The idea that a credible rival to iTunes could appear from nowhere and compete head-to-head with Apple (as Microsoft has clearly failed to do) seems far fetched to say the least. But never mind, it’s happening. The company that is presumptuous enough to believe it can do this is Omnifone and, given the reports that emerged from the recent 3GSM conference in Barcelona, the press believes it too.

It’s not too difficult to work out why. Omnifone has already sewn up deals with 23 mobile network operators, that have subscribers in 40 countries, giving it a total customer base of 690m subscribers. That’s a potential customer base of course—not all of those subscribers will choose to use Omnifone, but then again not all of the mobile network operators have talked to Omnifone yet either.

It is quite likely that Omnifone will sweep the board as regards deals with network operators—and here’s why: Few of the press reports home in on the killer capability that Omnifone has developed. The Omnifone software engineers have built an automatic configuration capability for mobile phones so that you can feed in the technical spec of a mobile phone, Omnifone software will build an appropriate MusicStation client for the phone—in about 2 hours. (Most handsets can be catered for in this way, but even when one cannot most of the MusicStation client can be built and a few days of manual programming completes the task. There are hundreds of different mobile handsets and Omnifone’s MusicStation will already work on about 75 percent of them).

Omnifone provides a fully scalable server for music downloads, just like iTunes, and it manages the whole process, downloading music, providing album covers, tracking usage and so on. The handset manufacturers like Omnifone because:

1. It isn’t Apple
2. The application is cool (It is, I’ve played with it)
3. It just works on their handsets.

The music business likes Omnifone (especially the big 4; Universal, Warner, Sony and Emi) because:

1. It isn’t Apple
2. They can sell music by subscription through MusicStation

and the network operators like Omnifone because:

1. It isn’t Apple
2. It reaches the vast majority of handsets including those that could only accommodate a few songs
3. It offers them a music revenue stream.

You can do a blow-by-blow comparison of iTunes and MusicStation, but no matter how you toss it up and catch it, it is difficult to believe that MusicStation isn’t going to take a big share of the digital music download market. First think in terms of coverage:

Even in Steve Jobs’ wildest dreams Apple’s beautiful iPhone will not capture more than a few percent of the mobile phone market. Omnifone will probably get most of the rest. Apple is giving exclusive deals to a single carrier whereas Omnifone works with all carriers. To that you can add the fact that the iPhone doesn’t allow direct download to the phone.

A big reason why the Music industry is backing Omnifone is the music by subscription model it operates. The idea is that you pay a regular subscription charge as part of your phone bill and you can have “all you can eat” in terms of music. (The initial roll out will offer 1.2 million songs). The music companies tend to think like this: With iTunes the average user buys around 20 tracks a year—equivalent to maybe 2 or 3 CDs and generating $20 in revenue. With a subscription model at, say, $3.50 per week, the revenues per person will above $160 (eight times as much).

All Omnifone has to do now, to establish itself as the other player in the music market, is to roll out the service (roll-outs have already taken place in South Africa and Norway).

Eat your heart out Microsoft.

P.S. I first reported on Omnifone last year.

I was briefed by Endeca recently. It wasn’t the first time. I’d run into the company a few years ago when I was doing a broad sweep through search companies to try to get a grip on how good the technology was. Endeca stood out for me then, simply because they had—as far as I could tell—bridged the gap between search and navigation. In the last two years they’ve improved the technology considerably.

So here’s the problem:

Searching is not (or shouldn’t be) a normal activity. In our normal activity we only search for something in exceptional circumstances—when it gets lost. Ideally we have a place for everything and everything is kept in its place. We find things by ‘navigating’ to where they are and then using them. Consequently it’s more natural for us to have a structured organization of things (including information) and to find what we need by navigating through the structure.

However, out there in cyberspace, there is a vast amount of information and not much of it is organized according to any kind of standard. Some sites have good internal organization (like Wikipedia, or eBay or Amazon), but there is no common taxonomy in any of this. That’s why the price comparison web sites are so clunky.

So if you want to find something in cyberspace, you don’t navigate to it, you search. At least that’s the assumption—and the interesting thing about Endeca is that it challenges that assumption. Before you leap to the wrong conclusion, lets first state that Endeca doesn’t (at the moment anyway) try to provide any kind of web search capability and, as far as I know it has no intention of doing so in the near future. The data volumes are far too large—it involve would involve boiling the ocean. Better to let global warming do that.

Endeca is in the unfortunate position of getting compared to other products that are not really like it. What Endeca does is build a kind of taxonomy, from the ground up over a set of files which could be databases (Oracle, or Access even) or could be text or HTML content. When you build a taxonomy of this kind you are, in effect, building a metadata structure—simple to do with a database, but actually quite possible with text or indeed anything that is tagged.

What Endeca then does with this metadata/constructed-taxonomy is build a kind of Excel pivot-table over the data. If you cannot visualize that then I’m not surprised, you’ve probably not messed with pivot-tables. So, to put it another way, it builds a series of navigation paths based on the metadata. Now without trying to explain why (because to be honest, there’s a great deal more that Endeca does than just mess with metadata), what you get is a very easy to understand navigation structure that has its claws firmly lodged in the whole data pool. And it works.

Endeca dynamically builds a navigation structure that works and, remarkably, is very easy to comprehend.

