One of the facts of corporate life is that sometimes business models change. Financial or investor pressures have a habit of intruding into the entrepreneur’s ideals and they’re forced to make decisions that they would never have considered in an ideal world or embraced into their original vision. It happens to us all.
I sense this financial reality in TextAmerica’s recent missive to its subscribers, sent to me by Alfie at MoblogUK:
Update to the TA Community insiders: Due to the complicated nature of the planned upcoming move to a private paid members only community, changes will not be formally announced until sometime in August. Current ‘free sites’ will be suspended starting July 1 with a planned deletion scheduled for the fall 2006. DO NOT QUESTION me about these changes as NOTHING will be said in advance of the official notices. THANK YOU for your consideration in this regard…
If you don’t know, part of TextAmerica’s service is that they store people’s photos and videos, which can then be shared with friends and family and the wider TA community. Of course, they’re free to change their business model, although you have to wonder a bit at the tone of this message.
So the problem here is that their service has a deep emotional meaning to their customers. They’re not announcing that car part 357 will be replaced with 457 next month. Or that a bank’s interest rate will be reduced by .25%. They’re announcing that they’re going to delete people’s digital memories that are stored on their system.
Suppose if I don’t get their email and I go and look for my only copy of the photo I took of dear old Aunt Ethel, who died yesterday? Imagine how I’m going to feel if I’m told that it had been lost forever and that I’d been advised several times that it would happen. It’s reminiscent of Arthur Dent, the planning application and the Vogons.
Fortunately, there is an obvious solution to this potential PR disaster. Alfie, noticing an influx of TA users has invited all TA users to move their free accounts to Moblogging UK. A TA user has even written a bit of freeware that does the job that can be downloaded here and can be used to export data for TA and imported to anywhere else.
This isn’t about TA bashing by any means. They offer a very good service as far as I know and they’re free to change their modus operandi. But when your change has such visceral implications for many of their users, I think they need to be very careful how they implement these changes. It would be so easy to become victims of a very nasty hate campaign if they screw with people’s photos and memories.
If I were TA, I’d certainly consider changing my tone a little about this. But more importantly, I’d offer my users alternative sources of free storage, which might, or might not, include Alfie’s crew. That way, they can be seen to solve a problem, not just present a problem, which is at the heart of good customer service. This also means that protecting people’s digital memories becomes an SEP - or Someone Else’s Problem.
But for those accounts which aren’t exported, I’d also advise them to be very sure to keep back up copies for a long, long time, even if they aren’t accessible by users directly. If they are responsible for protecting the cherished memory of the late Aunt Ethel, they need to be able to rescue this image when they are asked.
One of the deep questions I have about life is - how rich do you have to be before you drink something from the hotel mini bar without resenting the price they charge you?
Or maybe I’m just naturally mean, which is why I carry two mobiles these days, as I hate being ripped off for roaming charges. I carry a German mobile and a spare one I use for outbound calls, primarily when I’m in the UK, as I’m flitting back and forth between the two countries pretty regularly. The spare one is not a number I normally give out. Incoming calls are therefore taken on my German mobile.
Of course, it still hurts when someone phones you on the German phone when you’re out and about - for instance, someone in England calls your German mobile when you’re in England (or anywhere else outside Germany for that matter).
Last night, I arrived in Palo Alto (where AdMob is based) and put my German cash card into an ATM and happily got some cash. I switched on my laptop and easily connected to a wireless network. I turned on my German mobile and ….nothing. It just doesn’t work here. Then, I put a newly purchased US Sim card into my spare phone, only to remember I hadn’t got it unlocked. Damn.
So, I now have a situation where I can’t take calls on my German phone all week, as I had to put the Sim card into the German phone. And even if I could, I’d have to keep swapping Sim cards to make calls and then to check if I’d received any. Not exactly a one-world approach.
Incidentally, if anyone can recommend a better way than carrying 3 phones with me - which is what I might have to resort to now - I’d love to hear from you.
Now I need to wrestle with another paradox - shall I have that gin and tonic from the mini bar or not?
It’s my pleasure to bring you the 32nd installment of the Carnival of Mobilists, returning like a prodigal son with this week’s best writing about mobile technology. It brings Russell and I great joy to see the Carnival thriving, and that’s down to the support of the community, so pat yourself on the back. Thanks also to Khosla Ventures, kind sponsors of the Carnival of the Mobilists. Enough of the plaudits, though, and on with the Carnival.
There were several first-time entrants in the Carnival this week, which was great to see. Tarek Abu-Esber wants to know where all the Flash Lite demo apps are, pointing out that handset vendors are missing an opportunity to promote the potentially powerful technology.
Stephanie Rieger also writes about Flash Lite, highlighting several potential applications for it, beyond mobile marketing apps.
Shawn at Thought Pattern, who makes the case for providing different levels of user location information for mobile web sites and applications.
