<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?><rss xmlns:content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/" xmlns:wfw="http://wellformedweb.org/CommentAPI/" xmlns:dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:sy="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/syndication/" xmlns:slash="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/slash/" version="2.0"><channel><title>Northstreaming - </title><atom:link href="http://northstream.se" rel="self" type="application/rss+xml" /><link>http://northstream.se</link><description></description><language>en-us</language><copyright>Copyright (C) 2009 mywebsite.com</copyright><item><title>Wouldn&#039;t it be nice... Apps that appeal...</title><link>http://northstream.se/</link><pubDate>Wed 22 Feb 2012</pubDate><category><![CDATA[]]></category><description><![CDATA[Smartphones and tablets have indeed different usage patterns associated to them. Statistics from a study looking into usage of a news app indicate &quot;meal bumps&quot;, i.e. peaks of increased usage for either kind of device. Whereas the smartphone is the weapon of choice during the faster-paced meals breakfast and lunch the tablet seems to be the smoother choice from supper on and along the evening - until bed time at least when the little device just comes in more handy again. 
So what, you might say, isn´t that pretty self-evident? Fair enough. Nevertheless it sheds light on the rather primordially different requirements posed on apps. As not (yet) owner of a tablet I want to elaborate on what is being expected of an app in terms of it being a smartphone application. 

First, a very simple and clean interface is critical for success, and second a somewhat narrowed down set of total functions and options making both setup and usage fool proof. With the smartphone app markets maturing after 3-4 years´ existence users have increasingly higher expectations in terms of usability and relevance. We do not have more time at our disposal, and for those short moments on public transport or cueing for coffee or lunch there is a full range of apps installed on my device fiercely competing for my short attention span. 

Those risen expectations make that dumbed down apps will not find users´ acceptance. Fair enough, Angry Birds had some success (...), but shooting grouses fluttering over a screen will not win any future award. Now, you might say, this is a contradiction in itself saying we need simpler yet complex apps. Provenly it is not. Apple has showcased this quadrature of the circle to be possible. No matter if you are a follower of this religion or not, its core dogma is combining a rich set of features with a shockingly high level of simplicity and usability. The call for more Apple like apps is for power in function whilst usage being easy as pie. 

Two examples where my need for a smooth smartphone app remained unsatisfied: a) Electronic business cards apps and b) password encryption and storage solutions, like Keypass. Even though there are many of both, cumbersome setup and usage have led at least me to conclude that none of the existing solutions can currently satisfy my requirements. Even though I am able to live without both I think about it as lost chances - for app programmers in unrept profits and for users in not available benefit. 

An encouraging example is TED - Ideas Worth Spreading (which is always a great thing no matter how applied). The app allows me to easily bookmark my favourite inspiring clips, maybe because they are too long for a short metro ride to work or just because it is convenient. At home I can watch them on a bigger screen and without time pressure. But I would like to bookmark even clips watched at home on my lean-forward. App vs. desktop 1 - 0. Even better would be to have both integrated (remember the &quot;old&quot; 3-screen notion?). Registering an account at TED I would expect the following: videos bookmarked early in the morning on my way to work appear on my account for follow-up back at home. Integration is the name of the game. This will drive users to the app, make them initially potentially pay for it and eventually use it and spread the word about it. 

To conclude in this sense, let me recommend a great app I just found through a review: Zite really is what I call an Apple amongst apps. It is easy to setup (took me 15 seconds to customize it); it is visually appealing, with headlines and pictures in the cover story panel looking as great as never seen on a small smartphone screen. It features this effortless way of using it with an interface that just seems tailor-made for my fingers and intuitions; tapping, swiping, everything works as my intuition suggests at the first approach: tap once to make the menu bars disappear, tap again to make them reappear; swipe left and right to browse between the sections initially set as preferences (arts, politics, etc.). Last but not least, it is functionally rich. By feeding a certain selection from a set of prestigious high-quality newspapers and magazines it makes me feel what no newsfeed so far have managed: this is one app that satisfies my daily needs in terms of news on my smartphone close to exhaustively. This and no less is what every app should aim for. Developers, please be inspired. Service Providers, please be encouraged to facilitate. Users, please make your voices heard. Wouldn&#039;t it be nice?

