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 |
 |
MEOW! Mobile Entertainment Opportunity Watch #2, 2002 February 13, 2002 A few weeks ago I experienced a phenomenon called 'anonymous SMS slander': one of my dear Finnish readers did not appreciate the fact that one cannot be in Los Angeles as modest as you normally are in the Lutheran Finland so he (telling by the language it wasn't a she) sent me an anonymous SMS message from a Finnish website. I asked my Finnish operator Sonera whether they feel responsible for the psychological traumas caused via their network and they declined - welcoming me to file criminal charges. Hey, just keep on sending any feedback! I am only academically interested in how long this can continue without becoming an inhibitor to market growth. While in Sweden I saw 'SMS-bullying' in schools being a serious concern... The recession is continuing streamline the wireless industry. We start slowly seeing the long-promised consolidation where Nokia is riding the waves and knocking off fellow surfers. We are also seeing Ericsson becoming a shop of seven customers (the big global operators) in an attempt to recreate a vertically integrated industry. The global mobile operators revisit their walled garden plans in an attempt to climb up the value chain. The future is for the Internet, IP protocol and free competition but for now we will all have to look up to DoCoMo, Vodafone, Hutchinson, Orange, Telefonica, T-Mobil, mm02 and a bunch of smaller fish yet to be consolidated. Right now in the middle of February we are probably living the last days of the Great Pessimism, at least for the rest of the year. Vendors and operators are gearing up their press releases that will hit the news in the coming month, starting on Monday the 18th. There will be lots of new announcements, the first ones from started already dripping in today. Next week I will be attending the GSM World conference in Cannes, France - at the epicenter of the events. If you happen to be there as well, please don't hesitate to give me a buzz on +358 40 726 9534! Best regards, Tapio Anttila
THE STORYTELLING OF MOBILE COMMERCE When we buy merchandise on a good online site such as Amazon, we can see that we are being up-sold and cross-sold based on our current and previous purchasing sessions. In the context of large screens and fast connections there is more freedom to design this interactivity which aims at monetising the customer better while he/she is 'in the hook'. On a mobile device the design task is much more challenging and yet the opportunities to create a 'commerce flow' and up-sell to an individual in a mobile context are huge. Nokia has talked about this for a long time - the others seem somewhat clueless. With emerging push services, Java and so forth, it will be easier for a brand to keep the customer in the branded context, yet free to communicate and be available for commercial offers within the limitations of the privacy preferences. Hmmm... We could envisage a 'shopping volume control' button on the phone which would adjust the level at which you want to be bothered. Pump up the volume and earn loyalty points! The same applies to 'social volume control', by the way... Entertainment is today increasingly intermingled with merchandising, hence these capabilities should be designed in from the get-go. FLEET MANAGEMENT - PARALLELS I have been wondering for the past couple of years when companies will start deploying and managing wireless devices and services for their employees. The introduction of packet-switched networks such as GPRS will make it easier to extend the company intranets into the mobile domain. Companies like Inphonic (www.inphonic.com) are creating 'wireless virtual private networks' which are actually fairly close to Mobile Virtual Network Operators (MVNO) as a concept. The scope of these services can be purely internal (intranet) or extend over to customers and/or to the supply chain (extranet). The ultimate goal is of course free the company from the control of the mobile operator, to freely broker networking services and to minimize the total cost of ownership (TCO). Global operators want to offer all this as a service, multinational companies appreciate it but prefer to stay in control. Companies like IBM see great opportunities and synergies with their customer base, Nokia wants to close their eyes and wish that this would not happen just yet. How nice it would be from Nokia's perspective if the consumer market for mobile services would mature first and the 'mobile wireless private networks' would develop only after that. Users would insist having one mobile phone as a personal identity device and another one (owned, managed and virus-controlled by the company IT department) as an extension of the corporate network. That equals to 200% penetration of mobile devices - not bad! This is exactly what will NOT happen in the US. We have so far been suffocating the development of the