Mobile Marketing Magazine

RingRing Deal Based on "Perfect Synergy" says Amobee

As exits go, this must rank as one of the faster ones. Just a year and four months after we covered the launch of RingRing Media, the company has been sold to Amobee Media Systems for an undisclosed sum, though a figure around the $20 million (£12 million) mark has been rumoured. In an interview with Mobile Marketing Magazine this morning, Amobee CEO Zohar Levkovitz, said the company was impressed with RingRing from the first time it met them.
“We met for the first time in September 2009, and it was clear from that first meeting that the synergy between the two companies was almost perfect,” says Levkovitz. “So we checked them out further, and that was a very quick and effective process.”
This synergy comes from the fact that Amobee is a large vendor of mobile advertising inventory on behalf of mobile operators - it also counts Vodafone and Telefónica among its investors - while RingRing connects Amobee to the demand and the advertisers. The two companies say they now aim to create the world’s largest mobile advertising exchange, connecting publishers to advertisers through the mobile channel.
“Big media buys on mobile can be a nightmare,” says Levkovitz. “It’s an almost impossible mission sometimes, where you have to call Vodafone in one country, Orange in another, Telefónica in another, and then go out and find other publishers as well, and large media buyers just can’t do it. RingRing have taken the pain out of this process, and the joint company will have other solutions to make the buying experience even simpler.”
RingRing Media Co-founder Ben Tatton-Brown says everyone at the firm is over the moon with the deal.
“We’re ecstatic and excited, we feel like kids in a toy store,” he says. “We have grown very quickly in a short period of time. The business was founded in 2008, we were profitable after month 11, and we have never looked back, with revenues now in excess of $2 million per month.
“It’s a great deal for us, like two pieces of a jigsaw coming together because the two companies complement each other so well,” he continues. “We have the demand and the client relationships and the budgets and Amobee has the best ad-serving technology in the world. We have been busy building our ad exchange which has now reached 4 billion ads per month, and we now have a combined goal to create the world’s largest mobile ad exchange. In fact, with our 4 billion impressions a month and Amobee’s multiple billions we are already bigger than AdMob.”
But Tatton-Brown is keen to stress that going forward, it's business as usual for the company.
“We remain 100% committed to how we can benefit our clients, advertisers and publishers; we have their best interests at heart,” he says. “We will continue to buy inventory on other networks like AdMob, Quattro and Millennial. The deal does not change anything with regard to our day-to-day business.”

The Real Deal

David Murphy talks to Andreas Spechtler, Managing Director, Marketing for RealNetworks

DM: Andreas, I imagine a lot of people don’t realise that RealNetworks is in the Ringback Tone (RBT) business, how did you get involved?

AS: I came from Sony Net Services, which was an e-commerce innovation lab within Sony that was founded in 2000. When the Sony Walkman as a standalone MP3 player, lost the battle to the iPod, the music service division in Europe was sold to RealNetworks, and the deal included a contract with Vodafone for music, including RBTs, in seven Vodafone operating companies at that time. Since then, we have increased our coverage in Europe to more than ten countries.

DM: So on RBT, they tend to be a bit of an unknown quantity, in the UK at least. Why are you so enthusiastic about RBTs?

AS: RBTs are a hidden champion in the Value Added Services (VAS) market, because the penetration is enormous. They can work on any handset because they are network-based, and from a content perspective, there is no piracy And for some operators now, RBTs are overtaking standard ringtones in terms of revenues, as in Germany. RBTs are increasing, while ringtone sales are decreasing. We have produced our own figures that show that if you have an operator with 10 million subscribers, and you achieve 10% service penetration after three years, with a monthly subscription fee of €1 (£0.90), and a content fee of €1.50, then if the RBT subscriber buys, on average, 0.4 pieces of content per month, you are looking at €14 million of net revenue and €7.5 million of earnings after three years, and an ROI of less than one year.

