MEOW! Mobile
Entertainment Opportunity Watch A monthly report with a personal touch from the world creative media capital of Los Angeles. 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 #4, 2003 August 22, 2003 After a rather uneventful spring and early summer we are gearing towards a more interesting mobile market in the US. Having attended my first Latin American mobile data conference, the very successful IBC Mobile Messaging Americas in Miami, I was amazed to find out how advanced those markets are in relative terms. Money-generating platforms such as premium SMS have already been deployed, the inhibiting factors are rather the national economies and the consumers' purchasing power. In the US consumers have a bulimic relationship to consumption and it seems to be difficult to transfer that enthusiasm over from snacks, fashion clothing, tooth-whitening pastes and alloy rims to mobile phones and mobile entertainment. I have yet to see a man show of his mobile phone here the way they show off their rims... It's easy: rims are part of culture here, ring tones are not - yet. Will they ever? They have to develop a cultural meaning, just like the rims have done. And that's difficult to impose on people. We all know the six degrees of separation in the theory of communities. Well, now there is a tool to build professional business connections through a web-based community relying on that principle: LinkedIn (www.linkedin.com). I have had amazing success with it during my first month of use - and I am not paid to say this! You should give it a try and connect with me while there to get a kickstart for your network - I have 9,600+ contacts within four degrees of separation. Best regards,
WILL CAMERA PHONES BE THE NEXT BIG THING? Camera phones are entering the critical phase of crossing the chasm: unlike last summer, they have little novelty value but yet I am failing to see them being used extensively in public. Interoperability is something operators don't even dare to start talking about. Yet Ericsson has apparently sold the MMS-Cs to Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile so from this perspective we should be able to expect MMS working fairly soon cross those networks which amounts to some impressive 60 million+ people. I spoke with Seamus McAteer, the founder of Zelos Group. He has recently done a 1,300 sample online survey on the potential of these new services and the verdict is that first of all the potential for MMS is far bigger than the potential for Java games (which only catch the interest of roughly 20% of the market). When asked about their preferences in a new mobile phone, the respondents rank color screen and integrated camera to the top two positions while 'support for games' comes in as a number 9. My feeling is that in order to get the MMS business as a phone-to-phone usage to grow one needs to build first the photo community and mobile blogging businesses. There is a clear analogy to the videoconference market vs. the web: the former never grew as its value was tied to the number of connections as opposed to the amount of content accessible. Content accessible? Let's stop there for a moment. The problem with mobile blogging and photo communities so far has been that they have been offered within the operator walled gardens. Would you really send your family photo albums to Sprint PCS to be stored for the rest of your life? That's mere silliness awaiting to be exposed. The content repository available for a media company - say Vibe Magazine which a friend of mine is helping out in wireless - can be a formidable asset in the hands of skilled lifestyle media editors. But are the 900 Vodafone employees worldwide reportedly working with content (!) up for the job? Not without partnering with the best media brands, I would say. The market calls for independent portals to do something creative in this space, to start a new craze. We all remember www.hotornot.com which came out of nowhere to take a seat in the top 100 most visited sites on the Internet. Suddenly there is a copy of it with quality flava for the hip-hop community: www.raphunnies.com. And of course now 'diskodan' out of LA has started the new mobile phone craze with camera phones at www.mobileasses.com... These things, silly or not, create something new, unprocessed, creative - just like SMS when it first started all by itself. THE HANDANGO COMBO OFFERING: BUY SOFTWARE AND MEET NEW FRIENDS! Purchasing Symbian software from Handango is a fairly smooth experience except for one thing: after having bought a $9.95 piece of software and downloaded it, Handango tells me that the product license key will be email to me from the publisher within two business days... Have the people at Handango heard from instant gratification? Time to dig up those MBA textbooks again! I don't care how difficult it is to solve this, a delay like this is just unacceptable. It reminds me of the procedure of ordering a car in the Soviet Union and getting it delivered five years later. As a positive note, two days later I indeed get an email from 'Boris' in Poland who had a license key for me... And this is the company Nokia outsources its application sales to...