/ Franz-Josef

Franz-Josef Arnuga is a Consultant at Northstream


Feedback to blog@northstream.se
]]></description></item><item><title>Galina Garpenståhl</title><link>http://northstream.se/team/employee-spotlight/galina-garpenstahl/</link><pubDate>Wed 15 Feb 2012</pubDate><category><![CDATA[]]></category><description><![CDATA[Galina Garpenståhl is a Strategy Consultant at Northstream with experience in the areas of market strategy and business development. Prior to joining Northstream, Galina worked as an independent consultant and has been involved in projects for companies and organizations such as Travelport, Stockholm School of Economics, Ericsson, Warner Bros, Atlas Copco etc. as well as worked as Business Development Director for a Swedish game publisher. Before moving to Sweden Galina worked as E-Marketing Manager for Vivacom (a mobile network operator). 
Galina holds an MBA from the Stockholm School of Economics (2008) and a Bachelor&#039;s degree in Business Administration from the American University in Bulgaria (2004). 
]]></description></item><item><title>Franz-Josef Arnuga</title><link>http://northstream.se/team/employee-spotlight/franz-josef-arnuga/</link><pubDate>Tue 07 Feb 2012</pubDate><category><![CDATA[]]></category><description><![CDATA[Franz-Josef is a Strategy Consultant at Northstream with experience in the areas of strategic eSourcing, organizational restructuring and project management. Prior to joining Northstream, Franz-Josef provided clients with advice within IT-application based strategic eSourcing at Capgemini. He helped defining processes and managing knowledge sharing as well as outsourcing parts of the service line delivery to India training staff and supervising process compliance. Previously, he was involved into restructuring assignments at government agencies working for Roland Berger Strategy Consultants in Germany. ]]></description></item><item><title>Henrik Wramner</title><link>http://northstream.se/team/employee-spotlight/henrik-wramner/</link><pubDate>Tue 07 Feb 2012</pubDate><category><![CDATA[]]></category><description><![CDATA[Henrik is a strategy consultant at Northstream. He has a strong background from the IT industry, both as an employed consultant and also as a self-employed contractor where he has worked within a wide area of business functions. Henrik provides a profound technical knowledge as well as sharp business acumen together with a strong analytical mind set. His recent assignments include procurement, project management and regulatory compliance projects.
Henrik has a broad academic background consisting of a M. Sc. in Computer Engineering from the Royal Institute of Technology and a B. Sc. in Business Administration and Finance from the University of Stockholm. 
]]></description></item><item><title>To commodity hell and back</title><link>http://northstream.se/blog/to-commodity-hell-and-back/</link><pubDate>Tue 31 Jan 2012</pubDate><category><![CDATA[]]></category><description><![CDATA[Providing products or services that are commodities, meaning things that used to be premium but are no more, is a tricky thing. There once was a company that spent a lot of time thinking about how to stay away from &quot;commodity hell&quot; as they put it. This company offered the same service as many others did. They had no obvious competitive benefits in delivery, sometimes delivering both at a lower standard and at a higher fee than direct competitors. That&#039;s a very challenging spot to be in and certain to put you out of business eventually. 

Looking at the mobile operator industry in mature markets today one finds a similarity: they in fact offer a commodity too. A mobile operator&#039;s service is something that people use every day but do not care much about it except when it stops working and when the bill arrives. Telecom operators have become utility companies and offer a service that most people find essential but uninteresting, just like a water or electricity company. There are two reasons this is bad news for operators.

First, offering a commodity means that you&#039;ll have a hard time making people pay premium fees - because there is no premium in the service itself when there are others offering the same thing. Like electricity or consumer banking services. That&#039;s exactly why someone invented the notion of &quot;commodity hell&quot;: once something has become a commodity there is no going back. 

Second, offering a commodity also means that customers do not care much who delivers it - because the product or service looks just the same. Electricity isn&#039;t differentiated between suppliers; as long as the bulb lights up when you flicker the switch you&#039;re good. Most mobile operator customers reason the same way: if you can make a call from where you are and browse the web at reasonably high speeds you&#039;re good. Today all operators can make that happen. That means there are few reasons for a customer to stick to their current operator if someone else offers the same thing but at a lower price. The perceived value comes from the device or from services, content and applications not provided by the operators. Customers are therefore not very loyal or engaged which means that they are easily lost to competitors.