DM: So if RBTs are such a money-spinner for a network, why are more operators not biting your hands off?

AS: Because they have too many other things to do and you need to involve the network guys to install the players, and you also have to convince their management that this is a good revenue stream.

DM: So how long does it take to launch an RBT service?

AS: Around six months. There are three elements to providing an RBT service: the network; the service platform; and the managed service around it. We provide an end-to-end solution and in return, we ask for a long-term commitment and a fair revenue share.

DM: And how many deployments do you have?

AS: We have four in Europe, four in the US, and 10 in Asia. The European deployments include Vodafone Turkey and Germany, and we will deploy with another Western European operator in a major market during 2010. And we are getting good traction in many regions, including Southern and Eastern Europe.

DM: Anything in the UK?

AS: RealNetworks has delivered a technical solution for 3 UK. But the problem with the UK is that no one is prepared to take a chance. Orange and 3 did it a couple of years ago, but it was a half-hearted approach. They bought a platform, but they never completed the
go to market model with a partner that could really ramp up the services

DM: Do you think maybe it’s just a cultural thing, that RBTs work well in some countries, but not in others?

AS: I have heard this argument many times, but it’s just one of the myths surrounding RBTs. There is no cultural barrier. The only barrier to RBT adoption is lack of awareness and promotion. When an operator really focuses on it and promotes the service, they can double the number of subscribers in a couple of weeks. SMS campaigns are particularly good at driving RBT sales.
RBTs are also pretty resilient. In mature markets, in tough economic times, RBT sales stagnate, but they don’t slide, because people like the personalization service so much. Churn is much lower than for other services; it’s a very sticky offering, and I think this message is beginning to get through now. In a time where some revenue streams are falling, this is a chance for operators to come back with a solid revenue model with loyal customers and an attractive service.

Holding out for a Hero

David Murphy talks to Helen Keegan, who, like a 1-minute TV programme, seems to have been made for mobile, about her latest venture, the Heroes of the Mobile Screen conference, which takes place next week.

DM: First off Helen, the mobile industry seems to have no shortage of conferences. Does it really need another one?

HK: I agree, there are lots of events and conferences and I don’t like most of them. Myself and other Mobile Mondays members felt that there was a gap in the market for a grass roots type of event, one that is accessible to a wider audience, that doesn’t cost £500, £600 or £700 to attend.

DM: So what’s the conference’s USP?

HK: It’s really that we are running a conference from within the industry rather than being a conference organizer from without. We have designed the agenda to appeal to our friends in marketing, media and Web 2.0, because increasingly, mobile is part of these people’s jobs, and they often don’t have much expertise in or experience of it, so this is like a one-day fast-track for them.

DM: So tell us a little about the agenda.

HK: We are looking at four areas. The first is money: what is being invested in, why, what are the exit opportunities, what is making money, and what are the secrets of success.
Then we are looking at social media and location technology, and its impact on consumers. So we’ll look at privacy issues and perception and acceptance of this technology. What are the opportunities where is it going in terms of marketing. What do we need to careful of, what business models will work. There’s been a lot of investment in LBS (Location-based services), but it’s not clear what customers will pay for.
Then in the afternoon, it’s all about customers. In the first session we have six ‘Teenage Heroes’ on stage. They will give us an insight into their digital lives, and then they will be pitched with four mobile ideas or services and they will do a ‘Dragon’s Den’ on them, giving their feedback live on stage in what will hopefully be a constructive and engaging manner.
Following that, we will be releasing new research from Belinda Palmer of LadyGeek around what women want in mobile devices and services, and then in the final session, Paul Berney from the MMA (Mobile Marketing Association) will look at mobile marketing – what’s working, where it’s going, and what the opportunities are.

DM: And is this going to become an annual event, will you take it anywhere else?

HK: No idea yet. I have been asked if I would be interested in taking it to the US, but it’s very early days yet, we’ll have to see what happens.

