Mike Rowehl: This is Mobility

Yesterday was the last day of the free ads on mobile search on Google, and I have to admit I haven’t heard a single peep about the program after the initial launch. I figured it would be a nasty set of issues. It doesn’t seem to have been anything at all. From a practical standpoint I didn’t actually run across too many ads on mobile search that seemed to be transcoded pages meant for desktop use. Cool, guess I was wrong. Or was there other news floating around somewhere that I missed about this?

Reading Michael Mace’s commentary about Android reminded me that I keep forgetting to point out the Clayton Christensen talk from the Open Source Business Convention way back from 2004. Some of the examples from the talk are actually particularly about mobile if I remember correctly (I can’t find the transcript though, and don’t have enough time to even skip through the audio however). Here’s a quick summary though:

Several speakers discussed the “law of conservation of attractive profits.” That is, when a market becomes commoditized, the level above it becomes the attractive market and the level below it “bounces back” a little. Open source driven commoditization of software could lead to several markets becoming significantly more attractive, including those requiring a critical mass of data, users or connections.

There was discussion around what would happen to the handset market when the technology was “good enough” and assembling a handset meant just pulling in some prebuilt pieces and slapping them in. I think the N95 has shown that that’s really the way things have gone, there’s little value now in cramming in additional stuff. The value should be in integrating and making it work, and in letting consumers choose the right tradeoffs between features and constraints.

The direction that Google seems to be taking with respect to developing a common shared platform for mobile devices seems to be headed in that direction. Commoditize the base platform and the value should migrate a level up to mobile services, where they seem to be doing a great job with their mobile search, mobile GMaps, mobile GMail, etc. If that’s the case it’s also pretty interesting that they got their maps application onto the iPhone, cause the theory says that even with the iPhone the value should be in the apps on there and not the base platform itself.

Interestingly enough it’s a direction that also makes a lot of sense out of Nokia Ovi. What if Nokia were secretly worried that their handset business could get undercut by exactly the kind of thing that Google is doing? It would make sense to flip around and concentrate on the services those devices hook up to. Nokia isn’t in the Open Handset Alliance because they want to occupy the same position in that value chain that Google has taken for itself. Which assuming that all goes to plan, should be the real position of power. Give away the operating system for others to build into their products, own the services it hooks into. Everyone furrows their brows when I say this, but the business moguls where talking about it in 2004. This isn’t some insane ranting of an open source bigot here, I’m just repeating what actual respectable business commentators have said.

I saw a post on Marco Casario’s blog about google searches for Chuck Norris. If you type “google Chuck Norris” into the search box and hit the “I’m feeling lucky” button up comes this page styled to look like a google results page for Chuck Norris. Very funny. Would be even slicker if they managed to own the term “Chuck Norris” by itself.

I read things like Halting State and wonder how long it’ll be before some large scale virtual world heist. And then just a little while later I don’t have to wonder any more. The future keeps arriving faster and faster. According to my calculations it should appear blue before it gets here though, need to figure out why that’s not happening.

I spend a big chunk of today at the Under the Radar Mobility conference. It was fantastic. There were a ton of people there who I had never met before, and a bunch of companies that I had never run across. The main meat of the day for me was the section on advertising. The judges for that section were the best of the day I thought, willing to ask hard questions and drive to a conclusion when folks tried to weasel out of giving real answers. Very well done.

I blogged up a bunch of notes from my N800 using WordPy so that I could come back later and clean them up. Apparently that really threw a bunch of people off. But the posts are cleaned up now, if they’ve already passed through your aggregator here they are:

• Hovr
• Transpera
• XOsphere
• Zoove

I also posted a bunch of thoughts and updates to an Under the Radar Jaiku channel so that I would hopefully go back and clean them up into another well formed post. Will I? I might, but at least now they’re up there and public, some residue remains at least. If I need to find out what I was thinking, I can look there. Cause as everyone knows, I’m not going to remember it myself.

Russ made a plugin for Wordpress that redirects mobile browsers to Mowser. He gave me credit for the idea, but I’m pretty sure he’s lying. I don’t remember saying anything of the sort, he’s totally crazy.

However, it is pretty cool, and I installed it here on This is Mobility. I had m.thisismobility.com setup, but this is way hipper.

Zoove site

Their pitch is around “dialable domain names”. Make everything dialable. They plug into carrier networks and hook something up so that when a user dials star-star-something (ie **car) that’s able to hook up to their system. They call it StarStar Dialing.

Their system responds to the “call” with a prerecorded message or I’m assuming an IVR of some type. Would be nice to hook it up to Tellme style services. I assume they allow the call to be passed off just about anywhere. They can then provide WAP pushes, SMS or MMS delivery as well to follow up.

Live with Sprint. China mobile. Solves the shortcode complexity problem. Which is easier, text car to 12345, or dial **car. Dialing **car in all their testing is much easier. They have a few side by side comparisons where users definitely knew how to SMS to shortcodes, and when presented with a StarStar number instead they were much more likely to respond.

