Airwide news from CTIA

April 1, 2008 at 3:48 pm · Filed under Sponsored Post, Airwide

We wanted to let MM2 readers know about news we’re excited to be announcing at CTIA, where we and many of the contributors to the blog are this week.

The news: that we’re releasing version 5.0 of our award-winning AirGate product, an advanced application and traffic management platform for rapid delivery of third-party applications and value-added services across multiple delivery channels – SMS, MMS, WAP and the Web.

Over to the press release for more…

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Roundtable discussion at the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona

February 29, 2008 at 6:17 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, SMS, Sponsored Post, Messaging

At the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, Airwide convened a roundtable designed to forecast the future of mobile messaging. The roundtable and Airwide’s accompanying report revealed that:

• Asia continues to demonstrate the strongest overall growth opportunity. However, ARPU remains low as does the per-minute cost of calls and services, leaving operators in a quandary over where to concentrate their efforts in terms of customer base.
• Mobile spam has been identified as a hot issue in China and will continue as such over the next five years. Similarly the threat of mobile viruses also looks set to increase.
• The Middle East illustrates the greatest potential for growth of emerging services such as mobile IM, email, videoconferencing and MMS.
• Europe sees mobile email, mobile music and MMS more ingrained services than many places in the world and there is growing confidence amongst operators that these services can provide a steady and sustained growth in revenues.
• In the United Kingdom, accelerated growth is expected in mobile versions of applications that are already firmly established. Mobile email is expected to double its share of the total market over the next five years.

Present at the roundtable were me, the CMO of Airwide Solutions; Mike Short, Chairman of the MDA and VP of Research and Development at O2; Andrew Bud, Vice Chair of the Mobile Entertainment Forum and Executive Chairman of mBlox; John Darnbrough, Market Development Manager at the GSMA; Graham Rivers, CEO of WIN; Mark Newman, Chief Research Officer of Informa; Michele Scanlon, Founder of Green Giraffe Consulting and Paul Ruppert, Founder, Global Point View Ltd and contributor to industry blog, Mobile Messaging 2.0.

The roundtable sparked an interesting debate about how mobile use across the world has changed over the last few years. The debate discussed the differences in mobile phone use between the developing and more developed parts of the world and helped highlight the tremendous opportunities that lie ahead for mobile operators worldwide. The panel also debated some of the key themes from Mobile World Congress including mobile advertising, mobile payments and social networking.

Andrew Bud, Vice Chair of the Mobile Entertainment Forum and Executive Chairman of mBlox commented: “SMS used for business-to-consumer purposes continues to be a runaway success worldwide: to illustrate this, in 2007, mBlox processed over 2 billion application-to-person transactions and grew by over 40%. By 2011 we can see carrier revenues from all wholesale enabling services more than doubling to $8bn, if they replicate SMS’ successful wholesale business model. At Mobile World Congress, the biggest theme was the huge opportunity for the entire industry in the emerging markets, where applications like mobile banking are already beginning to drive the mobile transactions business. With a market of over 3 billion consumers to reach and serve, there is a lot to be excited about.”

Mike Short, Chairman of the MDA and VP of Research and Development at O2 commented: “Text – we’ve only just begun. Fifteen years since the start of text is just the beginning. There remains much more to be done in 21st Century messaging from CRM to Enterprise Messaging, from screen interactivity to better memory stores of your favourite messages from mobile marketing to personalised alert services, from public sector services to charity text.”

Lord Digby Jones, Minister of State for Trade & Investment, said: “This report shows the strength and energy of the ICT sector in the UK. British firms in this business have to be at their creative and innovative best. The text message was created in Britain and the British public are always early adopters of technology. There were a record number of text messages sent in the UK last year. Now companies in the sector are innovating to include data messaging using picture and video. Once again British consumers are taking up the technology before many other markets around the world. Companies in the UK are only able to innovate to this extent because of the world-class research being done in British universities and the highly-skilled workforce. All these factors make British firms fantastic commercial partners and will allow them to remain world-leaders for many years to come.”

Audio from the roundtable is available in the Resources section of the Airwide corporate website (see the podcast section) along with the full-length global messaging trends report (see the whitepapers section). These will be featured in Airwide’s next corporate newsletter.

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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

Mobilizing Marketing roundtable discussion recording

November 6, 2007 at 5:22 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Podcasts, Sponsored Post

As I noted in last week’s post, Airwide recently convened several leading observers and players in the mobile marketing industry to discuss the findings of our recent survey and further identify and investigate some of the dynamics that impact mobile marketing.

In addition to recording the entire discussion, for which audio files are provided below, we also conducted video interviews with most of those that attended - we’ll be posting those soon.