DM: And looking beyond the conference, I wonder, where do you feel the mobile marketing business is at right now, how’s the mood?

HK: I think it’s pretty healthy, there are a few new agencies springing up. I was at the Futureproof conference in Ireland last week and there’s a vibrancy there about what’s happening. It’s also good to see the network operators moving pay as you go customers to data now. I noticed that in the UK, 3 are giving free data access to people who top up a certain amount of credit and I see this as a turning point in terms of moving mobile advertising beyond SMS. It will mean more mobile Internet advertising and media owners will be getting more eyeballs looking at their ads, so it’s good.

DM: OK, well, best of luck with the event.

HK: Thank you.

Hitting the Target

David Murphy talks to Julien Oudart, Marketing & Business Development Director for mobile advertising firm Sofialys Mobile Media Systems

DM: So Julien, give us an introduction to Sofialys if you would.

JO: Sure. We started out six years ago with a mobile marketing technology platform for operators, and around four years ago, we started a project with Vodafone in France (SFR) collecting their customers’ consent to receive marketing messages on their phone. That database has grown from zero to 2 million names in four years. Brands will run quizzes and competitions on the SFR website and mobile portal offering discounts and prizes, and if you want to enter, you have to sign up to the database.
When you sign up, you can specify how often you want to receive marketing messages, whether you want them via SMS, MMS or WAP Push, and we also ask people to tell us what things they are interested in so that we can send them relevant advertising.
From a targeting perspective, we can segment the database by age, postcode, interested etc., and we can also monitor whether people click on the ads they receive, for behavioural targeting.

DM: And with 2 million people opted in, this obviously works…

JO: For sure. You know, people say mobile advertising doesn’t work, that it’s too intrusive, but we all have five or 10 brands that we want to be associated with in our own world, depending on what we’re interested in. Targeting is at the heart of it, and consent. If you can get people’s permission, and you can get them to profile themselves, then you are able to deliver the right message from the right brand at the right time. It’s very similar to the Blyk model. We were big believers in Blyk, and I think the only reason they failed was because they started form scratch, and when you do that, you have to accept that you won’t make any money for a couple of years.

DM: So how come you haven’t managed to sell this idea to other operators? It sounds like a no-brainer to me, but with the exception of Turkcell, I don’t know of any other operator that runs an opted-in database like this.

JO: There are some. Orange in France and Vodafone and Telecom Italia in Italy, but they are the exceptions as you say. I think the reason is that these are big companies who make billions from SMS and voice and a little bit from content, so it will take time, but I don’t think they will take their eye off the ball in the way that AOL did with the web. They are still in a very good position. They have the relationship with the customer, so they are in a good position to build an opted-in database and to deliver geolocated campaigns, and they also have a lot of experience in mobile advertising now, and I think in six or seven years time when the industry is more mature, they will be in a good position.

DM: So are you anywhere near to selling something similar to other operators?

JO: We are, yes. We have two more in Europe that we will be able to announce shortly.

DM: Do you do anything else with SFR?

JO: We have one other project on the go. Last October, we launched a CPC, auction-based sales channel for keyword on SFR’s mobile portal, a bit like Google Adwords for mobile. So if you’re a car brand, you can go on and bid for the word ‘car’. This has been very successful in driving SFR’s advertising business. It’s quite unusual, because I don’t think the operators have really been focused on monetising the search side of the business so far. The focus has all been on display.

DM: And how does the cost of a typical keyword on mobile compare to the cost of the same keyword on the web?

JO: It’s around two to three times higher, because if mobile is done well, people are much more likely to interact with it than on the web. We see clickthrough rates 10 times those of the web on mobile.

DM: And apart from your work with SFR, what else are you involved in?

JO: We have a mobile ad server called Mobile Ad Box that we launched in 2007. We use this to sell inventory for SFR, and for 10 publishers in Italy, Spain and Germany. We have social networks, and some big media brands such as Arena Mobile in Spain.

