The landing of the Android-driven smart phone has fomented a frenzy of  “it will” and “it won’t” kill the iPhone commentary.  This persistent portrayal of the market as a zero-sum game distracts from the real benefit of the competition for share.  Computing devices are going to emulate more of our behavior.

The disconnect between they way computers have worked and the way we live was best captured in a snarky back-and-forth between Microsoft and General Motors about 10 years ago.  Bill Gates suggested that if the car company had kept up with technology, its vehicles would be more efficient and less costly.  The response from GM was along these lines:  yeah, but would you want to crash a couple times a day?

Both companies are a bit different today but GM has come further than Microsoft.  It is hard to imagine cars with more computing power and software applications than have today and as for Microsoft, well, let’s hope 7 really is a lucky number.  But now that devices have come untethered, it is the smart phone, e-book reader, tablet that are setting the pace for human-style computing.

Credit Motorola and its clam-shell cell phone, kudos to Palm and its hand-sized design and add a shout-out to companies like NCR who took touch screens from science fiction and added them to automatic teller machines.  The career achievement award for making computers more like us, though, has to go to Apple.  Which brings us to the iPhone.

Much like the ATM changed an industry and the way we interact with it, the iPhone is making ease-of-use and value — two relatively new concepts in computing — essential to success.  The new black.  Looked at in this way — from our perspective — the competition won’t be based so much on the number of applications, but the way the apps work, not so much on the power of the network, but if the connection is reliable.

There is early evidence of success, but what comes next will be the real test of how competition can shape a market to look more like the customers is says it serves.

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MediaPost “Online Spin” columnist and President of Social Vibe Joe Marchese had this to say about the bright year ahead for mobile marketing:

“This is it.  2010 will be the year mobile marketing begins to realize the promise marketers have imagined for so long.  What’s different in 2010?  The phones are smarter, the networks are faster, an open development ecosystem is leading to faster innovation, and specialty mobile agencies have built up a solid knowledge base of what works.”

He is right that the tools for making mobile marketing real are in mass production.  You can count me as voting in favor of mobile in 2010, but the platform’s capabilities will shine a light on features that could be a drag on marketing — privacy and permission.  Just because someone downloaded an app doesn’t mean they knew all it did and weeks or months down the road they will likely remember even less.  Just look at the recent Sears settlement.

And being aware that our devices know where we are is not the same as permission to tell people.  I mean, we grant Google the right to read our email, but getting an ad tied too tightly to the conversation we are having at the moment can be creepy.  The reign of “notice and choice” has given online consumers little of either.  Advertisers are looking at notice in context and choice at the point of real decision.

Even the most zealous pro-mobile-advocates appreciate the concern/problem/speed bump.

A MobileMarketer column looking at the major trends for mobile in 2010 adds this to the list of those you have heard before:

“Mobile will be called to task on privacy in 2010. Reputable mobile ad networks will follow guidelines set by industry trade associations and standard bodies.  Offering opt-out capabilities to protect personal identification information will be an imperative and will propel the roll-out of more contextual and behavioral consumer ad targeting via mobile.”

Opt-in and opt-out, though, are so desktop.  There is a chance, though, in 2010 for this last hurdle to be cleared is new ways.  Our “persistent contact” with our smart phones, the speed of their browsers and advertisers use of short codes and 2-D barcodes stand to remake privacy and permission in real-time.

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In the New York Times Magazine’s annual look at the year in ideas was this bit of business about adding sound to silence:

“Nothing seemed to herald the end of the internal combustion engine more than the ability of hybrid cars to leap suddenly to life without the slightest sound. Unfortunately, it turns out that the sweet silence of 21st-century technology has a serious downside: pedestrians and bicyclists are less likely to hear hybrids and electric cars coming their way and are more likely to be clipped or run over. That has prompted a back-to-the-future solution: fake car noise that will alert the unwary.”

This is the latest in a long line of retrofits for safety.  The most important and well-smelled may be the addition of that bad egg smell to natural gas which is odorless.  This was prompted more than 70 years ago when a Texas high school was destroyed by a build-up of natural gas that no one noticed.  300 people died and a law was passed making the retrofit mandatory.

Not all such safety moves are well-received by those the rules seek to protect.  In 2007, USA Track and Field, the governing body for long-distance running events, decided headphones or ear buds should not be used during races.  The runners objected but the motivation was not dissimilar to dealing with the dangers of silent cars and odorless gas.  We have a better chance to avoid danger when it announces its presence.

The problem, as we are discovering, is that we are moving from spending most of our time in the real world to investing more and more in the online world where danger — whether identity theft, malware, sniffer programs and the rest — doesn’t make much of a sound.  And the rules we rely on out there — speed limits and stop signs for cars, building codes for gas lines and a courteous “on your left” while running — don’t apply in here.

