Orange, Europe’s third largest mobile network operator, held their inaugural Orange Mixr event this week in San Francisco. The event provided a combination of wine tasting reception and topical discussion. Attendees were invited by Orange Labs to engage on the topic and with one another. The topic, “The Death of Email?” is apropos given MM2’s focus this week on The Future of Mobile Messaging.

INTRODUCTION

The program began with an introduction of Orange Labs and describing the rise of SMS: “two-thirds of a trillion messages will be sent this year.” The indictments against E-mail were the typical: “outlook is limited,” “what about spam?,” and “kids use text messaging.” These complaints came from the executives of companies that provide SMS solutions. Of course, the issues of SMS spam and scams were ignored.

Another issue with the discussion was that only Outlook was discussed as a mail client. This created a cognitive dissonance persistent throughout the program. Outlook which is primarily an enterprise entrapment is weak in it’s consistent and constant communication capability when compared to Gmail. Gmail’s integration with Gtalk delivers presence along with a chat function into the E-mail experience. Presence is a linchpin feature for always-connected bursty communication. Within Gmail, one knows if their contacts are on line, their presence state and have the flexibility to choose immediate contact through chat or time-independent contact through E-mail.

A PARTIAL STORY

There was much made of the increased usage of SMS and the decreased usage of E-mail along with loosely coupled statistics on the transport mechanism preferences of teenagers. While perhaps a contrarian point of view, conclusions based upon vague and broad level data points leave too many questions hanging in the air. SMS isn’t solely a mechanism of person-to-person (P2P) communication. It is used for alerts, notifications, reminders, confirmations, marketing, advertisements, search results, directory information results, WAP push delivery, billing (PSMS) and etc. With so many uses, flat rate message tariffs and budding mobile marketing usage, one must expect ever increasing use of text messaging. And more salient, perhaps, is that we’ve yet to study the messaging habits of these youth texters once they’ve joined the adult population in professions and corporate environments. The variation in communication style and requirements for a 17 year-old cheerleader compared to a 28 year-old corporate attorney might include some shifts in messaging use and transport choice.

There are other pressures on email as the preferred communication transport including: dropping voice tariffs, the rise of picture and video messaging, and other behavioral shifts. One trend in behavioral shift is the use of the “missed call” notification. In an effort to be efficient, many subscribers have opted for returning calls listed in their missed call history list, rather than listen to voicemails. And subsequently, many have opted to refrain from leaving voicemails or sending email as the act of caller id delivery through simply placing a call is sufficient to notify someone that you’ve requested communication with them. And finally, email has been cyber-shifted by social networking services.

WHEN EMAIL IS NOT EMAIL

MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and all social networking services provide an E-mail message feature. These are often referred to as private messages which are saved for retrieval on the SNS website, and include, ironically, a notification sent to the user’s email address. The behavior of sending private messages is no different than the behavior of sending email. The distinction is, instead, a function of transport and storage. SNS stores messages in a database for retrieval on a website, while email stores messages in a “message store” for retrieval through either an email client or a website. So, ultimately, the distinction lies in UI.

Unfortunately, these issues weren’t addressed or even discussed at the event. Those who were solicited to comment on the demise of email, while somewhat balanced on opinion of a yes or no argument, represented mobile application developers. For example, Adam Smith from Xobni was invited to comment first, and Jason Goldman from Twitter was also invited to comment. Can you predict which side of the argument these participants chose? Of course, it was predictable.

What was less predictable was the commentary on the economics of providing SMS-based services. Namely, the absence of an easy way for young companies to share in the revenue they create by driving additional message traffic through the mobile operator’s network. There were additional complaints about the high price burden placed on small companies who must pay aggregrators and/or operators for the messages sent by their users, while they build a user base, and experiment with business models.

Orange representatives displayed disciplined restraint during this period of the discussion by remaining quiet and listening. No attempts were made to move the discussion away from these criticisms. Of course, the conflict is aptly described in the opening statements of this discussion describing the volume of text messaging traffic. What startup can generate enough messaging traffic to gain the mobile operator’s attention against billions of messages?

EVENT IMPRESSIONS

Obivously, the event was not short on content. Attendance was robust with roughly 50 people representing startup application development companies, a large company or two, indy technology press, analysts and corporate press. Any inaugural event has it’s challenges and the Orange Mixr wasn’t perfect, but it offered an interesting and occasionally spirited discussion along with excellent networking through a mix of attendees (a tad too Silicon Valley centric) and some lovely wine and appetizers. I’m eager to see where Orange Labs takes the Mixr concept and kudos to our hosts for this first effort.