Most operators are nevertheless doing financially well because of their oligopoly-like situation (which we covered in the November 2011 blog post &quot;It&#039;s not all in the network&quot;) and because voice and SMS still contributes so much to the overall profit. In their frantic search for new service pricing models, operators should also consider the customer experience. Customer experience is all the things surrounding the service delivery before, during and after sales. That includes things like personalized offers, excellent online self-service, friendly staff and other aspects that make people feel &quot;wow, great service&quot;. Think Starbucks, where people pay more and queue longer to be able to say &quot;wow, great coffee&quot;.

Being &quot;customer centric&quot;, as many claim to be, isn&#039;t the same thing as providing great overall customer experience. Nor is it equal to the quality of the network itself. Customer experience is the sum of the interactions that a customer has with the company and requires a multi-level, cross-functional approach to be fulfilled. In addition to a good network it involves IT, sales, customer service, product development and essentially anyone that ever provides the end-customer with anything. 

The beginning to the solution for operators is to acknowledge the importance of customer experience and dedicate resources to it. Like airline Virgin Atlantic - also in a commodity industry - where CEO Steve Ridgway announced that £100 millions will be invested to &quot;retain and enhance [...] leadership in customer service and experience&quot;. I&#039;m intrigued to see who the first telecom operator to announce a similar program in 2012 will be.

/ Erik 

Erik E. Byström is a Manager at Northstream 


Feedback to blog@northstream.se]]></description></item><item><title>RIM co-CEOs step down</title><link>http://northstream.se/news/rim-co-ceos-step-down/</link><pubDate>Tue 24 Jan 2012</pubDate><category><![CDATA[]]></category><description><![CDATA[RIM has appointed a new CEO after increasing shareholder pressure and a poor financial performance in 2011. Thorsten Heins will take over as president and CEO, with former co-CEOs Mike Lazaridis and Jim Balsillie stepping down. Lazaridis will become vice chair of RIM&#039;s board and chair of its new Innovation Committee and Balsillie will remain a member of the Board.
]]></description></item><item><title>MasterCard seeks partnership with Swedish m-payments JV</title><link>http://northstream.se/news/mastercard-seeks-partnership-with-swedish-m-payments-jv/</link><pubDate>Thu 19 Jan 2012</pubDate><category><![CDATA[]]></category><description><![CDATA[4T plans to launch later this year; insists services like Google Wallet will not hurt premium SMS revenues.

4T, the mobile payment joint venture established by Sweden&#039;s mobile network operators Telia, Tele2, Telenor and 3, presented its strategy at an industry event in Stockholm on Wednesday.]]></description></item><item><title>Three should not be crowded out of the 4G spectrum</title><link>http://northstream.se/news/three-should-not-be-crowded-out-of-the-4g-spectrum/</link><pubDate>Tue 17 Jan 2012</pubDate><category><![CDATA[]]></category><description><![CDATA[It is in consumers&#039; interests that Three emerges from this year&#039;s 4G auction on a more equal footing with its rivals.

The blockbuster acquisition by AT&amp;T of Deutsche Telekom&#039;s T-Mobile network in the United States may have collapsed, rejected by regulators nervous of price inflation were the number of national networks to have fallen from four to three, but European deal makers are undeterred.]]></description></item><item><title>Coming soon to a mall near you…</title><link>http://northstream.se/blog/coming-soon-to-a-mall-near-you%e2%80%a6/</link><pubDate>Tue 10 Jan 2012</pubDate><category><![CDATA[]]></category><description><![CDATA[With Christmas and New Year celebrations fresh in mind, I take this opportunity to explore how future location-based services can help with the rather busy and tedious task of &#039;Christmas Shopping&#039; (or any shopping for that matter). In this blog, I will use this as an example to illustrate how mobile location services could be greatly improved to exploit the obvious commercial potential that location-based services can offer to both the mobile user as a consumer and the retailing industry in general.  

