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A year of Windows Phone

Posted by Riaz Ahmed December 23rd, 2011

I have been using Windows Phone for well over a year now both for personal use and business use and have been impressed by what it has on offer from an ever-improving operating system, a very nice user experience to a maturing phone ecosystem. There has already been much said of Windows Phone and I would say that most of its been positive. Much to my surprise though, market share has dropped to 1.5% compared to 2.5% last year. Putting that stat to one side for now, 2011 has been quite significant for Windows Phone as it’s seen a major update to the software, thousands of apps being published, a variety of newer handsets, huge support for developers/designers and a considerable partnership with Nokia, all of which has put it in a good position to push on in 2012 and gain an increase in market share.
 

Here are some of my highlights of Windows Phone:

User Interface
I just love the new UI in Windows Phone! The Phone team at Microsoft introduced a completely redesigned UI called Metro. Metro has been given a big thumbs up by the creative and user experience community through its use of simple, clean, tiled interface that does a good job of presenting lots of dynamic real-time content consistently on mobile/tablet devices, desktop LCD’s or television screens.
 

Metro is now being used as the UI on Microsoft’s highly anticipated new operating system Windows 8 and is already on its way to xBox. The picture below from winrumors.com shows Metro UI on Windows 8, Windows Phone and xBox Live.

Let’s get Social
A major new functionality, introduced by the mango software update, is the social network integration. This bring in social integration capabilities with Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Windows Live and xBox Live.
I absolutely love this feature as my phone contacts list now has the likes of Charlie Sheen, Robin Van Persie, Richard Branson alongside my LBi colleagues and my mum
 

Apps and Marketplace
Let’s face it, a decent smartphone isn’t really decent unless it has the ability to discover, find and download applications…. and lots of them! There are now over 45,000 apps on the Windows Phone ‘app store’ otherwise known as Marketplace.

With the recent Mango update as mentioned earlier, the IE mobile browser got upgraded and now supports HTML5. That means Windows Phone now joins the other major phone players in the market for running websites that have been developed in HTML5.

Developers, Developers, Developers
The thousands of apps available to download across Apple App Store, Windows Phone Marketplace, Android Market, wouldn’t be possible without skilling up mobile application developers. Over the last 18 months Microsoft has made quite a large investment in the developer community by providing dev tools, learning kits, training and running developer courses and events globally.

Earlier this year, LBi was selected as the exclusive London digital agency partner to host the London Windows Phone Camps at our Truman Brewery offices. These dev camps have been very successful with the last camp reaching record numbers.

The Nokia partnership
2011 has seen a partnership between Microsoft and Nokia and the emergence of new Nokia smartphones running Windows Phone operating system. This was a very good move by both companies and exactly what they needed to compete with Google and Apple. The recent London launch of the Nokia Lumia phone shows just how serious Nokia are of the partnership and importance of gaining a market share in the smartphone race.

Well there you go, some of my highlights of Windows Phone in 2011. Windows Phone must be doing something right because just the other day I talked about some of the above with mates who are big time iPhone and Android fans and even they were impressed saying how Windows Phone had really caught up with the competition.

I think so too.

Thanks for reading and have an amazing 2012!

Riaz  (@TheRealRiaz)

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Tags: Android, apple, Google, iPhone, Metro, Microsoft, mobile, Nokia, Technology, UI, Windows, Windows 8, Windows Phone, xbox

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Tech City UK visits LBi

Posted by Calvin Lau September 7th, 2011

We welcomed special guests from Tech City UK for a breakfast meeting in our Brick Lane space this morning. Government advistors, entrepreneurs and other members of the East London tech scene gathered to discuss ideas, projects and opportunities centered around the Silicon Roundabout and East London. The initiative was launched by the PM to turn East London into a world-leading centre for startups and technology companies.

We were pleased to host a gathering of esteemed guests and to be part the future plans happening in our neighbourhood!

Tags: government, incubator, silicon roundabout, startups, tech city, Technology, UK

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LBi publishes ‘The Blended Future’ with Campaign magazine

Posted by Gareth Jones July 12th, 2011

12th July 2011: Leading agency sets out its strategic vision

LBi has partnered with Campaign magazine to publish ‘The Blended Future,’ an article outlining the agency’s strategic vision.

LBi Chief Creative Officer Chris Clarke and Director of Branded Content Graham Hodge

Appearing in Campaign’s ‘What Next in Digital’ supplement, ‘The Blended Future’ explains that in a world where consumers are increasingly demanding more from brands, any agency worth its salt needs a constantly evolving understanding of the possibilities technology enables.

