Welcome to the Village

De-portalization and Ecosystem, Orange

2006-10-20T17:55:00.000Z

I was just pointed at the following to jobs at Orange group:

Director of De-portalization and Ecosystem, Orange / France Telecom Group
Orange Director of De-portalization and Ecosystem, Orange / France Telecom Group

Sounds like Orange is putting some serious energy into driving off-portal activity.
Good to see.

Mobi Advisory Group

2006-10-03T10:22:00.000Z

I had a real laugh when I tried the ".Mobi advisory group" web site last night during mobile monday on my phone. (Its mag.mtld.mobi )

You can try it yourself at http://emulator.mtld.mobi/emulator.php?webaddress=mag.mtld.mobi&emulator=nokiaN70&Submit=Submit

It looks really bad on a mobile phone.

However .... a colleague pointed out that mag.mtld.mobi has a "get out". The .mobi rules say:
"Only hostnames http://www.domain.mobi/ and domain.mobi will be tested – other third level domains are considered out of scope and will not be tested".

As somebody pointed out at Mobile Monday, every industry needs something to laugh at as a sort of "common gripe". Looks like we have it!

PayPal promoting Mobile with Users

2006-03-23T16:49:00.000Z

Not many people remember that X.com turned into PayPal. Until recently you could actually log in to x.com on your mobile and log in to paypal.

Back last year, Bango started working with PayPal to enable mobile internet sites to use PayPal for micropayments. The collaboration is working very well. See http://www.bango.com/investor/paypal_120905.pdf for more info. Users can navigate round WAP sites and make one click payments, because Bango is tightly integrated with Paypal's systems. Nevertheless, connecting a PayPal account with a mobile phone to enable this process requires (at least once) a user to go to a PC.

From this week, PayPal have started educating users about mobile from the PC end. Paypal mobile! uses a mobile phone as an extension of the PC to instruct payments to be sent to paypal merchants or other users. Once a phone is connected to a paypal account, the authentication of the payment is done by IVR (basically Paypal initiates a voice call to the user).

This is great news. Using a text message or a voice call to transfer money to people or merchants is a huge step forward from requiring a "logged in PC" and will open up PayPal to a much wider audience.

While the new system is more complex for mobile internet sites, where the existing PayPal/Bango system works very well, the new system has application where the user is not on the mobile internet when they make a buying decision. Bango will be able to leverage both the text driven and the voice driven stuff to enable users to pay or pre-pay money to mobile content providers before the user visits their site to collect the content.

With thousands of content providers using Bango to get to market, Bango is obviously very keen to exploit - on their behalf - any new payment methods that achieve mass market traction. Lets hope Paypal by text and voice is one such method.

Microsoft buys Motionbridge

2006-02-14T06:26:00.000Z

Back in November 05 I posted about the rumour that Motionbridge had been sold to Google or Yahoo. Now it transpires I was premature. Turns out Microsoft won the prize: http://www.motionbridge.com/COMPANY/index.html

Motionbridge has been in the tag / keyword based mobile search business for five years and powers the "find" for Sprint, O2 and Orange portals. While they don't have a high profile - evident from the fact that nobody i spoke with yesterday had heard the news - they play an important role. Its interesting that this is the first time MS seems to have bought a mobile service - not related to the handset client. Perhaps this indicates a change of strategy to leverage Microsoft's obvious desire on the Internet without getting hung up on their poor showing in the phone client.

All in all, sounds like good news for the industry and for Microsoft. It will be interesting to learn what the price paid was.

More from .mobi - a bad idea rolls onwards

2006-02-09T13:02:00.000Z

As its coming round to the annual 3GSM congress in Barcelona, when the mobile industry talks to itself, it seemed a good time to see if .mobi was preparing to launch something. Sure enough, a new web site has appeared at http://mtld.mobi/ The good news is that it works on several WAP and xHTML phones - but seemingly not on WINWAP at the moment.

On the site is the process for sale of .mobi domain names, and more interestingly the "style guide" thats sites need to comply with if their domain names are to remain in the DNS zone file (i.e be accessible through a .mobi name).