DM: And on what basis do you sell this inventory, is it CPM (cost per thousand) or CPC (cost per click)?

JO: We try to keep it CPM, but mobile is going towards the performance-based model because a lot of mobile advertising comes from companies that sell stuff for mobiles ringtones and other content, so they like the CPC model, because they only pay if the guy clicks on the ad and comes through to their store. But then you have a big car brand looking to build awareness for a new car launch and they like the CPM model, so you have combination of the two.
Then a little later this month, we will be launching our own online mobile ad exchange.

DM: Like an AdMob?

JO: Similar, but with a much smaller number of publishers, and with visibility for brands as to where their ad will appear. Usually with an online ad exchange, it’s a blind network, but with ours, you will be able to decide where you want your ad to appear. Our publishers will profile themselves into specific categories, which we will monitor, to help our advertisers target. Advertisers will also be able to target by territory, and by device, so they might only want to reach iPhone users, for example.
And we are looking for a couple of hundred publishers absolute maximum.
I would rather work with a smaller number and have a CPM of €5 – 8 than with a much larger number and get a CPM of €1.

DM: What’s the exchange going to be called?

JO: You’ll have to wait till it launches for that I’m afraid.

DM: And what type of publisher are you hoping to sign up?

JO: We are looking at European publishers. They could be big media brands, or big web brands coming to mobile, or big mobile brands who are driving a lot of traffic to their site. The key really is to create the audience. Brands and agencies are willing to do stuff on mobile if we can deliver the right audience. It’s about quality, targeting and qualifying the audience.

DM: Just a final thought, do you see any real hotspots for mobile advertising currently?

JO: Obviously you get the emerging countries where the use of mobile is very high but there’s very little ad spend. And in Europe, 80% of total ad spend comes from the five big markets: UK, France, Italy, Spain and Germany.

DM: And within those five, who leads the way?

JO: I’d say the UK is a little bit ahead, in terms of initiatives and innovation, followed by France.

Testing, Testing

David Murphy catches up with Mick Rigby, Chairman of mobile media planning and buying firm, Yodel Digital

DM: So how are things at Yodel Mick?

MR: It’s been a tough year, but in the last two or three months, we have seen an upswing in interest. People are now planning budgets for next year and whereas mobile has been knocked off for this year, businesses starting to see their way out of it.

DM: Why do you think that is?

MR: Digital has been pretty much the only media to come through the last 12 months unscathed, and it’s because it is accountable. The ROI is very strong and clients can see what they are buying and track who is clicking through, and on the back of that, there is a general perception that mobile is part and parcel of digital. The level of accountability and ROI is as strong as digital, and sometimes better, so there is a lot of interest and I believe now that brands should be testing mobile and learning.
Our approach is to target big brands that want to get into mobile but don’t know what to do, and in the last few months, bigger brands have started to commit to it.

DM: So there are lots of things you can do with mobile; how should clients be spending their mobile budgets?

MR: You have to look at the whole market. Just because something is hot does not mean it’s the right thing to do. Every single business and every sector is different, so you need to do something bespoke for what you’re offering. So the sensible thing is to go back to basics and be very pragmatic in what you are looking to do, rather than just going for QR Codes because that’s what everyone is talking about.

DM: So do clients tend to come to you with preconceived ideas about what they should be doing with mobile?

MR: They will often have a digital agency or a mobile technology agency that’s good at building apps, developing WAP sites or whatever, and ultimately the technology is what they think mobile is about, but it’s not. Getting the right people and traffic is what it’s about. Other times, you get a new client who will say that they tried mobile and it didn’t work, and the reason why is because they spent too much on an app or a WAP site, and not enough on promoting it, or they didn’t promote it in the right environment. Mobile does work, it’s just a question of doing things properly.

DM: So where do you start, given that sort of scenario?