It brings to mind “Marathon Man,” a 1976 film with Dustin Hoffman who falls prey to Laurence Olivier.  In a scene set in a dentist’s chair, Olivier wants to know, “Is it safe?”

How can you know if you cannot hear it or smell it or feel it?

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Apple’s plans for bringing iTunes to the Web was big news, but it was a simple, apositive phrase, late in the story in the Wall Street Journal, that carried greater import.   In talking about how Apple will give users access to their accounts via any web browser, the Journal said, “That approach, known in technology circles as cloud computing, could…”

In technology circles? It is easy to think that the ubiquity of technology — smart phones, GPS devices, payment fobs, Fast Passes and the rest — has not only made it a part of our lives, but also a part of our vernacular.  Not so.  Companies promoting products and services to the market need to heard and understood.

The burden is even greater for technologies that don’t make an obvious impression.  The iPhone is a complex and powerful computer, but it is so darn cute and easy to use.  That’s easy to get and accrues to Apple’s benefit.  Nearly 20 years ago, computer chip maker Intel was able to break out of the box with its significant “Intel inside” branding and advertising campaign.

But multi-million-dollar ad campaigns don’t have the same effect today and customer skepticism undercuts “because I said so.”  So what is a technology company to do?

For one, they should use the language of the market they seek to serve and not fall back on the jargon of their own.     A column by a CEO from a deep technology company in Fortune makes the point.

When Neustar’s Jeff Ganek links his company’s deep technology of network hub directory services to edge services like Web browsing, texting and keeping the same phone number when you leave AT&T for Verizon in a fit of pique, he goes a long way in speaking the market’s language.

It is a good model for others.

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If you want to get people talking, ask them about their kids.  If you want to get reporters talking, ask them about the future.

At the annual Media Predicts dinner hosted by the PRSA of Silicon Valley, six Bay Area reporters stood for this version of “question time” with results that were predictable (”Apple is good,” “Facebook will IPO” and “The big will get bigger”), arguable (”Twitter is Pointcast” or “Twitter unlocks something in us”) and insightful.

It is this last list that ought to be most remembered from the discussion.  For a company hopeful of earning a reporter’s or blogger’s attention, they are the most helpful.

First, every company depends on others for its success.  As Wired’s Steve Levy said, “crappy cell coverage will hold back the mobile market.”  The snappiest devices are dependent on the service(s) to which they are tethered.  It suggests that communications ought to be collaborative.

Second, leading companies are those, as defined by GigaOm’s Om Malik, who are playing offense and setting the agenda.  This demands that a company’s communications ought to focus not just on its product and services, but on its aspirations.

Third, the best companies are those whose success leads to the advance of an entire market.  As Brad Stone of the New York Times said, ” the iPhone is an extraordinary platform” and USA Today’s Byron Acohido added that
“owning the platform is key.”  Promoting the increasing value of your ecosystem is an essential element in corporate communication.

Fourth, companies that are solving big problems ought to let people know.  Matt Marshall of VentureBeat touted technology that “makes us more efficient.”  Who can’t see the value of that?

Most of the predictions made last night will fall flat in the year ahead.  But what will remain constant is the value of creating corporate communications programs that respond to the guidance we heard.

The food was pretty good, too.

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There is more than a scramble for hotel space in Vancouver for the upcoming Olympic Games there.  The Wall Street Journal reports today that Canada itself is scrambling its image.  No more Mr. Nice Guy.

Here is a bit of the story: “Dominick Gauthier, a former Olympian now coaching two of the country’s top medal prospects, describes the country’s new Olympic philosophy this way: ‘Canada,’ he says, ‘is finally more concerned with winning than being nice.’”

Like any good rebranding, the effort promotes a snappy tag-line, too:  “Own the Podium.” Holy Poutine, Batman, we are not in Halifax anymore!

All this is a bit jarring to someone introduced to the Canadian spirit by Benton Fraser of the Mounties (as in “Due South”), described by his Chicago cop sponsor as “the nicest man on the planet.”  Bennie, how did you lose your way?

Or did you?

It may be a natural evolution of the culture as the systems that have sustained it (and the rest of us, too) have disappeared or changed.  Borders are less meaningful, distance is less meaningful, climate is less forbidding and it is easier to now know what we could ever hardly have conceived.

In the midst of such change, if you don’t speak for yourself, who will?   Start there — concerned more about yourself — and it is a short jump to a more self-centered brand.

So, despite what Robert Hughes might call “the shock of the new” in the rebranding of Canada, I hope they do get to “own the podium.”  Otherwise there will be disappointment on a scale the formerly even-keeled folks never had to confront.  But that is progress.

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