Data is Free

"The losers are the ones that don't keep it simple," said Westergren. "Companies that make things drop-dead simple are the ones that will win over and over again."

Today's article in MediaPost describes a panel at an AlwaysOn media event in NYC with Pandora founder Tim Westergren and Marco Argenti, vice president for media at Nokia, among others.

Westergren revealed that in the two days after the iPhone came out Pandora gained more subscribers than it had in the prior two years through distribution deals with Sprint and AT&T on 50 different handsets.

Not only was growth prior to iPhone slow, but the company was burning resources customizing its app across multiple phones due to a lack of standards. "We've been looking for a hero device," he said. "As a company now, we're thinking, 'what's the next iPhone?'"

I think the leap of genius in the iPhone app is abandoning the browser in favor of tiles, a move enabled by the touch screen. For years at Openwave and every other wireless software system the notion of the ultimate mobile browser was pursued. But a browser presumes that you can easily access content in a stream, and you have the ability to dip in and out of those streams.

But a phone isn't a computer. When someone uses a phone they are using it for discreet, bounded activities. Tiles are perfect for this because it directs the user to those discreet activities: make a call, play a game, listen to the radio, etc.

The message is that UI designers have to focus on keeping things simple. And wireless carriers and software/handset vendors that want to compete with Apple need to figure out how to make easy to use SDKs that run across their handsets.