Frequent contributor Martin Sauter is also talking about geolocation this week, and gets my vote for Best Post with his ideas about how to incorporate geotaggings into mobile applications. As Martin points out, the technology is there, it’s high time for some cool applications that make use of location info (and by cool, I mean something more than telling me where the nearest ATM machine is).
Location technologies and services was a popular topic this week, with Daniel Taylor at the Mobile Enterprise Weblog looking into the conflicts that can emerge when location-based services are introduced to the enterprise.
Rafe at All About Symbian (last week’s able host) has reviewed Juvino, an application that promises to cut users’ mobile bills by routing its calls and texts through its own gateway. Rafe says it offers some benefits, but isn’t without some big drawbacks, too.
Michael Mace at Mobile Opportunity says he’s found from several sources that mobile application sales are stagnating, and offers some solid insight and analysis into why.
Anders Borg at Abiro has waded into the mobile etiquette debate, offering users and manufacturers some advice on how best to use ringtones. It’s common sense advice, but some that all too often gets ignored.
At Xen Mendolsohn’s Xellular Identity, she has a guest entry by Nissim Bar-Siman-Tov asking an important question for operators as they rush into video services — why would mobile users pay for content they already own at home?
MobileActive this week takes a look at The Grameen Phone project in Bangladesh, which uses microloans to finance “phone ladies” in rural villages, using telecommunications for economic empowerment.
Scott Shafer at The Pondering Primate says that there’s a big opportunity for MySpace to move 2D barcodes for mobiles forward in the US.
Following the barcode meme, over at Smart Mobs, Mike Love posts about Codecheck, a project “to create an informed “community” of consumers who are able to critically assess products prior to reaching their purchasing decisions” by snapping a picture of a product’s barcode and sending it in to the system on their mobile.
Wap Review this week takes a look at some mobile versions of YubNub, finding them pretty useful front ends to the command-line service for mobile users.
Finally, for our contribution this week is Russell’s post on the disparity between popular sites on the mobile web and on the fixed web.
A couple more new entrants to point to: Life of a Software Program Manager with a review of the Dopod S300/Qtek 8500, and TamsPalm taking a look at Palm Desktop in Windows Vista.
Other entries this week came from Steve Litchfield, MOpocket, and The Mobile Media Show podcast, as well as another audio entry from Media Slaves m-trends.org, Darla Mack and Troy Norcross.
That’s it for this week, thanks again to all the contributors. See you next week at Rudy de Waele’s m-trends.org!
[tags]carnival of the mobilists, mobilists, mobile[/tags]
I’m off to spend the week in Palo Alto next week. If anyone fancies getting together for a beer and a bit of a chat about mobile, drop me an email using the link on the right.
Motorola, NEC, NTT DoCoMo, Panasonic, Samsung, and Vodafone have announced they’ll work together to develop a Linux platform for mobile phones, culminating in the formation of an independent foundation to push the initiative forward. The foundation will work on:
- Implementation of a fair, balanced, transparent contribution and participation process across the current and future membership.
- Establishment of safeguards to minimize fragmentation.
- Collaboration on a mobile Linux developer ecosystem.
- Coordination with existing industry organizations.
- Seeking participation from all interested companies across the value chain, including device manufacturers, operators, chipset manufacturers, independent software vendors, integrators and third-party developers.
This sounds a bit like a Symbian for Linux, then, which is what the platform needs if it’s ever going to really thrive, instead of fragmented approaches that take away many of Linux’ supposed advantages. Of course, we’ve seen similar announcements like this before, including the LiPS Forum and the OSDL’s Mobile Linux Initiative. So is this new group anything to get excited about?
The only thing here that could make this something of a tipping point for Linux is the participation of DoCoMo and Vodafone. DoCoMo, some time ago, specified Linux as one of its two preferred platforms (along with Symbian) for 3G devices, and its top-down approach means it will do a lot of work to dictate exactly what the platform will do to device vendors. Vodafone’s participation, by sheer virtue of its scope, will turn some heads. Remember back at 3GSM when Vodafone said it wanted to settle on two or three smartphone platforms (S60 being one of them) — looks like Linux is the second.
The operators’ interest here is simple — they want to drive the cost of using Linux down as low as possible. Many people have the misconception that using Linux is “free” when compared to the $5 or $7 per device Symbian royalties cost, but cost savings can quickly be chewed up by extra development work that’s needed to craft the OS into a viable smartphone platform with a solid UI. That’s what this effort, like the ones before it, hopes to achieve. The sign of interest from two major operators may be enough to make this initiative something of a tipping point for mobile Linux.
