IT DOESN’T HAVE TO BE THIS WAY

Aner’s insights from MEM2007 zoom in on the transitional phase the mobile industry is going through. The company I co-founded (TriPlay) recently launched an internet-mobile service (SyncSpace) with an Israeli operator and if there was one highlight to this whole process is that “westbound” mobile operators are sailing in uncharted territory. Here are a few key points I learned that highlight some challenges I came across (far from the complete list which could fill a book):

1. Target audience - there is no doubt that the market leaders on the demand side for web-mobile service are young people (ages 15-25 and we know that even 15 might not be young enough). They breath mobile services, consume content and eat up data services like no other target group. How is this a problem? Because WE - the mobile/internet start-up’ists, the VC partner, executives at large corporates, ALL of us who define, create, build and fund related companies and services are at least twice that age.

How can we be sure we are creating the right service?

Solution - Talk , talk, talk to them, get feedback, have them involved in your development process. Don’t force your vision on them and expect them to comply. If you don’t expect to find out at launch that you are simply not cool enough, that you have given them far too little credit and that you don’t really cater to their need.

About a year ago I read through a fascinating 200 pages research paper focusing on mobile youth. The ONE sentence I still remember a year later is that “Messaging services that fail to reinforce peer groups offer little beyond their initial novelty value to youth“. This is true for any service - there is tendency to seek technological breakthrough with less thought invested in the real life scenarios it supposed to serve. Bottom line - focus on value first, technology second.

2. Mobile operator corporate culture - analyze the typical headcount at any mobile operator and you will find that most are experienced MOBILE professionals who know a lot about mobile but less about web services, content and entertainment. Yesterday’s mission for the mobile was to ‘connect people’ by voice. Today’s Mission is about connection, voice or data and content. Tomorrow - the mobile will be an ‘IP gateway’ through which the users ‘mobile life’ will be enabled. Where mobility is the focus and not the mobile device.

The mobile device will be the users’ setop-box, entertainment and multimedia device as well as the voice/data communicator. These offerings are not only technologically diversified across platforms but also combine different schools of thought on how to launch new services. The words BETA, rapid development, on the fly, viral and other funky web 2.0ish words contradict mobile operator’s mentality. I don’t believe they need to change their skin but some of the attributes that go hand in hand with creating successful businesses in the web and entertainment industries will have to meld into their corporate culture.

Since this is not an overnight revolution, I expect this to be solved over time. Some interesting times ahead for management, HR units in the mobile operator world as well as their supporting industries. Service providers too will have to go through this metamorphoses. One that will reflect the new role the mobile device has in the future world.

3. beta? Don’t be surprised if you get this reaction. Telco’s are not used to running beta, not to mention the famous Google’s “perpetual beta” mode. Beta mean you are tolerant to bugs, open to user feedback and ready to change requirements if the market says you should. Telco’s heritage is simply different. The good old ‘telco grade’ means that when you pick up the phone (old fixed line phone) you hear a dialing tone - no ifs and buts. Web 2.0 user services launch way before they are fully tested for mass market usage. By definition they are not built for scalability and reliability from day one. They launch in beta, make mistakes, learn, fix and invest in scalability when the market demand forces them do so. When the ‘worlds collide’ this will have to change.

Mobile operators launching web-mobile services will not be able to apply this ‘telco grade’ mentality from day one. If they do they will always lag with services and not be perceived by their users as providing them with ‘edgy’ services. If users find their telco is introducing web- mobile services months and even years after independent players do they will find that the leading target users are already engaged with a different ‘off-deck’ solution. Scalability will not be an issue then since no users will use them to begin with.

Nonetheless they don’t have to be complete 37signals’ type cavaliers and mange their projects on IM chats, no meetings and launch. Somewhere in the middle would do.

4. The handset factor - most of the PC’s in the world are about the same, same OS (windows), same browser (Firefox/Explorer), same keyboard, strong memory, big screen, sit on one network - the PC internet is WWW etc etc. In the mobile world the ball game is totally different. A highly diverse OS environment - J2ME, Symbian, Brew, Windows; Countless different browsers, different screen size, open garden / closed garden (E.G Verizon) etc etc. Therefore creating a smooth, unified, simple, reliable and more important PREDICTABLE mobile experience is a mammoth task. Solution - focus on your initial target audience - what OS are they on? what devices serve them, what are the future devices - don’t try to capture all at once. Define an acceptable experience, aim for the core and spread.

