Angry Birds and product packaging

I played "Angry Birds" on my iPod Touch. It is so far the most popular mobile game on iOS and Android platforms. And it is not limited to male players.

It is a touch-based game, using different birds as projectiles to crash pigs hiding in a structure or out in the open. It is rated for 4 years old and older (4+). After playing it for a while, it seems to me Angry Birds is an artillery and dive-bomber game packaged with cute cartoon-like graphics. The red bird is a typical projectile shot in a parabolic trajectory. The little blue bird resembles clustered warheads. The fat black bird penetrates building structures with delayed detonation. The bloated white bird is similar to a dive bomber or ground attack aircraft.

My point is not to call out those similarities or to upset anyone. It is a successful software product executed by a 12-member team from a company with 50 or so employees. If the product were delivered as an artillery and dive bomber game, it would have lost most of its female players, which is half of its current player base. More importantly, the viral marketing effect would dissipate with halved customer demographics. (The interview with the creator, Peter Vesterbacka. http://technmarketing.com/iphone/peter-vesterbacka-maker-of-angry-birds-talks-about-the-birds-apple-android-nokia-and-palmhp/)

I played another iPhone game, Metal Core. It is almost the same type of game as Angry Birds. I believe its sales number is far less than what Angry Birds has achieved. The bird-against-pig game is not about any brand new idea that no one has done before. It is all about packaging. It will not be surprising if copycats of Angry Birds show up on iPhone App Store, since the birds are not original either.

My first iPhone application

I just released my first iPhone application on Apple App Store. The title is called "Tang Poems for the Youth" [幼學唐詩].

This application is for a very niche market, that is, people who have learned traditional Chinese. For me, this is a good opportunity examining the theory of long-tail market. As an independent iPhone application developer, I don't have a lot of resources or time. It is important to me that I don't have to resort to some esoteric programming tactics or interfaces to accomplish what I wanted to do. It is also equivalently important that I don't have to test through many different devices with different capabilities and screen real estate. In a sense, I created an application that appears to be outside of the main stream using mostly common programming interface on a generic platform, and made the product available on all the iPhone OS products For that, I praise iPhone and iPod Touch.

A friend asked me whether I will port this application to the Android platform. I am a registered Android developer though I have not put much of an effort in it. Android is an "open" platform for device manufacturers. It is no more open than Windows Mobile or iPhone OS for an application developer. It will take over iPhone in terms of volume, just like Symbian of yesterday. It will be a fragmented market for a developer like me. I will put more efforts in making my application iPad ready before having some quality time with Android.

In the meantime, there will be more titles coming out from me. I will see how far this long-tail theory will take me, and Apple.

GYM search

GYM search is the nick name some Internet pundits give to the top three search engines, Google, Yahoo, and MSN.

By any measure, Google owns at least 60% of the search traffic on the Internet as of today. It is more than double the combination of Yahoo and MSN's search traffic. I wonder why Microsoft would like to buy Yahoo in the first place. Since Microsoft and Yahoo walked away from the merger talk, there are investors want to force the marriage. The saga has not ended yet.

Yahoo and Microsoft has pledged to improve their search engine before. If you look closer to the press release, the emphasis was mostly on the ad platform. It seemed Yahoo and Microsoft's executives believed their search engines were only inferior in that aspect. People go to search sites for many different things. Maybe searching for a product or a service is the most common drive. But people also use the search engine to conduct many other activities, like doing homework, expanding knowledge, or simply to kill time. It is quite natural for a person to stick with a search engine which fulfills most of his or her search needs, for shopping or something else. If Yahoo and Microsoft's managers still look at the top use case only, they missed the long tail. It is the long tail that wags the dog.

I recommend everyone to see this video from the Google IO conference session: Underneath the Covers at Google: Current Systems and Future Directions (video). If Google did it, it is a proof by itself that can be done. If Microsoft is willing to spend more than 44 billion dollars to buy Yahoo, Microsoft can build a truly competitive search engine by one tenth of that cost. The search engine is the toll booth to the Internet. It is possible and it is imperative for Yahoo, Microsoft, or whoever competes with Google to have a state-of-the-art search engine. It is the same rationale that Apple never gives up its own operating system.

3G Smartphone for Under US$100

NXP Semiconductors said it has a solution to 3G cell phone at a transfer price below US$100.
http://www.cellular-news.com/story/28971.php

For people not familiar with NXP, NXP is one of the top ten semiconductor manufacturers in recent years. It is to EU as Texas Instruments to the US. In the announcement, NXP said it is a solution for entry level 3G phones. But what makes 3G interesting, besides its bigger capacity to reduce operator's cost, is its data service. That implies a more sophisticated phone to run applications that utilize 3G data service. We may see a 3G smart phone with a retail price at $250 in a year or two.

It is nothing to be excited or surprised to see the price decreasing for a consumer product while it becomes more sophisticated. It is very natural during the evolution cycle of a mass-market consumer product. What can be exciting is that, in three to five years, we may see the majority of the cell phones in use running multimedia-rich Internet applications. That will open the door for all kinds of possibilities for the cell phone. Today smart phones are expensive and designed for business users. And the smart phone experience is a minimal transplant of the desktop experience. Creativity for cell phone applications will not blossom until the community realizes the Internet is in everyone's pocket.

The cost for hardware is the key to all that to happen. Once that starts, we can then discuss what the long tail effect is to be played out on such a ubiquitous and mobile network. In this view, NXP's announcement is an important milestone.

The Long Tail Effect

People are talking about the "long tail" phenomenon.

This is not a new concept, at least not new in terms of Internet time. Based on Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Long_Tail), this phrase was coined in 2004 to describe certain Internet business and economic models. (Chris Anderson's article and later on his book) The name and the phenomenon are best observed in the diagram.



When I discussed this phenomenon with others, I got different responses. Some people focused on the "Winner takes all" appearance; while some appreciated the possibility of creating more choices for niche audiences, like Chris Anderson pointed out.

The winner-takes-all folks pointed to me the evidence of YouTube overtaking the video-sharing market while more than a handful of web sites offer the same feature. An even better example would be the fact that only a dozen or so Facebook applications among the five thousand (and growing) candidates enjoy 90% of daily usage. However, we could not draw a few simple rules of thumb as how and why the number one becomes number on.

The tail can be a blue ocean and yet a tough proposition. Netflix and Amazon are wonderful examples but hard to replicate. I guess if the cost structure is as low as my writing of this blog, there would be more stories to tell and songs to sing. I still remember in the early days Amazon's struggling for profitability and major investors had to reaffirm their confidence in the company to Wall Street. Look at Salesforce.com and its history of profitability. You will understand how long it takes to wag the tail.

I believe the long tail effect will be the governing law of Internet, like the Moore's law to the chip industry. There are more to be learned and leveraged, and more ingredients to be created and commoditized. I guess I am not too late for the show. Hopefully, I will get to blog more on this.