The real question, though, is will this bunch actually do anything? The other mobile Linux initiatives were met with a decent amount of hype when they were announced, but they’ve been pretty quiet since. While Linux has had some success in the mobile sphere, it’s really yet to emerge as a real challenger in the smartphone space, and these various initiatives don’t appear to have much to show for their work. Operator participation — a de facto assurance of a market for mobile Linux — should help, but it’s hard not to remain skeptical.
[tags]mobile, linux, mobile linux, docomo, vodafone, motorola, samsung, panasonic, nec, mobile software, mobile OS[/tags]
Taking Russell’s football talk a step further, FIFA and Yahoo have really scored an own goal with their “official” Mobile Matchcast app. On the first day of the tournament, it appeared to be having some teething issues, showing kickoff as 690 days away. That seems to be sorted, with the countdown now showing the time left until the final, but the problems don’t stop there. The application’s taken to rather nastily crashing the Sony Ericsson W810i I’m using (supposedly one of the supported handsets), while on a Nokia 6630, it doesn’t really function at all.
Apart from being mildly annoying, it’s a pretty significant misstep to bungle an application that’s really only useful for a monthlong tournament. One of the big lessons of mobile apps is that things have to work the first time a user tries them — most people don’t have the interest, patience or ability to play with settings, or re-download applications, or keep messing with them. Along similar lines, why is the application still “beta”? When’s it going to full release — in time for the next tournament in 2010?
In other football-related news, Motorola have bagged the services of David Beckham as a spokesperson celebrity endorser-person. It’s good to see he’s got his mind on the World Cup, seeing as he’s, you know, captain of England and all, but this agreement does appear to make a lot of sense. After all, you’ve got two entities seemingly incapable of substantive improvement, instead preferring “fashion”-driven cosmetic changes 
[tags]mobile, motorola, beckham, world cup, razr[/tags]
I had the opportunity to sit down for a chat with Jon von Tetzchner, the CEO of Opera, when he was in Austin last week to speak at Mobile Monday. Jon’s an interesting guy with a lot of insight into the mobile Web, as you might expect. From talking to him, a few things about Opera became fairly clear: they’re big believers in the mobile Internet (duh), and this belief is rooted in the idea that there should be one internet for all types of users, using the same technologies to deliver specialized services to different platforms. The Opera message really seems to be one of simplicity, both for users and content providers.
For users, it’s pretty obvious — an Opera browser allows them to hit the sites their familiar with, at the usual address, “giving people what they want,” as von Tetzchner puts it. He sees no point in creating a mobile site a different, specific address, when users are already used to straightforward ones on the desktop (echoing my earlier comments about .mobi).
For content providers and operators, the theme of simplicity plays out in a few different ways. I’ve written before about how content providers can use Opera Mini to simplify mobile app development, something von Tetzchner was keen to stress. It can reduce the technical barriers to developing a mobile application, allowing designers to basically create a browser to access a standard site instead of having to code a standalone application from scratch. But with products like Opera Platform, the company also wants to extend this simplicity to the rest of the phone, allowing operators or third parties to essentially overtake the UI of a phone and customize it, while providing an environment in which to run internet-based applications. Not just for the sake of branding, but to open mobile development to a wider group of people with skills in standard Web technologies.
This could be particularly attractive to operators, who could create a common UI across their handset portfolio (as with other tools like Flash Lite or Qualcomm’s uiOne). Except the UI becomes more like the Web, where it can be easily changed and updated, and things like AJAX can be used to add new services and applications to it. There’s a lot of operator resistance to the idea that giving users a full HTML browser and turning them loose on the Web is a good idea, but you’d be hard pressed to argue that operators have done a great job at encouraging people to use the mobile web and mobile data services with their more closed strategies.
von Tetzchner is quick to point out that while operators might have to give up something in the short term, empowering users’ net access with a full browser and open service leaves them much more to gain in the long run — though it requires a fundamental change of view. “Instead of trying to lock people in, entice them to stay,” he says. Operators can offer services that make use of a full browser, whether on a subscription basis, or as a tool to fight churn. Directing mobile users out on to the internet doesn’t mean operators are suddenly out of the picture. They can offer different service plans to cater to different needs, as well as utilize existing infrastructure to provide services like third-party content billing.
Much of operators’ approach to the mobile Web has been predicated on a closed strategy, whether by blocking access outright to anything outside the portal, billing for it at ridiculous rates, or setting things up in such a way that they’re a necessary gatekeeper and technical expert for anybody that wants access to their customers. This strategy is outmoded and ill-advised; operators stand to gain far more by opening up, and allowing users to get what they want, and making it easier for content providers to give it to them. von Tetzchner and Opera’s contention is that this is best achieved by using standard web technologies rather than mobile-specific ones, allowing content providers to simply serve mobile users, and allowing those users access to everything they want. “People just want the internet,” he says, “not to look at it through a keyhole.”
(Disclosure: Yes, that’s an Opera banner up there, but they’ve not thrown nearly enough at us to color our opinions of them. We should be so lucky.)