Authored by LBi Chief Creative Officer Chris Clarke and Director of Branded Content Graham Hodge, ‘The Blended Future’ highlights that in order to deliver real innovation agencies need a special culture that is not conservative, change resistant or nostalgic for the past.

‘Blending allows us to take ideas from strategy and concept to launch and evaluation as quickly and effectively as possible – regardless of the specifics of the business challenge. Blending ensures we function as strategic partners, helping our clients decide what’s next and holding their hands on the journey,’ writes Clarke.

‘It’s not a complicated process. It’s about casting the right people and orchestrating their contributions so that the outcome takes a client further on their digital journey, delighting their customers on the way.’

‘The Blended Future’ concludes that thanks to the constantly changing media landscape the challenge for brands and agencies is less about forecasting what’s next and more about organising their businesses to be able to quickly adapt to change.

Campaign’s ‘What Next in Digital’ supplement also contains thought-pieces by a line up of other leading marketing agencies.

Here’s a video clip from campaignlive.co.uk featuring LBi’s Branded Content Director Graham Hodge talking about what’s next for the digital industry.

Read the full Blended Future article (PDF)

Related articles on campaign.co.uk
Digital learns to play a new role: Roundtable discussion

Tags: agencies, blending, Chris Clarke, client, creative, LBi London, marketing, Technology, work culture

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my new ‘Social TV’ experience

Posted by Riaz Ahmed May 25th, 2011

It’s smart and social…

So, over the (Royal) Easter break not only did I treat myself to lots of chocolate Easter eggs and even a Royal Wedding street party (thanks mum!), I went out and bought myself a new TV. Well it turns out that not only does my new Samsung D7000 produce crystal clear HD/3D output it’s also very smart and social…

Ok so it doesn’t suggest the next big IPO to invest in or go out and watch the football with me, but with a huge array of very cool and useful Internet-enabled features, my new Samsung TV, has not only made my viewing experience a whole lot more enriched but I think Samsung are on a journey that will make them stand out from not only the competition like Sony, but rival Internet TV services such as those provided by Google and Apple.

Connectivity and Streaming

With built-in Wi-Fi and a very easy set up process I was up and running within a few minutes. The first thing the TV did when it connected to my broadband Wi-Fi was to start updating itself…after the TV came on it instantly discovered my laptop which had ‘media share’ software installed. Media share software e.g. Windows Media Center, allows sharing of music, video and image files stored on your laptop to externally connected devices. This meant without further configuring or cabling I could view almost any media file from my laptop over Wi-Fi. Because the TV could support many different and newer media formats (MPEG4, Xvid, DivX, MKV, MP3, WMA, JPEG) none of my media files needed converting. Ok ok so lots of modern TV sets have this already so nothing new there, but wait it gets better…

Samsung Smart TV Hub (click for a larger image)

The ‘Hub’ Button

While unpacking the remote control, I noticed a button called hub, upon pressing it I was taken to the Samsung Smart TV Hub which is a portal to all the Samsung TV apps and features. Because I enjoy tweeting I immediately went to try out the TV Twitter app. But before I could load the app, I was taken to the ‘Register Services’ screen. This screen allowed me to create a single Samsung TV login account that would store my credentials for social networking TV services that were available such as: Facebook, Twitter, Skype, Google Talk, etc

Tweet tweet... the Samsung Smart TV Twitter App (click for a larger image)

Social TV…tweet and watch!

Once I finished registering and logging into the Twitter service, I immediately found myself immersed into the world of Twitter on my TV where I could start viewing tweets, replying to tweets and almost anything that a Twitter app for my laptop or phone could do. What I really liked about the experience was that I was able to switch from using the full-sized app to a real-time social interactive tv view to allow what Samsung calls a ‘Social TV’ experience. Whenever I wanted the ‘Social TV’ experience all I had to do was press the social button on the remote control and have instant access to my social networking services. What would be really cool would be integration with Windows Live Messenger 2011…but with Microsoft’s recent acquisition of Skype it will be interesting to see what will happen in this space…

Samsung Smart TV Social TV (click for a larger image)