On a more macro level ‘the industry’ better get its act together and start to pin point preferred OS’s, browsers etc. and not let this jungle take over. There is no doubt that when the environment will be more standard, a plethora of new services will evolve.
5. AJAX (Web 2.0) meets WML / XHTML (Mobile 0.5 ) - not a problem! The mobile and PC web experiences are not meant to be the same. Stop raping the mobile phone with overly rich ‘web like experience’. On the mobile it is highly important to focus on simple and fast flows so not having the rich PC environment is not as big disadvantage as you think. A good and simple WAP page, can provide the required experience. In any case just like I mentioned above - focus on value (and now I am adding..) usability first and technology second. All in all exciting times are ahead. The paradigm shift I am seeing is that the mobile device will be my ‘handy’ extension to my mobile life…which can be used and enjoyed on the mobile device but has extensions on the PC and TV as well. As such, when designing such services one needs to think of the three dimensional ‘fused’ world we live in, serving real life / valuable scenarios and NOT focus on connecting two or three technological dots.

      

I spent the week in Monaco at MEM2007. From the personal perspective it was a very exciting show, after all, first time HOOQs was on display. From that perspective we had an excellent show - great feedback and lots of users and leads. We have work cut out for us, but the good news is that the market is HOT! The need for personalized, open, operator independent web to mobile services is all over the place and is welcomed by users, operators, content providers, analysts and bloggers.

MEM2007 is not really a classic exhibition, it’s more of a conference. Participation is nearly exclusive to industry insiders and the tracks, therefore, are very professional. To a start-up-ist, these represent rare opportunities to take a 30,000 feet view and collect some insights that extend beyond the daily challenges. My own personal climax was not a single industry lecture or panel, even though all were very interesting at their own merit. To me, the most insightful session was a focus group with 10 different teenagers. These young adults were gathered from different countries - Australia, England, France, Italy, Finland, Germany - and were all surveyed about their digital lives. Here is some of what they told us:

1. The key elements teenagers look for in their mobile phones is appearance. Then come ability to play music, quality of camera and feature richness. 

2. Nokia is the most popular handset brand. Out of the 10 participants, 5 had Nokias, 2 had Samsungs, 2 had LGs (Chocolate) and 1 had a Sony Ericsson. 7 out of 10 devices were 3G.

3. They don’t do mobile clients - only 1 participant ever downloaded a mobile application. A game. Used it a couple of times and ditched it.

4. Teenagers are smart shoppers. They don’t mind paying for Internet content, but hate buying stuff they can easily find for free. In other words, they will not buy songs for 3 Euros a pop. Contrary to popular belief, they buy a lot of CDs in addition to downloading free music. They know how to manage their music collection and how to get their favorite music on their mobile device.

5. On they other hand, all participants testified they would gladly buy new content if only they could find it easily. All participants agreed that the mobile operator portals are close to impossible to navigate through.

6. On top, the differences between operators and handsets make it impossible for users to share experiences. Not tracks or clips - pure information about where and how to find them!

7. They things they on their handsets are better Internet browsing and memory. They really don’t get why MP3 and Video enabled phones come with such little memory.

8. They don’t mind advertising if it makes content free. They are already used to online ant TV advertising, why object to mobile ads?

9. They all tried Google on their mobile and didn’t like it. The mobile experience does not provide anything close to the internet experience.

10. They don’t do MMS. All of them tried and all of them claim that “it doesn’t work”.

11. If they had to give up their TV, Mobile Phone or PC, 9 out of 10 would give up their TV (the only other answer was PC). None would let go of their mobile phone.

These young adults were not screaming in a vacuum. It was great to hear executives from operators presenting plans to further breakdown their walled gardens and push flat data rates. It seems like it’s only a question of price points now. This is music to the ears of user centric service providers. To me, however, getting the bartenders in front of our booth excited and HooQed was most rewarding than anything!

      

My day job has become my all-around-the-day job lately as you can tell from the lack of recent writing.  Well, the reason why is now out in beta!