All phones are set up for calls, no install required on the phone side. Simple setup for carrier.

One of their revenue models would be selling the StarStar dialing numbers. Interesting way to work around the CSCA, but I thought the CSCA was put in place cause having the power of controlling a namespace shouldn’t be consolidated but the value of a service suffers if there’s fragmentation. I’m surprised carriers are going for it, Zoove must be doing a great job.

He stated what they do as dialable DNS. He mentioned the opportunity to whitelist the IP of a handset and letting the marketer pay for the data charges so that even a user without a data plan can get a WAP push. That really got my attention and made me wonder how baked that function is. I’ve heard a bunch of folks mention that kind of thing before, and it could really make this a killer when it comes to SMS advertising. Send a StarStar code along with SMS adverts, it’s short and it allows straight voice response or follow-up which can be subsidized by the marketer. That’s quite sexy.

Judges say will be limited till it goes cross carrier. Presenter says lots of trials with US carriers came out at CTIA.

Also from the judges. Sending an SMS is getting very popular. Sure its complex, but people know how to do it. Presenter says that companies he’s talked to are willing to try it cause shortcodes aren’t working for them. Judges ask if the problem is complexity or if the problem is that offers aren’t relevant. Presenter says that there are examples where swapping to dialing resulted in much better response. Judges asked if that could just be because of the novelty of the StarStar Dialing however.

XOsphere site

XOsphere is a mobile platform for content distribution. They partner with publishers and agencies. They believe that the branded mobile approach is more important than advertising right now. Branded mobile applications is an area they seem to be paying a lot of attention to.

Lists out the stuff they do: Social networking. Rich content. Transactions. Interactivity.

They’re big believers in virality. Integration with other media is the key. Advertising and marketing outside of mobile.

They choose how to engage with the customer based on handset capabilities. SMS as the simple side through rich application for smartphones. Their concentrate is on reach and making an offering appealing across as many handsets, carriers, and regions as possible. The market is currently very fragmented so it’s hard to deliver a campaign and know that users will see all of it.

When asked by the judges what their overall differentiator is he says it’s reach. The judges think the offering hits too many areas too shallow. They want deep knowledge in one area. “One stop shop for mediocre everything” or something like that is what one of the judges said.

Transpera site

Transpera allows content providers and user to create channels and provides monetization through advertising and subscriptions. The presenter thinks mobile video is poised to take off. Someone needs to tell him its not. I have just completely top to bottom become unconvinced that all of the existing land grabs for mobile video are going nowhere.

The Transpera offering provides community features, targeted delivery, user to user sharing, persomal playlists, and ratings. They provide APIs that allow for using the features like sharing and rating, that could be interesting.

A lot of focus is on context relevant targeting. Using metadata from the video (I wonder what metadata from the video, if they mean just group behavior analysis or if they pull in additional info from content providers). Advertising is done via server side insertion.

They’re a firm believer in the power of user programming. Users decide what they want to watch, when, where, and with whom they would like to share media. Different users get different ads.

Their main target audience is publishers, but they work with carriers. They have lots of ex Third Screen Media folks on the team.

When asked by the judges “what kind of big mobile video publishers are you targeting” ESPN is his example. Hard to find other concrete examples. Presenter says market is fragmenting on the video provider side. Video sites are growing - they have more views and more users than they did last year. But the overall market is growing faster, so relative share per site is shrinking. Their push is to combat that fragmentation.

Hovr site

Hovr provides free mobile games hooked into a social platform that lets people communicate about and through the apps. They provide functions like creating profiles, avatars, recommendations, and competing for high scores. Sounds very much like the XBox Live set of functions, for free. What’s not to like about that?

Distribution is direct and through partners. Advertising is embedded in the games, in both “pre-roll” and “post-roll” styles, not between levels or during inserted pauses or anything.

Ad Logic is the name they use for the ad platform itself. Information from the social parts of the service are fed into the ad platform to provide extra information for targeting.

Social aspects drive adoption and use of the free games, which ends up being very viral. Not just in terms of new users, but things like competing for high scores really drive usage per user as well.

They’ve seen great growth, huge page view numbers. Audience seems to be really engaged - they’ve seen 8 percent CTR for some campaigns.

Drive users with free games. Engage with social networking. Monetize using the info gathered, and they provide info to advertisers and ad networks.

Judges asked questions about Greystripe and competion. Answer was that lockin is the social part, competition for high scores, building your profile and buddy list, not the games themselves. Question about the metrics used to measure that. Answer is the number of referrals sent through the system, number of high scores posted, which seem to indicate that the user base is growing well and keeping engaged.

300k users, about 25 to 30 percent are regular players. All users must register, and Hovr mines those inactive users to see if they find ways to get them to engage.

They feel they are able to really charge a premium because of the information they have.