Retro SMS

November 30, 2007 at 5:02 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Mobile Advertising

There has been a lot of good postings on the future of Messaging in the last couple of weeks. I want to thank my fellow bloggers on their insightful views and for sharing their opinions. As well as those readers that posted their comments onto this blog.

I believe it is in our nature to always look beyond what we have today; next year’s model is always better than last year’s; to never stand still, to look to the next big thing, to explore space and dimensions outside of our current understanding and our current reach. We feel the need to excel beyond our parents’ achievements, and a competitive need to excel with each other. Similarly we look to our services, which we use daily, and expect our services to evolve from their current capability and provide us with bells and whistles that would improve their usage and thereby improving our lifestyle.

Analysts, for years, have attempted to forecast the day of peak messaging revenue. To date that day has not come and but we see evidence of double and triple digit growth. The latest number from the Mobile Data Association in UK have reported another defining moment of 1 Billion text messages in week. Across the pond in my backyard the CTIA, have reported a growth rate of 127% from last year to this year in text messaging. North America is currently delivering 1 Billion text messages a day! So what is the defining day of max revenue? When should operators begin to worry? And as my kids ask me on those long car trips: Are we there yet?

Operators have provided MIM as a service offering for more than three years now. And in my previous post I stated my position on MIM. Ovum is imploring operators to look at a new type of service offering that can inject new messaging revenues into SMS. The article may lead you to believe that MIM will make up the shortage of falling messaging revenue. Again, as early evidence indicates MIM is providing an enhanced user experience, and not at the expense of SMS. Is MIM too far too fast for most subscribers to grasp? Answering my own question, the answer in my honest belief is it’s not too far. However handset capability and ubiquity on all handsets does limit MIM as a pervasive messaging utility.

One would not have to extend their network infrastructure too far to augment the SMS revenue stream, but to look at Mobile Messaging 2.0 architecture to provide the relief. By taking the Open Standards and Open Interface approach, adding and inserting additional capabilities and features into the network allows for an easy augmentation of the service and therefore more importantly providing for a needed bump in revenue. The Mobile Messaging 2.0 architecture as it is defined allows for simple features to be added such as Personal Services whereby subscribers are provided a feature set similar to email; such as messaging forwarding and archiving. The MM2.0 architecture allows for operators to entertain alternative business models such as enabling mobile advertising into the person-to-person text and picture message flows (similarly to how MSN, Yahoo, and Google advertise with free email and more importantly generate revenue). The Mobile Marketing Association is one of many driving thrusts helping to drive a definition for advertising in the mobile services arena.

Evolving may mean going back to a previously visited version of what you may have had. At times a good idea from the past, in the form of a design, surprising had an appeal that did not capture the audience of today. The fashion and automotive industry are a couple of industries that are recycling thru old ideas and designs of the past. In fashion we have seen the 1970 bell bottoms recycled / refreshed into this generations “flares. In the automotive industry Ford and BMW have restyled their much sought after Mustang and Mini of the 60’s and has reinvigorated interest in youth rodding and nostalgic cruising. My favourite model being the 69 Mustang Mach1 of which I am a proud owner. The market calls this “retro”. Maybe SMS, with the addition of Personal and with Ad-Inserted capabilities is the bell-bottom from 15 years ago, but with a twist, and we have just defined “retro-SMS”! I like to think of this augmentation as Retro Revenue!

Please tell me how you would like to retro your SMS!

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Airwide Solutions

The Latest Mobile Acquisition…

November 28, 2007 at 2:10 pm · Filed under Mobile Tech, Sponsored Post, Acquisitions/Mergers

If you’re tracking the mobile industry as closely as we do, you’ve likely seen a bunch of interesting posts about acquisitions whirling around the blogosphere lately: Mike Arrington on ATT/Ingenio, Jemima Kiss on Google/Skype rumors, Brian White on Qualcomm/Firethorn, Andrew Schrock on Nokia/Enpocket, and Darren Murph on Microsoft/Musiwave. And that’s just for November!

Well, we’re excited to announce our own acquisition, of First Hop. They make mobile service control and gateway technology for mobile operators, which fits in nicely with our own suite of mobile messaging infrastructure. Adding functionality like context, personalization and profiling to our existing offerings will help our carrier clients launch new messaging services even more quickly and easily.

