Global Mobile Messaging 2007
by Debi Jones
The Global Mobile Messaging (GMM) conference was collocated with Mobile Entertainment Market (MEM) at the Grimaldi Forum in Monte Carlo, Monaco on June 5th and 6th.
The Global aspect of GMM was left wanting. The conference was decidedly focused on the European market and it’s concerns which isn’t surprising given the conference location and it’s organizer, Informa. A couple of speakers from the US were present and one from Korea, but the agenda and panels speaker selections showed a strong emphasis on European operators. Notably absent were any operator participants from Japan, China, South America, Canada, Eastern Europe, and the Middle East. That is, if you call a conference global one would expect more global representation.
With two conferences occurring simultaneously it was very difficult to select sessions for attendance. For example, the mobile communities track from MEM ran concurrently with the IM track from GMM. This is often a painful choice during content rich conferences and MEM + GMM was no exception. It’s odd to me that mobile communities were placed in the MEM agenda rather than GMM, but I’ll have a podcast or two as a conference supplemental to address this omission.
There were three dominant themes emerging at GMM.
- Mobile IM is the next application focus for European operators.
- SMS interworking efficiencies via distributed architecture (i.e., hubbing)
- Integration of messaging modalities
Mobile IM
Mmetrics recently reported a dramatic increase in use of IM for the month of March in the UK while IM use is falling across the rest of Western Europe. The US still leads in use of IM over Europe with 13.7 million subscribers which larger than France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the UK combined.
To Connect Or Not To Connect…
Operators from Portugal, Beligum and Turkey commented on their struggles to select operator branded Personal IM solutions over direct connections to MSN, AOL and Yahoo! Paulo Simoes of TMN, Portugal, commented that business deals and terms with “The Big Three” were draconian. For me, that was the money quote for GMM Day One. All content and application providers will appreciate the irony.
All Your Contacts are Belong to Us
Another battle ground is who provides or owns the contact list. A direct connection to MSN, AOL and Yahoo! means that these companies maintain their siloed versions of your contact list. The operators contend that the logical contact list is the phone address book, an another silo. Of course, both are correct and what would make sense is contact list integration. No one spoke on this option, though.
The one who pays has the say?
Matt Champlain, MSN USA, spoke in his session about the contact list as “the” social contruct through which messaging will naturally occur. He, also, emphasized the user experience and explained that monetization is something that would be determined only after the best user experience was achieved. It’s unclear to me if the lack of revenue model discussion was sincere or a protection against competition, but a logical monetization option would be premium service via IM bots. Perhaps as suggested by Vince Kadar during our podcast that IM bots could be tied to PSMS for billing.
SMS Hubbing
The elimination of bilateral interconnect agreements between operators through distributed architecture via SMS Hubs was a major discussion topic at the conference along with exhibits from all of the SMSC providers tauting the new capability. For those more accustomed to the ground-up distributed nature of the web, this development is likely to only produce yawns. However, the transport and interconnection of SMS and SMSCs across operator and national boundaries has been a source of frustration for all in the mobile ecosystem.
Integration of messaging modalities
Exhibitors and presenters like Shozu and SpinVox brought a bit more life to the discussion of mobile messaging showing off their picture/video and voice-to-text messaging solutions. Shozu operates on a technology not covered at the conference, syndication. Given it’s absence from the agenda, are we to surmise that operators don’t care about RSS, Atom and related technologies, especially as they apply to mobile messaging?
Readers of this blog and listeners to it’s podcasts will already be familiar with SpinVox. See Oliver’s detailed post on SpinVox and my interview with Philip Marnick, CTO SpinVox.