consumer market for mobile devices - something that is just now about to change. The relevance of all of this to the experience industry is that consumer brands are using their extended brand relevance to fight for a maximal 'role' in an individual's private spending. What in a company is called 'management', is in the consumer market called 'marketing' - just the rules of enforcement are different. A consumer lifestyle segment is nothing but an 'extended enterprise' of those brands that make the segment's individuals live up to their individual and collectives tastes ('you are what you consume'). So should consumers be 'fleet-managed' like a flock of sheep or should every individual be encouraged to piecemeal together their consumer experience (personalization)? Mass media offers a clear model of the former, new media and new economy fanatics preach in the name of the 'market-of-one'... One of the mobile Internet mantras is personalization: 'give me MY information'. Device constraints have resulted in using customization as a design goal. But here lies a trap: there is a limit to what extent people want to be personalized. Let's separate three terms: customization, personalization and individualization. Customization means receiving a tailored product or service, personalization means receiving a tailored experience, individualization means that a person builds his/her identify through choices, through comparing a personalized experience with what's outside. So how do we build mobile services that support individualization and regard a customer relationship as a learning process? What does this all have to do with fleet management? It certainly does, let's leave it for the next time. Please send me some feedback.
QUICK TAKES It was new to me that mobile content actually sold twice as much that wired Internet content in Western Europe last year: 590 million euros vs. 252 million euros. The ratio is expected to remain fairly constant into the future. (ARTICLE) A common insider view in the industry seems to be that GPRS will have to mature another 9 months to really hit the market. The software bugs need to be ironed out, network deployments (in the slow economy) completed and MMS deployed and tested. Then we can all shoot for a fairly hot holiday season at the end of 2002. Hopefully there will be plenty of applications presented in an attractive way to consumers! I look forward to seeing how Nokia is going to keep their stock price up in the meantime, though. Rumors tell they have lots of new products in the pipeline, among others a GPRS communicator doing five timeslots down and three up. Watch out, Palm! Virgin Mobile is reportedly planning to sell what they call "Cheeky Fun Stuff" and what others might call soft porn or mobile adult services. According to the article users can send anonymous SMS messages. Girls, turn off your location services...! Boy, this anonymous stuff is going to raise some eyebrows...! According to the article, Virgin's research into the market indicates that "40 per cent of women said they would consider using text messages to request sex". I wonder whether that is 40 per cent of UK women or 40 per cent of women in the Virgin customer base (and whether Sir Richard was used here as an example to lead the respondent to give biased answers). (ARTICLE) AOL Music is envisioning the use of instant messaging in virally marketing music through AOL Instant Messenger and ICQ. Although full music downloads on mobile networks will not happen before true 3G services (2006+ in real market terms), group messaging with music clips of right size and quality might be very compelling on GPRS. This could be an excellent application for MMS: virally distributed song samples could trigger one-button impulse purchases and downloads of related ring tones. The thing is I have started to be rather pessimistic about AOL's commitment to the wireless space. The company seems to have enough problems with the post-merger integration to stay in the driver seat on this one. (ARTICLE) Is the WLAN public infrastructure going to explode in the US this
year? Boingo is now the hot name
as a WLAN service provider (www.boingo.com). They have an ambitious
target to have 5,000 public access point available in the US by the end of
2002. At the same time Hanaro, the second largest broadband ISP in
Korea has a similar target for Korea at 15,000 access points. That
puts things in perspective: we will be in 2004 before one can
consider using WLAN in the USA without having the search for access points
as a primary goal in life. (ARTICLE) FOR FURTHER READING Go to the website at www.anttila.net for online version of the newsletter and the embedded hyperlinks.
* * * Disclaimer: Opinions presented herein are those of the undersigned and do not represent the position or message of any company I might be affiliated with. |
| Responsibility @ this page: Information:
tapio@anttila.net |
Latest changes: 11 April 2005 21:56 |
|