Like most people living in Western Europe, my Christmas shopping involved a combination of &#039;On-line&#039;, &#039;High Street&#039; and &#039;Shopping Mall&#039; purchases; I also had the opportunity to spread the shopping between London and Stockholm. During this period, I experimented with some of the popular mobile phone apps with location services such as Facebook Places, Foursquare and O2 Moments with the hope that these apps would improve my shopping experience in terms of cheap deal offers, item recommendations, assistance etc. As much as the apps helped in keeping me informed of my friends&#039; locations and of many promotional offers around my location, I found that the apps were too focussed on the social networking experience. What I, as a consumer, really needed from these apps was however not readily available. As a consumer, I needed my digital footprint (mobile and desktop computer generated data such as location, browsing, social networking etc.) to be harnessed and fused to offer intelligent and personalised services that can be used when I embark on my shopping ventures.

So what/how should future location-based services look like to fulfil expectations and exploit mass-market potentials? 

Before I proceed with the description, it is important to note the implicit assumption that the user gives the permission for his/her data to be used. A detailed Privacy discussion is beyond the scope of this blog but in general, I find that most people are happy to have their data used provided that the following basic contract is agreed between the user and the service provider: 

•	That true value is offered in exchange (and agreed upon prior to data collection).
•	That the data is collected for a purpose, used for that purpose and then destroyed once it no longer serves the purpose.
•	That the user is constantly informed about the data kept about them and the processes applied to it. 

It may sound plain and obvious, from both sides of the &#039;contract&#039;, but in reality neither implementations nor user perceptions satisfy all the criteria. 

Future location-based services must rely on a combination of innovative concepts with far greater flexibility and capabilities than those of a single phone app. The reflections below are not intended to give a full specification but rather touch on some of the key aspects that I think will make a difference. It&#039;s also worth noting that most of the core technologies involved already exist in some form, they just need to be reapplied from a different perspective.

Indoor Location
Using my Christmas shopping example, my mobile should be able to log every store (indoors or outdoors) I walk into (and if it&#039;s a large store such as IKEA, the various sections or aisles that I visit should also be logged). The stores that I visited should have the means to know that I visited them and possibly log the items that I purchased from them at that time (not difficult to achieve if mobile payments are in use).  

Digital Activity Tracking
In my example, I browsed various items from different outlets such as Amazon, eBay, Facebook Marketplace etc. I also booked flights to travel to London. For an enhanced service, future location-based services should be able to tap into my digital activity and build a picture of what I could need or where I could be, in a similar way to a top-end personal assistant. The purpose of tracking my digital activity and utilising it in location-based services would be to match my behaviour and movements with relevant retailers in such a way that I don&#039;t feel spammed or intruded upon but instead feel assisted and guided.

Data Fusion
For the entire system to work there needs to be some means of aggregating the data, adapting it and constructing a personalised service. As an example, let&#039;s say that the day before I travelled to London, I visited Stockholm Kravatt (a tie store) but didn&#039;t buy any ties. Future location-based services should be intelligent enough to check for attractive deals (or even broker a deal) at Tie Rack at Heathrow airport and suggest it to me upon arrival. 
  
We will get there!
The system that would enable location-based services will rely on innovative concepts that will make it more than just a social network-based app. Some of the technology heavyweights such as Google and Apple have, in the past, demonstrated their ability to design and market large software ecosystems. To nurture this with enabling technologies and service ideas, there is a countless amount of smaller innovative companies (and we&#039;ve seen many of them) just waiting to get their 15 minutes; So there is no shortage of brains to seize the opportunity.  I therefore hope that in the next couple of Christmases, I will be able to rely on my phone to help me find the gifts I want from the most convenient location and at the right price. Industry, please help me out!

/ Landry

Landry Ndikumasabo is a Consultant at Northstream

Feedback to blog@northstream.se
]]></description></item><item><title>Landry Ndikumasabo</title><link>http://northstream.se/team/employee-spotlight/landry-ndikumasabo/</link><pubDate>Tue 10 Jan 2012</pubDate><category><![CDATA[]]></category><description><![CDATA[Landry Ndikumasabo is a Strategy Consultant at Northstream with a Masters in Electronic Engineering with experience in the area of communication systems development, technology consultancy and project management. Prior to joining Northstream, Landry worked at Roke Manor Research (formerly part of Siemens) as a Research Engineer in the field of radio systems development, MIMO antennas for Femtocell applications and Business Development of autonomous systems. ]]></description></item></channel></rss> 