MR: We will look at what they have done and break it down, and if they have gone wrong, we will tell them why and tell them what we would have done, based on our experience and understanding of the market, and then underpin that with good solid thinking and case studies, backed up with quality research. It’s not all about going for  CPCs (Cost per Click rates).

DM: So in your experience, do brands see mobile purely as a direct response medium, or as an awareness medium too?

MR: Brands’ attitude towards mobile is not necessarily as a direct response mechanism, though there will always be an element of how many people click through to visit the WAP site or download an app. But they understand the branding element and the emotional factors behind advertising, so it’s not just about the click but about engagement and interaction.
Currently, the big spenders in mobile are the content and gaming and mobile services companies. They account for 75 - 80% of mobile ad spend globally, and the remaining 20 – 25% is brands. Part of the reason for this is that the mobile-centric companies generate income on the back of mobile, because they know the market and it works for them. But over the next four or five years, that will change. Mobile-centric businesses will still spend, but they will be a far smaller percentage of the overall marketplace, and as big brands come in, they will learn their lessons

DM: So what advice would you offer to any band about to dip its toe in the mobile marketing waters?

MR: Remember that mobile and digital are different – the way people consume it is different, on the hoof, immediate response, whereas digital is more considered. Keep things simple. Don’t be blinded by the possibilities of the technology. Sometimes you need to get technical, but mostly, keep it simple and start learning from it. And get your mobile search strategy right – the number of brands and businesses who do not have the right search PPC (Pay per Click) strategy in place for mobile is a travesty.
Finally, I’d say that today is about testing and learning. 10 million people are using the mobile Internet according to m:metrics, so the market is big enough to test to get good learnings, but not yet to play a major part on the marketing media plan. The advantage of that is that you get good solid learnings so that in one year or two years’ time, you will have made your mistakes or learned what works and therefore, it’s you who will benefit. So test with a £20-30k budget, get the learnings and move on.

InMobi In Europe

David Murphy talks to Naveen Tewari, CEO of InMobi (previously Mkhoj), which recently announced its European launch, after success in Asia and Africa

DM: Why did you take the decision to rebrand? Why InMobi as a name?

NT: The rebranding has been in our plans for some time. It was really a confluence of events that drove the timing. As we step onto the global stage, it was important that we simplify and reinforce our core offering. The launch in Europe presented a great opportunity to announce the rebranding. ‘InMobi’ is a reflection of the words ‘in mobile’, and spells out our value proposition clearly. InMobi not only speaks to our core offering, but also symbolizes our long-term goal of being a global player in mobile internet advertising.

DM: Can you give us some numbers relating to your operations in Asia. How many ads served, how many publishers/sites you sell on?

NT: Across Asia, Africa and the Middle East, InMobi is serving 2 billion ad impressions per month. This is across 700 publishers and 150 advertisers on the network.

DM: Who is advertising with you? What is the split between mobile content companies and mainstream brands?

NT: We have a very wide variety of advertisers on the network. We have content players; brands such as Reebok, Yamaha and Nokia; and educational institutions like USJournal to name just a few. The ratio of brands varies from region to region. In some of our geographies brands make up 40% of the total spend.

DM: How are things going in your other territories? Why have you chosen to launch in these regions now?

NT: So far, our focus has been on the Asian and African mobile markets. Now that we have achieved scale there, we feel it is the right time to make the leap to the global stage, especially given the requests from our partners for strong advertising and monetization opportunities in Europe.
After the successful start in the United Kingdom last quarter, we felt that it would be the right time to go live in the rest of Europe, and have started providing our services in France, Germany, Spain and Italy.

DM: What next? What can we expect to see from InMobi over the next year or two?