There is also a list of demo sites - some of which do not yet seem to work, but I'm sure they will by next week (3GSM).

.mobi is a very bad idea, but I'm sure there are some good people working at implementing it. Hopefully the initiative will shine a spotlight in the need to produce mobile sites to reach the global audience of nearly 1 billion mobile users. Also, hopefully, the site owners will follow the W3C recommendations and use a single URL for promotion of sites to all users.

I can't see .com dying out so I expect that most CP's will use .com whether or not they comply with the W3C rules. Another benefit of using .com is that there is no danger that a site will be withdrawn from DNS (for good reasons or through error) by the .mobi business.

Trends seen during 2005

2006-01-01T10:00:00.000Z

2005 has seen a migration from content through SMS to WAP portals (just like 1995 saw an evolution from email services to web services)

Mainstream brands have entered to market directly, rather than solely through operator portals. Examples include SKY TV, THE SUN, Bands like OASIS, WESTLIFE, EMINEM Music Labels like EMI (The Raft)

Moble Network Operators (Carriers) are moving to support the D2C content channel. They see D2C on the mobile internet as the technical solution to SMS billing headaches, providing better consumer transparency and a better audit trail.

Bango's slashing of the costs of going "off-portal" provides lower costs of entry, meaning more content players can get into the market. We are seeing independent music labels getting into mobile, smaller content providers etc.

In the US, the content market is gradually opening-up giving consumers greater choice and driving better quality through competition. While Carriers like Verizon are still opposed to giving their customers choice of content supplier, the leading network - Cingular - is on a clear path to supporting its users in getting what they want.

In the PC-centricUSA, linking mobile services off web sites is a key traffic generating tool. Sun Microsystems uses its Java.com web site to promote the benefits of the Java user environment and allows the user to experience Java content by literally ordering the download off the web page.

Lovely Translation

2005-12-06T21:45:00.000Z

Received an email from Italian company ETNOTEAM today which made me smile:

Etnoteam joins the RAI DTT The Etnoteam Group, is attested as the preferred interlocutor about the DTT for RAI.

Winning the bit for the Digital Terrestrial Technology of RAI infrastructural platform, Etnoteam will carry out not only the "return channel" software, used for receiving and managing the messages that the users want to send to the transmitter during the service fruition distributed on the digital terrestrial technology, but also for the "one way channel", with the goal of conforming the interaction of both applications.

This platform certificates the spread of MHP applications and multimedia content on the digital terrestrial technology channel. In the production platform framework for the one way channel, Etnoteam places at RAI disposal technologies and competences suggesting a managing contents and applications system based on technology and products Vignette7.

Press Release

Motionbridge bought by Google (or was it Yahoo?)

2005-11-15T21:46:00.000Z

Heard a rumour today from a credible source that Motionbridge (www.motionbridge.com) may be getting bought by Google for about £10million. No announcement from Google or Motionbridge so perhaps work still in progress. Siemens Mobile Accelerator Fund ( the biggest investor) is trying to sell on its investments at the moment so that makes disposal at an early stage somewhat sensible.

Motionbridge provides mobile focussed search for several mobile operator portals (O2 UK and Orange FR for example) and has some quite neat technology. They run the "paid for keywords" system used by O2's search advertisers.

Google or another search company like Yahoo or MSN might like to buy Motionbridge to get a short-cut to operator portal presence, and to provide the "metatag" type search that works beter than crawling for mobile sites.

Access to Sprint http://www.sprintpcsinfo.com/modules.php?name=News&file=article&sid=1008
might also make sense.

MMS for mobile content delivery is dead

2005-08-17T17:04:00.000Z

I was on a panel about mobile content at the mobile youth conference recently in Barcelona, and happened to ask the audience (mostly mobile operators) if anybody believed that MMS had a future in delivering mobile content (rather than peer-to-peer usage). Surprisingly for me, I could find nobody to support MMS for content delivery - whereas a year ago, many mobile operators would have said it did have potential or were investing in MMS for premium content delivery.