First Hop is a Finnish company — Finland has amazing mobile technology thanks to Nokia — which was founded in 1997 and has clients such as Vodafone, T-Mobile, and Telefónica.

For more details, see our press release.

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Airwide Solutions

Dark side of the moon?

November 14, 2007 at 1:21 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS

The sixth track on Pink Floyd’s Darks Side of the Moon album is entitled “Money”.

Money drives economies, money drives purchasing decisions, and as Pink Floyd stated: “Grab the cash with both hands and make a stash”. CNN recently reported on text messaging charges, and adjustment on pricing (increasing), that has taken place, over the past year. Highlights of the CNN report highlights how North American operators have raised the price of SMS messaging from what used to be 10 cents per message to 15 cents per message, as well as charging a premium to the message if the consumer is messaging to a foreign number (more than likely to maintain their margin of the message that need to make on the basic message). That would equate to roughly 1 cent for every 8 to 10 characters (depending if the operator is CDMA or GSM). Operators are set to rake in $52 Billion worth of text messaging revenues in the U.S. this year.

We have seen over time how the consumer products industry have shrunk the size of products that we have purchased while maintaining their price points to maintain healthy margins. Toothpaste is just one whereby a tube, 250ml, was at a price point of 99 cents 20 years ago is currently still 99 cents but for a 125ml. The packaging looks almost the same; just half the size.

Could the mobile operators price text messaging comparatively? If I sent a text message “BRT”, meaning “Be Right There” since I used less than half of 160 characters that I am charged appropriately. Maybe I’m charged 3 cents for the message, still a healthy margin, since I’m only using 3 characters from the available 160 (120 in CDMA) characters.

From the astounding revenue figure this year alone, I think Pink Floyd had it right from the thinking of the operator: “Share it fairly but don’t take a slice of my pie”!

What are you thoughts?

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Airwide Solutions

MIM’s the word? Consumers want simple integrated messaging

October 8, 2007 at 3:53 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, Mobile Applications

Last month we had a great two-part post “Is Text Messaging Terminal?” (part 1; part 2). I would like to thank Paul Ruppert on his market view points on how innovative services have tried to reinvent the mistake that SMS has created.

MM2.0 is about addressing the market with a different set of components. The components provide the operational and capital savings to offset the continued growth of text messaging. MM2.0 also creates architecture for reusability between all the messaging value-added services, providing an architecture whereby the next messaging application can in fact reuse the services and functionality of the other. Lastly, not to forget the subscriber, it is about giving a level of control to the user, providing you and me the ability to personalize and define our messaging services.

As we look at text messaging forecasts, Portio’s latest numbers reset the market expectations in a continued positive growth beyond 2010. As Ruppert stated, Mobile Email did not eat into SMS, “VoiceSMS” (another marketing term for cheap voicemail) also didn’t take away from SMS. Will Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM) complement or detract from the growth? Do subscribers care about Mobile Instant messaging? My latest personal research seems to indicate that subscribers that use MIM are also subscribers that text.

The pundits of texting have been hyping the rise of IM and the death of text for many years now. I haven’t seen a market anywhere yet whereby MIM has greater than 2% saturation rate. Even if MIM were to double year over year for the next five years MIM will still be less than 40% of the market and referring back to current user behavior, texting and IM do not currently negatively affect each other. I would be curious to understand take-up rates of other modality services such as “VoiceSMS.”

To be clear, I am a fan of MIM. Four years ago I was given an early prototype of the Sidekick, the Danger device, which I most proudly carried with me everywhere I went flashing it in front of mobile operators and the like. I texted like a banshee, but more importantly I was also using MIM and using quite of a lot of data around on an “all you can eat” data plan. My IM group was desktop IM subscribers and the recipients of my texts were of course mobile. The Danger at that time had a separate client user agent, and to this day still does have such a super agent because their operating system has the capability to multi-thread and multi-task well. The Danger device sadly met its fate when I clumsily dropped that first prototype on its head while engaged (open) effectively decapitating the unit. The Danger device remains one of the many devices that I have owned that has left me with a positive experience.

Today one of the devices I carry also has the ability to IM via GoogleTalk and MSN, and in retrospect I note that I still follow the defined behavior of IM and texting as I did four years ago. I have matured, but my communication profile has not yet and maybe it will take the next generation to define a different use case than mine.

