23rd MobileMonday Taipei Event Report
Posted on: August 17, 2009 – Filed under: Taipei
Steve Follmer consulted in Silicon Valley for many years, where he co-founded live365.com. He is currently between startups and analyzing opportunities in the mobile space. Steve holds a BSE degree from Princeton University.
“Get your head in the clouds : Are Netbooks quietly driving us toward Cloud Computing? ?”
Taipei MobileMonday 23, at Mary’s Bistro Cafe, featured a dynamic presentation from Sascha Pallenberg and Nicole Scott of Netbook News, on netbooks, the cloud, and their mutual synergy.
Sascha began with a fascinating review of the history and future of netbook hardware. Milestones included the first eeePC, which sold 3.5mm units. And more recently, ASUS has a netbook for kids, using Disney branding and distribution, with a 8.9″ display at $350. The Dell Latitude 2100 is also breaking ground at schools, its light, ruggedized, and straps right on to your little scholar. For teachers, Dell offers a 32 port docking station that recharges both the battery and the homework. Another exciting development is the eeePC T91, a “netvertible” that pirouettes into a tablet.
Netbooks are really hitting their stride, settling in on proper sized keyboards and screens, while retaining their svelte form factor. Users are waking up to the fact that they are fully capable for for our quotidian computing: email, surfing, IM, youtube, and office tasks. And they are breaking into vertical markets such as hospital and emergency workers, now that they are turning into tablets, complete with touch screens and multi-touch hardware and OS support.
Nicole does all her work for netbooknews using her netbook, with the exception of video editing. She argued that netbooks and smartphones are not exclusive, that there are valid reasons to carry both, and that the press is trumping up any “battle” between the two. Indeed carriers are now bundling free netbooks if you commit to their 3G data plan contract.
The 3G data network links smartphones and netbooks alike into the cloud. Sascha demonstrated for us a very advanced example: jolicloud, which lets you follow other users and the hot new apps, games, and services they are using (hosted on Jolicloud and sold through their app store). Jolicloud will soon operate purely in html, thus automatically syncing your service ecosystem across most every machine and platform. While also not fully released, Google’s Chrome OS will compete.
The cloud has technical advantages for many home, SMB, and even enterprise users. Less proven, but as Sascha discussed, equally vital, are business models leveraging this new paradigm. Carriers distributing free 3G netbooks with data plan subscriptions is one. Google’s targeted ad support is another; their Chrome OS speaks softly but carries a big stick. A more service oriented model such as e.g. $25/yr flickr pro acct. may also prove viable.
The cloud is the future, and the future is now. The client computer is too fat for most tasks; do most users really enjoy fretting about backups, disk crashes, viruses, and syncing? Tonight’s talk brought this vision into focus. The cloud enables a thinner desktop, which can take the form of a netbook, or a smart phone. Netbooks and the cloud are synergistic. Netbook unit volume in Taiwan now rivals conventional notebooks. Even meagre CPUs are adequate to launch linux and run a browser. CPU’s and operating systems are becoming commodities, and the Wintel model is under assault.
How are the big players affected by the netbook-cloud juggernaut? The obvious winner is Google, and the losers include Intel and Microsoft. Amazon has been selling cloud services for years. Taiwanese manufacturers invented netbooks, and they are profiting, though margins can be low. Apple both wins and loses; their notebook sales are being hurt by netbooks, they must release their own netbook tablet; their iPhones and iPods benefit from the cloud but their back end lags Google’s. And in the end, the biggest winner is the end user.
Resources
Netbook News http://www.netbooknews.com/ (Video, English)
Netbook News http://www.netbooknews.de/ (Text, German)
Mary’s Cafe http://www.maryscafe.com.tw/ Taipei’s Fine Dining Top Steak Pasta House