NT: As we evolve and step onto the global stage, we expect that InMobi will be regarded as a pioneer in many ways. We are one of the few Internet product-based companies that have broken the mould and successfully adopted the approach of scaling up in emerging markets first and then moved to the developed markets.
We feel that rebranding to InMobi will open new doors for us as an organisation. We recognize that developed markets have different nuances, and while we are the most preferred and experienced network in the emerging markets, the next milestone we have set for ourselves is to penetrate the European market. InMobi is continuously working to improve our performance benchmarks, in terms of quality, transparency, innovation and customer service. Our goal is to delight our customers and deliver a global user experience to our advertisers and publisher partners that will set new standards in the mobile advertising industry.

DM: What is your outlook for the mobile advertising business?

NT: We believe that this is just the tip of the iceberg. The future is very promising, with better handsets, and better and more innovative applications coming into the market every day. Mobile advertising is going to start seeing higher shares of the media mix. Brands have started to invest in mobile advertising, and the trend is just going to grow. This can be attributed to the inherent advantages of mobile as a medium.
In the future, we believe mobile advertising is going to see more location-based services, and better utilization of user patterns and preferences, keeping in mind the privacy concerns of users.

DM: Naveen, I hope you’re right, and wish you the best of luck in replicating your success in Asia and Africa in Europe.

NT: Thank you.

Squared Deal

Nick Lane, CEO of mobile research specialist mobileSQUARED, tells David Murphy why he thinks predictions for the value of the UK mobile advertising business are way too high

DM: So Nick, tell us a little about your background if you would

NL: I started out on a publication called Telecoms Pricing Bulletin in 1996, then moved to Informa at the start of 2000 as the Editor of IP Core Network Analyst, moving on to Editor of 3G Mobile, and then at the end of 2006, I was appointed Principal Analyst for mobile content and services. This involved overseeing the report writing and editorial direction and I also had some input into the forecasting, and we were responsible, in fact for that figure for mobile advertising, $11.3 billion per year by 2011, that everyone always seems to quote.

DM: So why mobileSQUARED?

NL: Two years ago, I got fed up of working 80-hour weeks for no money, and the opportunity came along to set my own thing up. The idea was to carry out quick, reactionary research for clients, turning things around within 48 hours or a week for slightly bigger projects. Things like strategic WhitePapers or forecasts. We have built a model based on consumer behaviour that means that by changing a few variables, we can create forecasts.

DM: Can you tell us a little more about the model?

NL: It’s broken down into segments such as Heavy 3G Users, Frequent 3G users and Non-3G users, and using these segments, we can get a pretty accurate figure of where the market is and where it’s going. So it’s fairly accurate, but also, if the market is changing, we can go back to the model and change it to reflect these changes.

DM: And has the business plan panned out as you expected?

NL: We are doing the ad hoc stuff, but there are not as many of these projects around as we expected. We publish a newsletter every couple of months, it will be monthly before long, and we try to use that as a way of doing research. So it’s more like a strong of mini Whitepapers, where we give away some hard facts to encourage people to come back and read the next one.
And then in addition to the ad hoc projects, we go out and produce our own reports on the most interesting sectors of the market as we see them.

DM: Such as?

NL: The three most recent ones are on mobile data in India, looking at content, services, applications and mobile marketing. We have spoken to a lot of people; we did something like 40 interviews, which is a lot for one market.
We’re just putting the finishing touches to another report on mobile apps, and our view is that the whole app thing is not going to work or be particularly effective, despite what everyone seems to think.
Then the big one is on mobile advertising. We’ve spent the last six months researching this, and it’s due out in September. 

DM: And have you come to the same conclusion as the Internet Advertising Bureau (IAB) and PricewaterhouseCoopers, in terms of that the UK mobile advertising market is worth?

NL: No. We think the IAB’s figures are too high. The figures we have suggest the market is a lot lower. But I guess, if the industry believes this is the starting point, and if you agree that to move forward, everyone needs a single figure, then even though we think that figure is too high, in terms of enabling players in the value chain, it could be a good thing.

DM: Have you discussed this with the IAB?

NL: Yes, John Mew at the IAB believes their figures are very accurate.

DM: And if they say £28.6 million, what do you say?