Samsung TV Apps Store

The Samsung Smart TV Twitter app was very slick and I wanted to discover more….so the next TV app I tried out was the BBC iPlayer app, again this was also impressive and I was able to start watching BBC content with very few presses on my remote. The BBC iPlayer HD content was particularly impressive and the programme search worked well and fast. Oh and I would like to point out that I only have a 4MB broadband connection at home and all the streaming worked well with very few judders! Likewise while trying out the YouTube TV app I was very impressed how it worked so seamlessly well with the TV and made good use of the remote control buttons to navigate through the app. I wanted to see what other apps I could download for the TV so I went back to the Smart Hub and navigated to the Samsung apps widget. This took me to the very impressive Samsung Apps Store where I could search and download a variety of cool apps for the TV. I think the UK Samsung app store has about a 100 apps so far, with newer apps always popping up, like the recent Explore 3D App

Samsung Smart TV App Store (click for a larger image)

Two million Five million downloaded TV apps

In a January 2011 press release, Samsung stated that two million apps had been downloaded from the Samsung TV app store. The press release went on to say:

“Samsung reached the 2 million mark within a year of the launch of Samsung Apps and the number of apps downloaded has doubled since November, when it reached one million downloads.”

“After reaching one million downloads, consumers have downloaded an average of 100,000 applications every five days.”

The full press release can be found here

Update: as this article goes live, Samsung are reporting that they have passed 5 million app downloads

A TV SDK* for the developer community

Back in September last year, Samsung ran a competition for developers to build the best looking and most innovative Samsung TV app. The winners shared a pot of 500,000 euros and the voting public got a chance to win a new Samsung TV. These types of initiatives always encourage more and more developers to develop for your platform and now Samsung claim they have over 400 TV apps available in over 120 countries.

After a little bit of digging around, I found that to develop a Samsung Smart TV app, you need skills in JavaScript, CSS and HTML. Developing a Samsung TV Widget seemed quite straightforward; Liam Green-Hughes has a great write up on developing a “Hello World” app on his blog.

* SDK: software development kit

Full Internet browsing with Flash but not HTML5 yet!

Another very cool feature on my Samsung TV is that it has a built-in fully functional web browser. The browser is based on an adaptive version of Google Chrome. The browsing experience is quite good and the experience is enhanced even more so by a built-in pointer in the remote control which acts like a mouse. The menu items in browser are easily accessible by the remote control buttons and the browsers ability to play flash content was a very welcome feature. The only drawback was the browser’s inability to play HTML5 content, but I have read that HTML5 will be fully supported and available in the coming months.

Samsung Smart TV Web Browser (click for a larger image)

Search

A very useful and well thought-out feature of the TV is search. The search function can be accessed directly from the remote control or from the Smart Hub. When I searched for ‘Arsenal’, the search app started searching for all Arsenal related content from Facebook, YouTube, Websites, Samsung TV apps and even my own media library that was stored on my laptop.

Samsung Smart TV Universal Search (click for a larger image)

(credit for picture with Iron Man 2 search: http://www.samsung.com/us/article/the-wonder-of-samsung-smart-tvs)

A Google TV/Apple TV Killer?

Absolutely yes! If Samsung keep investing in TV app development and roll out feature-rich updates with new Internet based widgets, apps and services to the Smart Hub, I think Samsung television owners won’t need to purchase Apple TV or Google TV products. Last week, Samsung UK announced a deal with Channel Five about rolling out a Five on Demand app. These are exactly the type of deals Samsung will need to do to get consumers choosing Samsung over other rivals. The more content providers that sign up with Samsung the more appealing these sets will become to consumers.

Whilst talking about rivals, Sony, will be launching their Internet TV sets in June/July this year. They are offering Internet based features similar to that of Samsung but have one big advantage……..Sony can provide a huge amount of Sony owned content like Hollywood blockbusters and a massive music catalogue. Currently this is available through the Qriocity TV service but I can see this expanding and becoming very feature rich. The only drawback is that the new Sony HX TV’s are much more expensive than Samsung’s identical sets.

So yes, it is smart and social

Ok so it doesn’t suggest the next big IPO to invest in (smart) or go out and watch the football with me (social) but with an array of top notch Internet enabled features, services and lots of TV apps in development, surely Samsung are on a winner and this is certainly the year of the Internet TV — with social being at the heart of Samsung’s offering.

Thanks for reading!

Riaz Ahmed is the Head of Microsoft Development at LBi and can be found here @TheRealRiaz and here LinkedIn

Tags: apple, Apple TV, Facebook, Google, Google TV, Internet TV, Microsoft, samsung, Samsung Smart TV, Skype, social, social networks, Social TV, Streaming, Technology, Windows Live Messenger

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