Wak Oentoenk

From time to time I like to drop in on What Japan Thinks, a website that translates into English an enormous number of market research studies conducted in Japan. That's where I recently came across an astonishing survey conducted earlier this year on mobile game use in Japan.In the US, game-playing on mobile phones is seen as a fairly popular activity, and I think the view in Europe is similar. But neither place holds a candle to Japan, if you can believe the survey. Here are some highlights:More...

The LA Times is a wonderful place to watch the entertainment industry try to figure out the Internet. Some issues that aren't a big deal in Silicon Valley fascinate them endlessly, while other things that Silicon Valley thinks are important are completely ignored.A great example of this process is the newspaper's recap of 2006 on the Web, "Ten moments the web shook the world." "This was the year wishful thinking -- that this Internet phenomenon might just go away -- evaporated, and those media...

I sympathize with reporters sometimes. If you attend an event, you're expected to write about it -- even if there isn't any news. That's what I think happened a few weeks ago when Palm CEO Ed Colligan did a breakfast Q&A for the Churchill Club, a local discussion forum here in Silicon Valley.About 50 people attended, and while Colligan said some interesting things, an informal breakfast talk is not the sort of place where you deliver major news. But two reporters from the San Jose Mercury...

No. It's a nice start, but the operators need to take several other steps as well.Recently flat-rate pricing for wireless data service has become a big issue in Europe and some other parts of the world. Data service to mobile phones there has often been metered, with users paying by the megabyte. This led to some frightening stories on the Internet of people accidentally ending up with 800-Euro monthly phone bills for browsing too much. Needless to say, this has made many people very cautious...

I'm testing a new template for Mobile Opportunity. If you'd like to check it out, you can see a prototype version with some dummy content here. You can post feedback as a comment to this message, or post a comment on the prototype blog. Thanks.If everything works, I'll move to the new format in about a we...

"Phones are the new cars. The car's history suggests that the phone's future is about divergence, not convergence." -- The Economist, December 2, 2006 It looks like the world is finally starting to understand that the future of mobile data is about segmentation rather than finding a single killer app. Because different people want to do different things, it's impossible to make a single mobile device that pleases everyone -- just as you can't make a single automobile that's simultaneously ideal...

"Palm Signs Perpetual License for Palm OS Garnet Source Code" -- Palm press release Now the circle is complete.Way back in the days before the Internet bubble, Palm was a single integrated company run by its founders, making its own hardware and OS.Today, Palm is once again a single company, run by its founders, with its own hardware and OS.If it weren't for Eric Benhamou being on Palm's Board of Directors, you could almost pretend the last eight years didn't happen.The details of the license agreement,...

Ed Colligan, CEO of Palm, gave a talk this morning. Afterward I asked him if we'll see next year the secret project that Jeff Hawkins has been working on. "Yes," he said, and moved immediately to another question.Very little information has been released publicly about the Hawkins project. I know a number of very bright people at Palm moved to work on it, more than a year ago. Hawkins himself has dropped cryptic hints about something that would start a new category of devices, alongside handhelds...

In April of 1999, Rick Levine, Christopher Locke, Doc Searls, and David Weinberger posted to the Web one of the most iconic artifacts of the Internet Bubble. It's called the Cluetrain Manifesto, and parts of it are so pompous that they read like a cross between the socialist Internationale and an L. Ron Hubbard novel. Here's the document's preamble:"The sky is open to the stars. Clouds roll over us night and day. Oceans rise and fall. Whatever you may have heard, this is our world, our place to...