Tatter & Media SK Telecom "All That Life 100"
Sunday, August 8, 2010 at 4:46 PM This is the third, and final, part of a brief series looking at Google's Android mobile Operating System and it's success (or otherwise) in Korea.
So I've looked at Android in General, and already those stats are beginning to look a bit shoddy as news came out this week that Android handsets are outselling Apple's iPhone. I've also gone into a brief history of Android in Korea, and indeed looked into our crystal ball at one rumour that I would like to come to fruition. In this final post I'm going to look at arguably the most important part of the whole equation - especially in terms of handset sales and market dominance - Content.
Its one thing to have a flash whizz bang handset, but if you can only make calls on it you may as well go back to your Motorola Razor. Smartphones are all about doing more. Some have called them mini computing platforms, still others have shied away from this moniker, but everyone agrees that Smartphones are excellent for content consumption.
Enter Tatter & Media, a blog aggregation, curation, organisation, and among other things design, company which I am affiliated with through Nanoomi. TatterMedia (for short) curates so called "Power Bloggers" in Korean language K-Blogland who discuss all manner of subjects in their respective fields of interest.
These bloggers have become some of the most widely read authors in their fields and TatterMedia boasts, as part of its stable the likes of Carholic, and PlayPC.
While each smartphone has the ability to access the internet, and Webkit based browsers such as Apple's Safari and the various browsers available through Android do a good job there has been an explosion of content specific (Destination specific?) apps on all platforms. Why browse the Internet version of the NYTimes (absent of flash and all) on your tiny (compared to the desktop) screen when you can have all the same info in an app, customized especially for your platform?
This is some of the rationale behind The Tatter & Media / SK Telecom All That Life 100 where both companies have set the goal of releasing 100 apps on the Android platform by the end of the year, bringing Blogger's content to the Android platform (and especially The Galaxy S) via SK Telecom.
At the end of July, both companies held an event to show their progress so far having debuted 10 Apps since the beginning of June.
And there has been considerable success, measured by the huge number of downloads of these apps in just a short time. Both TatterMedia and SK Telecom were pleased to announce that almost 35,000 downloads had occured since June:
This correlates with the continued growth in Android adoption not only around the world but also here in Korea. This slide, presented at the event details Smartphone OS adoption by type in the first quarter of 2010:
In less than a year, Android has gone from almost 0% to almost half of the market. The quick adoption is probably even steeper in the case of the Korean market - i.e. a similar rate of adoption over a shorter time. You'll note too that Androids growth has come at the expense of iOS with Apple's share of the smartphone market peaking at around 70% in May 2009 and dropping to less than 50% earlier this year.
But there is more to TatterMedia and SK Telecom's shift toward creating apps than just getting market share - remember, unlike Apple Android is a platform on several different handsets, in the face of one single Unit still taking half the market, Android has a lot to do to shore up its growth. One thing might be to move from high cost social service and content apps that offer little in the way of rich media to low cost apps providing plenty of rich media opportunities:
The killer-aspect to all this though is to make the creation of rich media apps easy and accessible to content creators such as bloggers. Thus All That Life is not just a series of apps, but also a series of templates that can be tailored to content.
So far the templates can be tailored for:
News
Recipes
eBooks
and for budding cartographers; mapping databases, with more to follow in the coming months including a template promising the ability to deliver podcasts to end users.
The ability to make these templates accessible to content creators is especially important now that more and more people are being granted access to App Inventor - Google's somewhat-WYSIWYG, browser based, android app writer.
App Inventor allows users to write apps and "sideload" them directly to their phones. As of yet it is impossible to decompile these creations into code for to be added to the Android Marketplace - but really that's only a mater of time. And while there may be a number of Apps "invented" in this fashion there will still be a premium on well created functional apps like The All That Life 100 series.
At present the workflow for All That Life apps looks like this:
TatterMedia's pool of content creators create content, TatterMedia curate and send content to the so-called "App Factory" where it is apples to a ready made template thereupon it is sent to SK Telecom's T Store for Android where it is either downloaded for free or bought and ends up on end users handsets.
At first I was hesitant to find that content ends up in SK's Store rather than the wider Android Marketplace. Is SK Telecom creating yet another walled garden for its users? But like the iPhone before it, and notwithstanding Government regulation, Korean smartphone users are becoming more savvy and cherry picking what they want from the Global Marketplace - which itself is pretty devoid of Korean Language content - while also filling their phones with local content from the T Store.
And that, in a nutshell is a good example of the new paradigm the Korean phone market finds itself in. Whether it is the local version of the iTunes app store, The Android Marketplace or T Store, Korean consumers are demanding access to the same apps as their global brothers and sisters, yet are finding ways to inject local content into their phones as well. Thankfully handset manufacturers are starting to realize that this is a way of differentiating their products from the competition instead of hiding behind ultimately useless and unneeded government regulation.
The Telecoms companies too are not immune form this shift either. As shown here by SK Telecom, it doesn't really matter where the content is coming from, consumers will download or purchase quality content. What I think I see happening is that the Telcos are beginning to realize that they will still make money on it because they are charging for bandwidth. What they are missing is the fact that they could still make money - possibly even more - if they were to open up their models further and provide flat rate, no limit data plans. - How else can consumers fill their bellies with all this excellent content?
Stay tuned for further developments in this space. As noted above TatterMedia is behind one of my other projects - Nanoomi, and there is definitely a Nanoomi All That Life 100 App in our (near) future, from there it's only a hop, skip and a jump until there are SeoulPodcast and ChosunBimbo apps.
All I need, as I sit here waiting for my iPad to arrive, is an Android device (on SK Telecom I suppose) to take advantage of all the All That Life 100 Apps.
I'd quite like a Galaxy S actually...
Anybody...?
Anyone....?
Reader Comments (2)
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Being a 'blogger' is a fairly broad description, and although some bloggers are thoughtful opinion leaders, you also have guys like me who just sit around and post photos of Big Baengy.