This accords with my view. Message based delivery content is less successful for Content Providers for three fundamental reasons:

1. There’s no easy way to know the capabilities of teh target device when preparing a message. The provider has to take a lowest common denominator approach to the content they deliver. In the WAP model, where they send a link to teh content page and the user's device accesses the web site, the CP can optimize content delivery to the device type, giving the more data hungry customer with a better device a very good experience.

2. Marketing is expensive with messaging services and it’s hard to build customer loyalty. In the browse-and-buy model, we see a 46% user return rate versus only 18% for messaging services. User spend per visit is up to 50% higher for 3rd party content delivered through a mobile internet site versus the one-shot messaging delivery approach. Content providers prefer the browsing model (which I assume is better for carrier data revenue….) because it’s a better brand experience and users can bookmark favorite sites.

3. Users prefer to pay for services through a WAP site presentation. The charges are much more transparently presented to the user at the time of purchase and there isn’t the over-reliance on “small print” in the initial advertising. In short, there are fewer customer purchase problems to deal with.

Content providers in Europe dropped MMS as a viable content model in favor of WAP browsing. MMS is used in certain contexts for alerts and some outbound marketing, but almost all 3rd party providers now use the mobile internet for their core content services.

.MOBI HAS NO CLOTHES

2005-07-07T16:19:00.000Z

I wrote a letter to the editor of New Media Age today just to make clear my views on the .mobi "top level domain". Here it is:

.MOBI HAS NO CLOTHES

The "approval" of the .MOBI top level domain by ICANN is interesting but pointless. .MOBI is a red herring that will be consigned to the dustbin of irrelevant initiatives - like PL/1, Ada, Algol 68 and OSF/1. Here's why:

Content Providers want to promote ONE "address" in written, electronic or verbal forms and want it to work through any medium - mobile, fixed or word of mouth. The technology exists to support this today. For example http://www.vodafone.com/ works well a PC or from a mobile phone.

The WWW Consortium advised ICANN to reject .MOBI early in 2004. Browser protocols provide an HTTP_ACCEPT header to a single URL to be used across all device types - hiding complexity from users. World Wide Web creator Tim Berners-Lee warned that a new .MOBI domain could be harmful, potentially breaking the web's device independence and putting mobile users in a walled garden.

The sponsors of the Irish company behind the "scheme" claim to want to provide a good user experience. It's therefore amazing that after several years, most of their own web sites give an error message to hundreds of millions of mobile users. gsmworld.com, microsoft.com, sun.com, and even nokia.com all give an error message to most users because they only work on PC browsers.

If the .MOBI initiative gained any traction, it could complicate and confuse the Internet experience for mobile subscribers, and slow down the delivery of mobile services. Fortunately, enough people in the Mobile Content industry have pointed out the obvious flaws in the proposal, so few people will be embarrassed by praising the clothes of a naked emperor.

However, just in case its not absolutely clear, let me be like the little boy who spoke the truth: ".MOBI has no clothes! " If any of the sponsors need help in developing their web sites to enable them to better support mobile devices, as Vodafone has already done, we are certainly more than willing to help provide them with the appropriate information.

Ray AndersonBango

.MOBI Top Level Domain Rejection Notice

2004-04-21T13:50:00.000Z

After some days studying the proposal to ICANN for a ".mobi" top level domain, I decided that the idea was not only ill thought out, but (like Tim Berners Lee) could actually harm the progress starting to be made on the Mobile Internet.

I therefore filed my objections to ICANN here:
http://forum.icann.org/lists/stld-rfp-mobi/msg00017.html

It turns out I'm in good company - almost everybody who has commented seems to realise the problems with this crazy idea.

However, given past experience with ICANN, plus the propensity for large organizations like the sponsors of .MOBI to not really have a big enough view of what is going on to really understand what they are backing, I expect that in a year or so the .MOBI idea will be approved and we will see some PR effors and stuff in 2005 to try and get it going.

I doubt it will really get anywhere - but who knows! :-)