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11 April 2005 21:56
MEOW! Mobile
Entertainment Opportunity Watch A monthly report with a personal touch from the world media capitals Los Angeles and New York City. Focus on pinpointing opportunities in the mobile media and entertainment area. Subscribe at: http://www.anttila.net |
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MEOW! Mobile Entertainment Opportunity Watch #1,
2001
November 13, 2001
This is the inaugural issue of my newsletter - slightly late since it took a while before I was able to settle down in Santa Monica, California - and get out of New York where the air quality was definitely not helping cure my sinus infection. A couple of points about this newsletter - just to set your expectations. I did this at Ericsson for a large group of employees every two weeks. It gave me a way to clear my own thoughts, document interesting findings, get feedback from a community of friends as well as hopefully make a contribution to our common learning. I intend to continue acting from the same motive. However, now you are a very heterogeneous group out there so it might take a few iterations to find the tune. One important distinction to make is that this is my personal newsletter, not tied to any company, client nor technology. Yes, I am one of the founders at www.crispwireless.com and we indeed work on these issues 24/7 but the company has its own newsletters and marketing channels. I will deliberately keep the newsletter very low-tech in the beginning, I feel we are living in an era of reflection rather than coolness and gimmicks. The whole mobile industry is going through a 'take off your sunglasses and get down to work' -like sobering experience where asking the right questions is more important than providing lots of answers. The structure of this newsletter will be to fit onto 2-3 pages one or two personal reflections as well as up to ten 'quick takes' on interesting trends, company announcements and thought-provoking peculiarities. I will finish with a section on further reading in order to learn to navigate the wireless world on the web. Later we might introduce interactive forums and reader feedback - these things were tried and dumped at Ericsson, in a big company discussing anything openly is subject to political positioning and therefore avoided. In any case, I will slowly build up my website at www.anttila.net for you to explore. TEN COMMANDMENTS OF A MOBILE ENTREPRENEUR There are perhaps a couple of things we need to focus on in order to get us out of this slump and get our stock portfolios back to some decent shape. Here's my take on what makes sense on the mobile consumer market (By the way, I do think that enterprise applications are important as well - mostly in Europe. In the the US there is excessive focus on the enterprise in a situation where poor coverage does not (or should not) allow deployment of mission-critical applications.) 1) Respect users' money. Users ultimately judge which technologies and services will succeed. Try to look around beyond your own market where the money is. Today it seems like the worlwide SMS usage of almost one billion messages per day is generating the revenue innovation will be based on. 2) Beware of dumb capital. The bubble economy created drivers who knew the make of their convertible and who were able to use the accelerator and the brake pedal. Today's VCs need to be fully qualified car mechanics. And make sure your supporters have a stake in the short-term success of the market - VCs usually don't. 3) Focus on evolution, not revolution. VCs tend to look for technology discontinuities - the mobile game short and mid term is rather about choosing the right step-by step evolution. Big players like operators and manufacturers (need to) focus on getting the next step right - otherwise there will be no tomorrow. 4) Understand the industry dynamics during a downturn. Economic woes of the big players mean that they drive down application and platform initiatives. Entire divisions have been or will be laid off and those people can form the undergrowth of the new entrepreneurial fabric. Bubble era startups are stumbling and those entrepreneurs form the senior layer who can establish new ventures and guide the entrepreneurially challenged corporate refugees to the closest survival camp. 5) Understand the system you're a part of. Mobile economy is an evolution of a traditional voice communications industry. In the future most other industries will devise ways to use mobile business-to-business services to add value to their business, be that then retail, entertainment or finance, to name a few. Mobile B2B services will lead to the creation of a large number of new business entities and mobile commerce (as a broad concept) will eventually be hugely successful. 6) Cultural maturity will drive markets. The tidal wave of mobile adoption among teenagers in the Nordic countries took place in 1997-98. That means there is an unparalleled maturity in terms of young people having grown up with mobility as a natural part of their personality formation toolkit. Those people are now forming companies to innovate on new services. The common technology base in Europe and Asia offers good innovations a fertile ground for immediate large-scale market introduction. 7) Franchising models will enable fast market penetration. Global consolidation of operators will result in a trend to standardize service brands and service offerings across the entire network of international service provider properties. Hence the old McDonalds franchise model of optimally combining centrally managed scale economies and local market knowledge will be the natural way to address today's mobile consumers. Moreover, the technological complexities of service roaming will fortify the position of global operator networks and global service brands. 8) Create new forms of usage, don't translate old analogies. Journalists will perhaps never get this but ayway: 3G is not about watching your favorite video on a mobile device - it is about pioneers with mature usage culture (6) creating new forms of usage where added value from mobility, self-expression and community formation play a key role. Suggesting music downloads into a mobile device is industry executives' lazy attempt to cover the question about applications for good and move onto a more intriguing topic such as base station deployments. Music in the mobile industry will play a huge role but in new complementary ways that have real added value. Also, stay true to the nature of the medium and maximize the value-add within its limitations: narrowband is 'erotic', broadband is 'pornographic'. 9) Multimodal usage varies based on geographies and demographies. Using the web, broadcast media and mobile devices in an integrated fashion has a lot of potential but this multimodality differs a lot between continents: North America is web-centric, Asia is mobile-centric and Europe is mobile-centric with increasing importance on the web and broadcast channels. Prepare for full-scale modality but implement what the market is able to digest. 10) Marketing, branding and timing are everything. In order to successfully launch new generations of mobile services, there are some obvious lesson to be learned from the past WAP era. Consumer mobile services need to be marketed to lifestyle segments with the right business models, with appropriate support from branding partners, with technology-assisted marketing and with the notion that you will not get another chance if you miss the time window of a user-created emerging fad. MOBILE LIFESTYLE BRANDS WANTED! QUICK TAKES Pope John Paul II seems to have potential MVNO plans. At least he has recently spoken for the importance of the Internet in spreading the gospel and suggested the nomination of a patron saint of the Cyberspace. http://www.msnbc.com/news/653706.asp. Religious groups should be good candidates for innovative community-based mobile services. See for example the catholic ISP http://www.catholic.org or a list of religious WAP services at http://orange.cellmania.com/cgi-bin/category.cgi?CategoryId=47 . The economic woes of operators are perhaps resulting in changes in the until now very conservative attitudes towards mobile adult services. Sonera recently announced their own trial on porting 'naked news' of a cable TV channel onto their mobile service. http://www.msnbc.com/news/654060.asp. See also www.erotigo.com. Early mass adoption will in my view come from Germany - the largest adult services market in the world. Ring tones are becoming a very hot revenue generator for mobile operators and other players in the industry. Nokia estimates to get 'billions of dollars' in revenue by the end of 2005. Polyphonic ring tones and phones which can play them will most probably be one of the hot sellers in 2002. The music industry has waken up. Who actually owns the rights to a ring tone that vaguely resembles of a song or has been modified by the end-user? http://news.zdnet.co.uk/story/0,,t269-s2098488,00.html Maskina Ltd. of Reykjavik, Iceland, has found an interesting niche from end-user generated mobile services. With their mCstudio platform, operators can enable individuals launch their own SMS services. (www.maskina.com) Public video voyerism might be a big thing in the near future. Remote Lounge (www.remotelounge.com) in New York offers the possibility to do your dating by zooming web cameras and the whole act will be stored on their website. Clearly, mobile phones could greatly enhance the experience. An example from the UK is Mamjam (http://www.mamjam.com/howto.asp). |
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