HooQs is a user centric web to mobile service. You can search, create, save and share internet media with mobile phones.  Your personal media is aggregated in channels which we call HooQs. HooQs can be saved, managed, sent to mobile phones around the world and of course, enjoyed. Registration is optional, however as a user you get your own internet rich media portal tailored to your own personal taste.

Since the whole idea is to get personal, my own favorite HooQs at the moment are Paris Hilton in Jail, Vintage TV Commercials, Best of Monty Python and Computer Game Nostalgia.  My full HooQ board can be found here.

So get HooQed but be gentle, Beta means Beta! We do promise to do our best to continuously improve and personally I would more than welcome your feedback and comments! 

HooQs is best used on a 3G phone.

      

CTIA fueled some significant mobile news this week as Google, Nokia and Yahoo are about to crash helmets over the next mobile killer app.

Google has made a couple of significant steps this week. The more significant announcement came on Monday, as a strategic deal with LG was announced. Mike Evant reports that Google and LG will preinstall Google Maps, Gmail and Blogger on a wide variety of LG phones, making it a no brainer for carriers to ship and for users to try.

In addition, YouTube will be launching a mobile site as soon as the exclusivity period with Verizon Wireless expires. Unlike the Verizon version which is client based, the mobile YouTube will be WAP based. It will be interesting to see how YouTube deals with video streaming issues across different carriers, networks and devices. All in all a “two punch strategy”, Google for text and YouTube for video, could end up being very effective.

Nokia has not kept quiet. Unwired view is telling us about Nokia’s patent bound semantic visual search engine, screen shots and further explanation of the search process is provided. Katie Fehrenbacher speculates about the natural synergy with Nokia’s camera phones and if half the rumors are true, Google will soon have to go back to protecting home turf, at least when it comes to search innovation.

Yahoo has not kept silent and may very well be making the most concrete steps to date. The introduction of Mobile OneSearch is a promising mass market step, taking search to every internet enabled phone. Yahoo already offers Yahoo Go, the full blown Yahoo experience, to the high end, and together with OneSearch a comprehensive strategy seems to be forming. 

These seemingly little steps are very significant for a number of reasons. Such proactive steps by handset manufacturers and web titans take the carriers further out of the “next killer app” equation. In addition, these provide indication that search, rich content discovery and messaging are the areas where the leading players look for the next killer app. Search has never been carrier territory and carriers have struggled with putting together winning propositions around content. On the other hand carriers do make a lot of money from content and tons of money from messaging. The battle over who owns what asset is definitely not over, but this time, I believe, the space is mature enough to focus on the criteria for splitting the larger pie rather than fighting over who gets to burn it.

      

GigaOM reports that Symbian is about to announce a significant upgrade to its operating system on Monday at CTIA. According to ABI Research, Symbian held a commanding 73% market share of the loosely defined Smart-phone market in 2006, resulting in about 50 Million shipments. 

Improvements include battery and memory management, camera and multimedia enhancements and the introduction of transparent and automatic roaming between WiFi and 3G. MobHappy brings the full details.

The upgrade is very significant for a number of reasons. Symbian is reaching out of the Smartphone niche. The multimedia boost, for example, is clearly a consumer focus. Push email and Voip are communication apps and not “business apps” anymore. Symbian is slowly but surely building an attractive and real consumer position, realizing that the higher end market would pay a little more for high quality feature phone.

The introduction of transparent WiFi - 3G roaming is even more significant. While full handset OEM support is needed, this has the potential of making operator independent mobile internet actually usable. Very few users actually bother with switching networks on an ongoing basis. Making the switch automatic would not only reduce costs for the end user, it would also break a wide open hole in the walled garden. And this does not only apply to browsing but to the very core - phone calls. Now, I don’t see Mobile VOIP going mainstream very soon, but I definitely see a gradual uptake, mostly by the cream of the crop from an operator point of view - the travelling professionals.  

How will Operators deal with this? Good question. So far everybody’s happy with the containment of Symbian devices as “Smartphones”. It makes it easy for everyone to avoid a clash. Some operators force vendors to take off the WiFi feature for now (Cingular and Nokia E62 for example). Some put a more constructive focus on upgrading their 3G networks. In any case, it’s all a prelude to the unavoidable reshuffle of the mobile universe.