[tags]mobile, mobile web, opera[/tags]
Regular readers of MobHappy will know that back in the dawn of mobile marketing pre-history, I was involved in a venture-backed start-up called ZagMe. We ran a location based marketing service where opt-in users received sms coupons when they went to the mall.
ZagMe failed for reasons extraneous to the business model and success of the service, though there’s no doubt that we were far too early for all kinds of reasons. If you want to find out more, email me using the link on the right and ask for a copy of my White Paper - free, as it’s you.
I mention this because one of the conundrums we faced was coupon delivery. sms is expensive to deliver, which precludes many impulse-based brands from using it. As an example, if you send a message costing 10p to deliver and you get 10% response, you need to sell something with a £1 margin, just to break even. Clearly the stats get worse if response rates are lower.
A further issue we faced that our 85,000 users were double opt-in. They registered as users in the first instance, but then had to sms us when they arrived at the shopping mall. This was partly as better technology simply wasn’t available, but partly as we felt that an automatic trigger would be intrusive. Supposing if you didn’t want to hear from us that day?
As a result, only about 30% of the users went on to use ZagMe more than once, despite rave feedback in focus groups. The fact is that many forgot about us, forgot how to use us, were just too lazy or most likely - ZagMe just wasn’t important enough to be worth the hassle.
So I was very interested to read about Cellfire’s approach to this very similar problem. How do you take the best of push-based marketing, while retaining the user-controlled, non-intrusive nature of pull?
Many people have tried wap-based approaches, but this tends to fail for the same reasons as ZagMe - people forget to use it. So is there a better way?
Cellfire is a couponing service that cleverly uses an application downloaded onto the phone and thus acts as a permanent reminder that the service is there. Users simply fire up the app and can see all the latest offers from Cellfire advertisers.
And as the app is topped up over the air with new offers, the cost of delivery is free, meaning it can be used by many more brands.
Very neat.
Of course, while Cellfire has solved one of the key issues in a mobile marketing channel, many more challenges still need to be faced and conquered. Not the least of these are getting users to sign up, download and install the application in the first place, persuading advertisers to pay them to distribute coupons and getting those advertisers’ staff to know what’s going on when someone wonders into a shop flashing their phone hopefully. However, I feel that the big advantage Cellfire has is that their timing is right and that’ll help them overcome many of the issues they’ll face as a business.
They’ve already signed up some big brands to trial the advertising channel, so it looks like they’re on their way. Definitely one to watch.
As you may have noted, I’m working with AdMob these days and as such, I’m spending a lot of time looking into the mobile web. As a reminder, AdMob is an advertising network, which serves text-based, pay-per-click as on our partners’ websites when they are accessed by a mobile device.
Part of my job is to look for mobile website publishers to work on a revenue share with. Or “can I give you some free money?” is another way of looking at it.
This isn’t a plug for AdMob though (but, yes it’s going very well, thank you!), but I thought you might find it useful if I shared some learnings and observations.
The first surprise about this world is the lack of information. If you want a list of the biggest websites in the world, I can think of 5 free sources off the top of my head. Global and local information is readily available.
Not so with the mobile web - certainly that I have found. I can’t get information globally or locally about any market from the UK, through Europe or in the US. If I’ve missed something obvious, please tell me, but I can’t find out anything.
The second eye-opener is that there’s a parallel universe out there, which seems to bear little or no relation to the computer accessed web. Unless you’re a heavy mobile web user, you simply won’t have heard of some of these big brands. I’m thinking of giants like TagTag and Peperoni.
In fact, of the top 10 mobile website partners at AdMob, I’ve only heard of two - one because it’s a blog (All About Symbian) and the other because I blogged about it ages ago.
While I’m not a huge user of the mobile web - I use it to check stuff like trains and plane times mainly - I am pretty knowledgeable about mobile generally and I found the apparent lack of importance of strong computer-accessed brands a bit of an eye-opener. Of course, with the lack of real data, this could be an assumption on my part. I know that the BBC apparently has a huge mobile web presence, as an example, but I suspect that this is the exception rather than the rule.
I also asked my pals at M:Metrics for some hard data. While they don’t currently offer anything on the top sites, they were able to tell me that 29% of UK adults regularly access the mobile web and even in less mature markets, such as the US, this is still as high as 22%. If you factor in that not all phones can access the mobile web (admittedly, probably not many now) and many can’t as they have the wrong settings, this is a surprisingly high figure.
If you know any big mobile websites, please share with MobHappy readers. If we start getting lots of information, I might try and pull together some stats and ranking system here - a kind of collaborative unofficial ranking. In the meantime, if you’re an analyst reading this, there’s a business opportunity here.
I’ll keep you updated in general terms, as my adventures in this paralell universe continue.
Image from the BBC.
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