John Whelan is Off Portal and Off Net!: June 2005

Wednesday, June 29, 2005

WAP advertising / mobile adwords

The mobile app community is finally realising the opportunity of wap advertising. Ajit Jaokar author of the excellent Opengardens book and organiser of the important Opengardens events in London discusses in his blog today how alatto's Tribes fully supports the "mobile adwords" concept today. We are calling on brand owners to embrace this opportunity as the live deployments of tribes are read and waiting for advertisers to come on board. A mobile marketing agency has told us that brands are willing to fund the cost of free WAP browsing for consumers in exchange for some branding of the content. They are waiting with their chequebooks. Looks like a good opportunity for all parties concerned and Tribes is the perfect vehicle to bring this to reality.

Monday, June 27, 2005

Real threat to MNOs from VOIP

Check this very interesting offering launched at CommunicAsia recentlly: http://www.ipdrum.com/subpage.aspx?m=4&amid=73

VOIP (i.e. skype) from any mobile phone for price of a local call - seems to look it will work. IPDRUM are a Norwegian company apparently and they are selling (or more correctly taking orders for) a cable that turns a PC into a base station for routing skype calls to and from any mobile handset for the price of a local call. Now why didn't I think of that? I have put in an order and will tell you if it works if/when I receive the cable.

New Media Age gets Tribes again

Thanks to Nic Howell of New Media Age in UK for nice article on Tribes again. Hopefully some other print media will pick up on the Tribes revolution. To quote myself: The average length of WAP sessions during these trials has been over ten minutes. "Tribes makes WAP sticky," said Alatto co-founder John Whelan

Wednesday, June 22, 2005

Tribes Blogfest continues apace

Russell Buckley has some nice words about Tribes and how it helps mobile usability in his blog today. In fact our live deployments of Tribes at O2 Ireland, Mobistar Belgium, Telfort Netherlands and Telering Austria are now giving a 5X(sic) increase in average session time and bandwidth consumption. Tribes is as STICKY as chewing gum you tread on in the street! Been a while since I've used that word STICKY probably last used it in 1999, but the concept is still as important as ever for the mobile web.
Similarly The Feature covers much of the same ground from an interview with my colleague Neil Flanagan.

Monday, June 20, 2005

Japan not cheap for mobile data !

The success of mobile data services In Japan is certainly not based on cheap prices. According to an interesting article on Mobenta Vodafone Japan (referred to as Voda KK by those in the know) charges over 4 times more per Mb in dollar terms than Vodafone UK. Considering the strength of sterling the real cost is even more. Similarly some MNOs in Korea and the US are approximately one seventh the cost per megabyte in Japan. one Mb with Vodafone Kk costs an incredible USD22.17.

Of course these figures are difficult to compare accurately as various data bundle options may be available that are not taken into account. In Europe bundles are an important factor that while leading to enormous confusion amongst consumers do at least lead to cheaper data which will in turn increase usage.

Tuesday, June 14, 2005

Why French mobile data market is the most advanced in Europe

Gallery is a unique in Europe association of the three mobile delicious in France. Thanks to Shaun Zelber of Alterstudios for explaining the detail to me. It is a loose agreement between the telcos on how to deal with the issuing of service codes, how to regulate the selling of content via a common portal. It is also an effort by the three to homogenize: what, how much and how content is sold on a mobile phone. But above all it is an effort by the three to promote a portal of services to their clients.

This is what it looks like on a Gallery enabled phone if you type in a directly a service code (brand). Here for example Mappy the mapping content provider :

Gallery will be launched in the coming weeks with a large budget to promote itself cross telco to the end user. Gallery has now become a brand in it's own righ. tA gallery link is installed on each phone that has been certified by Gallery. That stands at about 100 phones in France today and will be upgraded by 15 new phones a month for the rest of the year. Presently there are more than 10 million + enabled Gallery phones on the market. Usage is more like at 4 or 5 million. Each MNO can sell certain advertising spaces, key words and the like on their entry to Gallery.

The MNOS keep 33% and the rest is available to CP. I call on European operators to follow suit and we can all make money together.

Thursday, June 09, 2005

Breaking Out of the Walled Garden

Another excellent article yesterday by Justin Pearse in The Feature on off portal mobile content. Vodafone and Orange in the UK now admitting that 70% and 50% of revenues revenues respectively coming from off portal. In the long runs it seems that mobile portals are dead! D2C (Direct to Consumer) is the hottest thing in mobile now but really has been around for a longtime. For example who discovered and made the most money from ringtones years ago? Service providers who figured out to get the MNOs out of the loop as much as possible.

Article also states that Overture are taking mobile channel very seriously. Well I hope that is true because their big competitors( you know whoooo now and worth more than Time Warner) are not! I'm off to give Sean Walker from Overture a call.

In my own view another interesting development in off portal comes from France (just returned form a trip to a few operators there this week). Check out the Gallery portal formed when the 3 French operators got together in a unique way to form a pseudoindependent portal.

Wednesday, June 01, 2005

Nokia's latest device has no telephony functions!

On May 25th Nokia announced the Nokia 770. Not only does this device drop the first digit from the usual 4 digit device nomenclature but also doesn't have functionality you might expect from a Nokia device ...i.e. mobile telephony.

Device uses bluetooth and Wi-LAN as bearer for connectivity so is a major step for Nokia into Apple type territory. Thought it might have least come with 3G capability. Next software release will support VOIP so has Nokia given up the ghost on UMTS?

P.S.: Who understands the Nokia 4 digit device nomenclature scheme anyway. I remember asking a Senior figure in Nokia and they couldn't explain it. You think you have it figured out as in Series 40 , Series 30 denotes the first digit and then along comes an exception.

What's happening in mobile applications particularly regarding anything new and funky in the mobile browsing experience. Always on the prowl for innovative, quirky and even strange application ideas to generate revenue for all parties in the mobile value chain. Lots and lots of stuff from Japan and Korea as they lead the way in this space. All views expressed are the views of myself John Whelan as an individual and in no way represent the views of Alatto Technologies Ltd.