Samsung, AdMob See The Value In Opened-Up Business

Samsung has announced it’s getting into the app development market, with its “bada” software platform and developers toolkit. We saw Paypal getting in on the action as well last week – two years ago it would have been hard to imagine such massive companies opening themselves up so widely to outside developers, and now they’re stumbling over one another to do just that. If the iPhone can already be said to have a legacy, this is surely the most significant element of it: changing companies from hermetic, distrustful islands into nigh-on open source, discursive networks.

Samsung are (probably wisely) steering clear of Apple and going after the low to mid-range smartphone market along with Nokia. Though they’re late to the smartphone game, Samsung could be well placed to mop up market share across the whole sector – the bottom end with their own phones, the top end with the chips they provide to Apple for the iPhone. They’ve also announced that as well as their own operating system, they’re going to be using Android a lot more and Windows a lot less – it’s the latest blow to Windows, who have been looking very sorry in the mobile sector for some time.

The other big mobile news today is that Google is acknowledging the sector all the more – their latest purchase is AdMob, whose network for delivering ads on web pages seems like a good fit for Google’s ever-heftier cash cow. As is now the norm, AdMob uses information about your ethnicity, gender and age to target appropriate advertising your way – though the privacy advocate that the FT spoke to didn’t seem too concerned about the company. 

The Wall Street Journal has a blog post about AdMob’s founder Omar Hamoui, who only started the company while still at business school in 2006. Some of the wisdom of his head of European operations, Russell Buckley, syncs rather nicely with this whole shift towards openness that iPhone and Android are predicating: “Far too many entrepreneurs get paranoid about protecting their idea to the point of paralysis. The value of most ideas is in the execution, not in what the concept actually is. To make it reality, you need to share it – actually, with as many people as possible, counter-intuitive though this might seem.” Meanwhile Jim Goetz, partner at Sequoia Capital who first invested in AdMob, says Hamoui succeeded because “he kept a maniacal focus on the independent developer… He ignored the carriers, he ignored the ‘walled garden.’” Proof that in the digital age, the loosened-up businessperson is likely to be the most successful.

Photo: Jeff Kubina

Posted by Ben Beaumont-Thomas in Sci-tech | November 10, 2009 12:57PM |