state of mind that is NOT possible to achieve today (please write to me if you think otherwise, have experienced it yourself or know someone who does). This is only possible when all devices communicate and allow seamless transfer of information. This is the place where technology should be….a place where it serves you instead of you servicing it. As can be seen by the graph below, digital zen is not a quantum leap from digital life but the delta to get there is the x factor many companies and industries pursue endlessly.

Another benefit of being in the ‘Zen Zone’ is the fact you reached a plateau. There is progress but its not characterized by rapid changes for good or for bad. Its where the digital environment blends flawlessly into a users life.

A change in the technological environment (or just growing old and becoming out of it) may throw you back into a digital imbalance stage (the next downturn level) which, in turn, forces you to climb back again or just give up.

STAGE# 5 Digital Overload

When a good thing turns bad. Too many connections trying to provide services that are not useful and are too complicated and operate. When you spend too much time thinking what to do instead of just doing it. People in this stage often revert back to Digital Puberty because that seems to be the place where they can remain in control OR progress back to ‘regular’ digital life leaving the pursue of Zen to others.

Personally I am currently living a Digital Life with Zen far out of site. Windows, Apple, GSM, CDMA, MP3, WMV are all but in the way. And that is just on the OS/ network side..what about usability and reliability?, still a long way to go.

      

There seems to be a wave of new releases among social networks, putting together yet another serious attempt at positioning competitiveness along the mobile axis. Treemo launched a well built mobile-focused social network. I tried Treemo and it works well, if you excuse the delivery of Video clips to mobile devices via MMS vs. via streaming. I personally don’t find a 6 second truncated video clip very entertaining, and I am still looking for the streaming options to be supported. Right now, the major holdback is with operators open infrastructure, or lack there of, but the evidence from DocoMo, Japan clearly supports this direction.

Wadja is also bankng on mobile features, offering free SMS to members of it’s network. I agree wth Pete Cashmore that this is not enough and that Facebook and MySpace already covered that base.

What I find much more intriguing is the potential for subject oriented, vertical, social networks. A genuine common passion is a much better sticking glue then a feature, any feature, and a start up cannot win a feature war with MySpace. Social networks that successfully aggregate people with a real common interest are verticals that I believe can develop to stay, but they need to be built in fundamentally different way then the horizontal ones.

      

The release of Google Apps triggered an interesting discussion that is going on in the blogosphere these days. The topic of debate is whether online office tools can effectively compete with MS Office. Honestly? I was bothered with the discussion being focused on that axis from it’s beginning. I just don’t think such a narrow perspective really tells the story.

I was happy to read Chris Anderson’s recent entry at The Long Tail. Chris argues that it’s not about “desktop apps vs. web apps”, but about embedding office functionality in web services. Or in his words:

What might those things be? I think we have a hint in the spread of embedded video, courtesy of YouTube. The ability to easily embed into any blog page a full-featured videoplayer dedicated to a single video is a large part of YouTube’s success. It doesn’t require you to go elsewhere or download anything–it just works.
Now imagine the same model working for data. Rather than me posting static jpeg charts and links to Excel spreadsheet files, what if I could post data the way I post videos: as an embedded mini-app that simply displays the data in a useful way, allowing readers to manipulate or copy it at will? This would be a little like what Ray Ozzie (Microsoft’s Gates V2.0) calls “Live Clipboard”, which is a proposed way to copy and paste code, structured data and even functionality from website to website, just as we currently do with plain text.

That’s what I want. Not an online spreadsheet that simply replicates what Excel already does perfectly well on my laptop, but small spreadsheet elements that I can paste into a blog post in the form of a specific data set or graph.

Embedding web apps? Wow! This can take collaboration to a whole new territory. This is also where the web offers a built in and sustainable advantage. Zoho, the best creator of online office apps in my opinion, are already educating their users on how to embed Zoho Show Presentations. Or in their words:

A cool feature added in recent Zoho Show update is the ability to embed presentations anywhere on the web. This can be powerful and there is nothing like it (based on my limited knowledge) on the web today that makes this functionality possible - unless you create and save your presentation as flash object.

Anil Dash presents a very educated point of view which is quoted by Chris Anderson as well as by ZDNet:

Google Apps for Your Domain is not a competitor to Microsoft Office. There’s simply no other way to put it. There will undoubtedly be lots of breathless press or Web 2.0 hype about how this is Google’s shot across the bow of the Office juggernaut, and this just plain isn’t true. Feel free to poke someone in the eye if they say this version represents a competitor to Office.

Read his post.

Speaking of ZDNet, here is a summary of interesting opinions by leading analysts, such as Anil Dash, Kent Newsome, Nick Carr and Scott Karp - all on this very subject. A recommended read for the scene follower.

The bottom line? Yes, Google and MSFT are rivals, but their primary battle ground is not MS Office vs. Google Apps. Embedding web objects is where the internet offers a huge platform that desktops can’t. MSFT will not just watch, of course, and will demonstrate that through Office Live! As far as embedding objects in internet pages goes, however, it’s MSFT that is expected to play catch. If you ask Anil, MSFT doesn’t really care for MS Office users beyond their 500 enterprise customers. If you ask me, I find it hard to believe they really don’t.