The participants:

• Chair: Nick Lane (analyst)
• Robert Thurner, Commercial Director, mobile marketing agency Incentivated
• Jonathan Bass, Chair of UK Mobile Marketing Association (MMA)
• Anthony Reilly, Head of Mobile, Universal McCann
• Kerstin Trikalitis, MD of WIN SA
• Jay Seaton, CMO, Airwide Solutions
• Mark Windle, Product Marketing Manager, Airwide Solutions
• David Murphy, Mobile Marketing Magazine
• Alex Farber, New Media Age
• Ian Williams, Vnunet.com
• Stuart O’Brien, Mobile Entertainment
• Helen Keegan, blogger on mobile marketing

The roundtable discussion is broken up into 4 segments, each of about 30 minutes. Click below to play in place or download for listening at your leisure. We’ll be posting video interviews with many of the participants in a subsequent post.

 

 1st Segment [29:15m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 2nd Segment [30:12m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 3rd Segment [28:00m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

 

 4th Segment [28:08m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Airwide Solutions

Mobilizing Marketing

October 29, 2007 at 2:14 pm · Filed under Mobile messaging 2.0, Studies + Research, Mobile Advertising, Sponsored Post

It was just over twenty years ago this month that the deal was signed to build mobile networks based on GSM technology. Since then the success of the mobile phone has been phenomenal. It has transformed from being a simple communications device to an apparatus for gaming, photography and downloading music, a payments tool for content and services and more recently a distribution and advertising channel for brands wishing to interact with their customers.

Big brands face exciting opportunities to increase revenue and market share by deploying innovative mobile marketing techniques to demographically predetermined groups of potential customers. And more and more big brands are already taking advantage of this emerging opportunity and gaining early brand reinforcement and customer relationship advantages. To shed some light on the market and how it’s evolving, Airwide recently commissioned an independent survey of 50 global brand-name companies which revealed that 1 in 3 big brands have already launched live mobile marketing campaigns.

Among the other findings: brand experience with mobile marketing is increasingly positive as more brands are getting higher response rates from their campaigns. Brands surveyed confirmed that many recipients of mobile marketing campaigns requested more information as a result of receiving a mobile marketing message. Three quarters (73%) of brands answered that up to 10% of recipients subsequently undertook a financial action as a result of the campaign. Every responding brand agreed that their most recent mobile marketing campaign was successful in increasing customer familiarity of their brand.

However, according to the survey, despite enthusiasm for mobile marketing, barriers continue to hold back even higher growth rates; almost half of big brands (46%) are concerned that mobile marketing is too intrusive, with many feeling that customers will perceive messages as spam. Of these, 41% are unsure how to rectify the problem by targeting specific audiences. Over a third of brands (36%) would require detailed information on how the user responded to the message, and one in five want proof that the message has been received by the user’s handset (concerns mirrored by recent high profile issues with TV text voting).

The ongoing development of mobile messaging systems has paved the way for a range of valuable new marketing opportunities for brands, but mobile marketing will only reach its true potential when brands and operators recognize the need to confront the present lack of supporting information to manage and optimize marketing programs, and enhance the targeting and tracking characteristics of mobile marketing. It is essential that marketers target their campaigns specifically to gain the desired response rates, and enable opt-in mechanisms to avoid being perceived as ‘spammers’.

The good news is that there is help at hand: with reliable infrastructure in place and a means to control and measure campaigns, more and more big brands will be competing to create and deliver the most effective mobile marketing initiatives to subscribers. And consumers are set to benefit too; almost 60% of brands intend to send special offers via the mobile phone, and over a third (36%) will send discount vouchers. Other incentives will include digital loyalty cards, free gifts and preferential terms.

We hope you find the findings above of interest - we certainly did and hope you stay tuned for more info in subsequent posts. Also worth checking out: a mobile marketing roundtable Airwide recently convened to discuss the findings of the survey and further identify and investigate some of the dynamics that impact mobile marketing.

We’ll be releasing audio recordings of the discussion held earlier this month as well as video interviews with the attendees in the next week or two and invite you to listen in and add your own perspectives. Among those who participated: Nick Lane, analyst; Jonathan Bass, the chair of the UK Mobile Marketing Association (MMA); Anthony Reilly, head of mobile for Universal McCann; David Murphy from Mobile Marketing Magazine; Ian Williams of Vnunet.com; and Helen Keegan, a blogger on mobile marketing.

Jay Seaton is the CMO of Airwide Solutions

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Airwide Solutions

Mobile Messaging 2.0 white paper

August 21, 2007 at 9:32 am · Filed under Sponsored Post

Airwide Solutions, the sponsor of this blog, invites you to read a white paper by Vince Kadar, our CTO, on our belief about how mobile messaging is evolving and why the next generation of infrastructure and applications merits the “2.0″ moniker.

We hope you’ll read the piece, PDF available here, and invite you to react to it on the same page - we’ve set up comments and are eager to hear from you.

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Airwide Solutions