Endeca has been selling like hot cakes into certain application areas. One such area is web sites. The leading D-I-Y store in the USA, Home Depot, installed Endeca to provide the navigation for its ecommerce operation—replacing its previous solution and the outcome was a 30% increase in web sales simply because web site users were able to find what they were looking for.

And that’s what’s impressive about this technology. It’s not that it creates a navigation structure—there are quite a few ways to do that—it happens to create navigation structures that work very well, on the fly. If you’re looking at search technology, you should take a look at Endeca. It could be what you need.

Google is now head-to-head with Microsoft in the Office Apps market, as you may have guessed from the recent Google Apps announcement. What you get from Google is word processing, spreadsheet, calendar, chat, web page creation and email. There are two price points:

• It’s free. Just log on to Google and register. But prepare to be advertised at and you’ll get less storage space (what Google gives you is still all you’re ever likely to need if you archive your email every year or two).
• Google Apps Premier Edition costs $50 per user per year and, you can use your own branding and domain name on email, etc.

So will it actually take market share from Microsoft? I think the answer is “yes”. Here are the 5 reasons why.

1. Google has the brand to make it possible. Free Open Source office components have been available for many years, via Open Office (and other products). They work very well. However, they never dented Microsoft’s monopoly. They may have taken a small sliver of the market, but not yet a significant slice. The problem (I believe) was branding rather than product quality. If I was forced to decide, I’d personally go for Open Office rather than Google Apps, but most organizations wouldn’t because “Who’s behind Open Office?”. This comes down to branding. Google has a powerful brand. It was sufficient to convince Proctor and Gamble and General Electric to set up trails.
2. Google Apps is not great software, but it is good enough. Actually the word processor is really good for collaborating on documents because its versioning works well and it’s easy to understand. The email is good too. But there’ no PowerPoint equivalent yet and the spreadsheet is weak. But who cares. Microsoft Office is ridiculously over-featured and for 50 percent of users (if not 80 percent). Google Apps will be good enough.
3. Office software costs a small fortune over time. First, you have to upgrade regularly (or eventually) which never costs nothing. Second sometimes staff need to be trained in the new versions (or just to be effective users) and third, possibly most importantly, there’s administration. When you add it up, you quickly realize that if an organization ditches Microsoft Office for just some of its users, it will probably save more than $50 per Office user per year. The Google offering is a no-brainer, wherever Google Apps fits the need.
4. Google isn’t done yet. Think of this as release 1.0 of a server based office applications suite and you get the picture. Google is going to build on this. As companies sign up Google will have users to support and the users will bitch about the stuff that’s inconvenient and it will all improve in time. Google will gradually move up the food chain to try to satisfy the more sophisticated users.
5. Now think Web 2.0. The Google Apps software has all its interfaces exposed so that other software can link to it. Not more than 2 days after Google announced Google Apps, Avaya leapt straight in, announcing that it was going to integrate its considerable suite of communications software with Google Apps – its eyes firmly focused on the SMB market. Salesforce.com will also integrate with Google Apps and probably most SAAS (Software As A Service) vendors will follow suit. So without even launching a channels program, Google is acquiring pretty powerful partners.

So what does it all mean? Well the last point listed is the one that really threatens Microsoft. If Google Apps becomes the de facto integrated Office Suite then Microsoft Office is toast.

The initial reports were that Apple had done a deal with Cisco to get full rights to the iPhone trade mark-and I reported this in my instant reaction to the Apple iPhone announcement. However, it was untrue. Apple had negotiated with Cisco but failed to get Cisco to part with the trademark. Cisco, quite understandably, suggested sharing it.

Mark Chandler, Cisco’s SVP and General Counsel, wrote the following in his blog “Today’s announcement from Cisco regarding our suit with Apple over our iPhone trademark has spurred a lot of interesting questions. Most importantly, this is not a suit against Apple’s innovation, their modern design, or their cool phone. It is not a suit about money or royalties. This is a suit about trademark infringement.”

So Apple is now going to fight the case in court, on the basis that several companies, including Cisco, are using the iPhone trademark for a VoIP device, whereas Apple is using it for a cell phone. My guess is that Cisco probably doesn’t care too much about the iPhone brand, but it is irritated by Apple’s gall. It may also see an opportunity to get a stream of publicity for its own iPhone. At the same time, we should note that Cisco is actually a minor competitor of Apple that, in time, will probably become a much stronger competitor.

Cisco is in the home LAN business, making devices that help you turn all your PCs and entertainment devices into a network of a kind and pass data between them. It has a big interest in VoIP (of course) and routers (of course) and video, and it may also have its own vision of the household of the future-which doesn’t exactly involve wall-to-wall Apple devices. So Cisco may have more than one axe to grind.

Suing Apple is starting to become a sport in the US-one that reflects Apple’s success. Like most, if not all, successful companies of the past, when Apple found itself sitting on a de facto (music-playing) monopoly, instead of getting all “open standards” and bountiful, it quickly did its best to lock its users in.

In the world of consumer computing you really don’t need to do much to lock a user in. A proprietary file format or two will normally do the trick. Apple is already under threat of legal action because of its iTunes-iPod-iMac success, but while legal action may eventually result in Apple having to get a little more “open standards”, I doubt if it will trouble Apple’s music business. Most iPod users never even bothered to look at a Zune, because they were never going to go to the trouble of exporting their music files to some other device.