PICKS FROM THE HOLLYWOOD MOBILE SCENE Premium SMS with common short codes has finally arrived in the US - facilitated by European telco folks at Telenor Interactive. All My Children's Sexiest Man in America Contest (by ABC Daytime) will provide viewers the opportunity to vote via premium, cross-carrier text messaging to choose the winning contestant. Each vote will cost $0.50. This is still the early days and success will be determined by how well the show is promoted, something where the American Idol excelled and subsequent shows failed. However, it is significant that a European telco with their extensive knowledge and deep pockets has been chosen to facilitate the introduction of a new technology. SMS usage in Telenor's home country Norway is the second highest in Europe. http://www.telenor-interactive.com Primedia has launched a video-on-demand services called Video Magazine Rack, developing subscription video services to complement their print media magazine business. This could probably fit well with the upcoming 3G mobile services where people with mobile lifestyles could be offered on-demand 'support channels' for their endeavors. If you are setting out for a Harley tour, you would want to prepare by reading magazines and watching your own Harley channel. Once on the road, you might want to have a version of the multimedia channel available, along with community applications, mblogging and other tools that enable you to tell the story as it develops. http://www.magrack.com/index.jsp Maxim and other magazines from Dennis Publishing will soon be available as a wireless service. Both FHM (signed up for a 'dry run' by Hutchison 3G) and Maxim redefined the soft end of the adult market and it will be interesting to see how much creativity their developer Airborne Entertainment is able to embed into the limited medium. The blurp promises 'Maxim's Gentleman's Ringers and Manly Tones'. http://www.pocketboxoffice.com/web/news/pressrelease.cfm?id=31 Right Angle Media, a syndicator of adult content
for wireless devices, said it partnered with adult content
site Danni's Hard Drive to launch Danni's Mobile Edition, a wireless
content service designed especially for users of the latest generation
of handsets that feature color screens and allow full-motion video
clips. Friends also tell me Danni is close to signing one more of
those exclusive deals with Hutchison 3G... Jenna Jamison, the highest rated adult entertainment star at the moment, is planning to launch her mobile services according to industry rumors. Represented by the Hollywood talent agency Endeavor, she has reportedly received an 'OK' from the top management of Vodafone for her ambitions... Arun Sarin, you're a stud! http://www.clubjenna.com
PICKS FROM THE WORLD MOBILE ENTERTAINMENT SCENE Nokia is reportedly getting squeezed by the operators out of the end-user business. Recently the Club Nokia Photo Zone was mysteriously closed down, following a Finnish-style blunt message to members from the mobile phone giant. Well, I experienced constant technical problems with the service during it short life so probably the effort was half-hearted anyway. I guess it takes a Microsoft to build a channel conflict by going after end users and get away with it... JustYak is a new cross-system mobile IM service from Linefusion in Singapore. It works on a range of Java phones, including the tricky Nokia Series 40 phones with difficult memory handling features. The services incorporates MSN Messenger, ICQ and Yahoo IM but not AOL IM. The monthly subscription is $4.18 for all-you-can-eat. I tried it and although it is a bit rudimentary it is certainly more solid than Tipic. www.justyak.com Inphonic who seem to be staging a major roll-up play in the white-label mobile services space recently acquired the mobile marketing service bureau AvesAir. The latter was kind of the mobile marketing leader in the US and even they ran into difficulties in the tough market. Operators, get now the premium SMS here so we can all start making money! http://www.newsobserver.com/business/technology/story/2541708p-2360177c.html MTV finally launched an MVNO offering in Sweden. The deal with Spinbox only took some three years or so to materialize. Hopefully they will be successful, at least their MVNO partner TeliaSonera has the brain power to innovate, even if not the best geographical coverage to expand into a pan-European operation. http://www.europemedia.net/shownews.asp?ArticleID=16530 HelloNetwork and Zingy are partnering to enable consumers to send in their video and share it with users of Java-enabled mobile phones. This is supposedly an industry 'first' in a very important trend of end-user generated content which which probably evolve into 'video blogging' sooner than later. http://www.hellonetwork.com/company/press_story.jsp?id=76 American Idol gathered in the US some 7.5 million SMS votes at 10 cents a pop. In Norway, the corresponding show is receiving 50% audience participation at about 70 cents a pop! Imagine what the US market could be like... http://www.strandreports.com/sw616.asp In a very important development showing where mobile commerce and MVNOs will take the industry, Virgin Mobile UK launched a loyalty scheme whereby consumption at Virgin Megastores will earn free airtime at the Virgin Mobile Service. The scheme was pioneered at Virgin in Australia where it has even been extended to third party retailers. http://www.virginmobile.com/mobile/media_centre/media_newsstory.jsp?id=3645 Vodafone's 900 content experts are also after dolphins for a source of mobile entertainment. Reported by Wired News, Vodafone is said to be working with a dolphin sanctuary in Ireland to record a dolphin sound library. Wired's journalistic common sense might be failing here but the idea is intriguing: just like some of us have Klingon conversations, why not talk like a dolphin so mom won't understand... http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,59909,00.html From the mobile R&D scene, folks at BT Exact are studying SMS-enabled interactive toys. Soon you will be able to communicate with your friends through their Barbie and teddy bear. I find this an exciting scenario but perhaps it will be a few years before it will be widely deployed. I can rather see a mobile phone developing toy-like features and extensions. http://www.160characters.org/news.php?action=view&nid=69 INDUSTRY ANALYSIS NetSize has released an old (June 2002) but free study on the European SMS industry. The study lays out country profiles for leading European markets. It is highly interesting that measured by the volume of SMS per subscriber, the clear leaders are Ireland, Norway and Portugal whereas the laggards are France, Italy and - Sweden. http://www.160characters.org/news/dsp_newsDetail.cfm?id=776
MEOW! EVENTS CALENDAR > Mobile Internet 2003 - November 20-21, Paris
HOLLYWOOD MOBILE ENTERTAINMENT CAREERS Not much new to list in this chapter but the companies I know POTENTIALLY to be hiring for the LA area include mForma, Airborne Entertainment, Sony Pictures, Mobileway, Telenor Interactive. * * * 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. |
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