Can the current lack of MIM usage and penetration be fixed with a more integrated approach to messaging that would include SMS delivery? As we noted earlier MM2.0 gives control to the user to define their messaging needs: how they want, when they want, where they want their messages to be delivered. Relevance of how to deliver the message based on the several differing aspects. Can an integrated MIM and SMS network environment tied to relevance create an environment whereby ignorance to network delivery is bliss? Do users care?

Put simply, users want to communicate with each other and they want to do that as easily as possible. Currently my communication mechanism requires that I know more than just your first and last name, but potentially a mobile number, email address, IM handle, skype ID, and soon to be released other addressing schemes that are brewing in standards bodies. On all the above my form of communication is via the written word, voice (encoded attachments), or a richer form whereby I can communicate via pictures. To send a voice note, I am limited to how I can communicate. If the message is written I am also further complicated by several addressing mechanisms that I just identified above.

Again do users care? Just to state my position: I care, I love technology tied with simplicity. We have the technology covered; we need to work on simplification by unifying the user experience a la Mobile Messaging 2.0.

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Airwide Solutions

A Big-Bang?

June 21, 2007 at 2:48 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0

Part of my job requires looking at the signals in the mobile messaging market from all angles. Some of which includes; analyzing emerging business models, understanding the consumer usability aspect of our business, keeping an ear to the ground on the differing regional telecommunications policies that may have an impact on our customers, and learning from the findings of our Advanced Development Group. I am privileged in my position that I can ask the question: Why? Why does that business model work or not work? Why does text messaging take off in one region vs. another? Why does the industry develop closed systems?

All of these signals at some point in time collide to create a phenomenon not equal to the big-bang but enough to alter the current market conditions and affect the status-quo of what we do. Companies that are able to decipher these signals and define the appropriate solution are the ones that will be successful in evolving market conditions.

Mobile Messaging 2.0 is just such a collision:

• Operators struggle with the duplication of service infrastructure;
• Consumers struggle with a poor user experience for anything other than text messaging;
• Content providers want web-like capabilities from their interactions with operators;
• And governments start to mandate that operators provide more forms of control and subscriber protection.

From recent forums that I have attended and operators that I’ve spoken to, I’ve heard complaints of value-added services stage fright. In other words, many services have been greatly anticipated for their potential to replicate the $60B SMS market phenomenon, but as yet all have failed to deliver. MMS is one such service, and we have lived through its growing pains, starting with the first deployments back in 2001. From some of the more recent market data we see that strongest market for MMS is the last market that deployed the service - North America.. Did the early adopters jump before we could swim? My expectation is that the early adopters with lackluster growth will relaunch MMS for mobile advertising or another application ensuring the problems of yesterday are addressed. The penetration of capable devices, inter-working between networks and devices, and usability improvements have all helped to allow MMS to succeed in the North American market place.

Mobile Instant Messaging (MIM), another much-hyped service 4 years ago is also at a serious crossroad. Operators raced to install Personal IM solutions to only reposition their offering as direct connect services to the big IM providers. Fear of subscriber retention and ownership played a major role in the decision to blaze down a Personal IM solution. Even with the direct IM connections subscriber penetration for MIM barely reaches 1% for operators that have deployed it. To add to the problem, consumers face a daunting usability problem because MIM and other forms of messaging do not inter-operate.

It is unfortunate that the requirements for Mobile Messaging 2.0 did not exist prior to the efforts of 3GPP to define standards for MMS. It’s also equally unfortunate MM2.0 did not exist prior to the wireless village standardization of Mobile Instant Messaging. In fact it was the frustrations with vendor-driven new technologies that led to the emergence of Mobile Messaging 2.0 as a practical ‘cookbook’ for deploying next generation mobile networks.

However it is fortunate that:

• SMS still continues its strong traffic and revenue growth, providing new methods for the operator to grow their capacity.
• MMS continues its growth requiring the 2nd generation MMS architectures to augment or replace current networks
• MIM for all that I like from a usability perspective, it is fortunate that we have learned that direct connect MIM as a starter pack is the best service offering.

The above signals provide the operator with an opportunity to start the deployment of a Mobile Messaging 2.0 framework from either one of the mobile messaging silo architectures.

As I said earlier this is not a Big-Bang, but is far more than a gradual evolution. All of the above factors mentioned previously are producing dramatic changes in the Mobile Messaging status quo.

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