NL: We believe around £10 million for the total marketing in 2008. But this is not me proposing this figure; this is what a lot of companies were telling me at the state of the year.

DM: So what do your reports sell for?

NL: They start from £300. We try to price them realistically and make them economically viable and affordable. The mobile advertising report will be £500, which, for a global view of the mobile advertising marketplace, with all the national breakdowns looking at specific markets, where the spend is going, I would argue, is pretty good value.

DM: And what about the ad hoc stuff?

NL: Around £2,000. And that could be, for example, call us on a Monday morning and on the Friday afternoon, we will deliver you a 15-20 page Whitepaper with six-month projections.  And with all our reports, we offer free updates, so when you buy the report, whenever we update it, you’ll get the new information sent on to you.

DM: Anything else we should know about?

NL: Yes, we’re looking at events to. The first will be on 5 November in central London. A dynamic half-day conference with strategies and case studies for taking your business to the mobile web. We’re dubbing it as ‘where conference meets research’, and after London, we’re looking to take it round the country.

DM: Sounds good, best of luck with it.

NL: Thank you.

Smooth Operator

Turkcell is a mobile operator with a reputation for innovation. David Murphy talks to Head of Mobile Marketing & Advertising, Melis Turkmen, to find out why the company seems to be so far ahead of the game when it comes to mobile marketing

DM: So Melis, first off, tell us a little bit about Turkcell please.

MT: Sure. Turkcell operates in eight countries, and we have 62 million subscribers. In Turkey, we have 37 million subscribers so we are the second-largest operator in Europe and the 13th largest in the world.

DM: So, mobile operators do not have a great reputation. People talk about them as the ‘dumb pipe’ and say they are very slow to innovate, but whenever I hear Turkcell speak at conferences, or when other people talk about you, you seem to stand out from the rest, and you also seem to be very keen to share your experiences.

MT: Well we have more than 20 mobile marketing products and we are keen to give more information about them to people from other countries. We believe we are a leader in the sector, and the job of a leader is to educate and share best practice.
When we talk to some other operators, most of them hardly think about mobile marketing, but we see mobile marketing as a huge opportunity. Therefore, we have been active on new products and services since the beginning. Our database of 7.6 million opt-in subscribers that we can use for mobile marketing and advertising is a healthy revenue generator. This is one of the largest databases of its kind in Europe, possibly in the world, and we know a lot about them, including their location, demographics, and their data usage that we target subscribers accordingly

DM: That’s an impressive number. Do you give these people any incentive to opt in?

MT: We give up to 20 credits (which equals 10 texts) for pre-paid and 10 texts for post-paid, as they opt-in to the database. But the main incentive that we offer is to tell them that the mobile marketing that they will receive on their phones will be targeted to their needs and interests. So the youth segment will get texts offering discounts off Adidas equipment, and housewives will be targeted with offers for things they can use around the house.

DM: And when did you first get in to mobile marketing?

MT: We started in 2002 started with a Sweepstakes campaign for Lipton Ice Tea. We used a keyword and a Shortcode on the packaging that people could text in to in order to win a brand new car!

DM: So what sort of campaigns do you run?

MT: We try to reach our opted-in database via many different channels, SMS, MMS, WAP Push, video, even IVR (Interactive Voice Response). So a customer might get a call asking if they have any Olive Oil in the house, and they are asked to press 1 for Yes and 2 for No. If they press 1, then we send them a gift. If they press 2, then we tell them, if they buy the brand today, we will send you a gift, maybe something you can use in the kitchen.
Credit and airtime campaigns are also very popular. In fact, campaigns account for more than 60% of our mobile marketing revenues, with the rest coming from advertising. We sell credit and airtime to brands, in millions of units, that they can then give away for free to their subscribers
In May 2007 for example, we ran a campaign for Pepsi, where consumers had to text in to a Shortcode printed on cans of Pepsi. This was charged as one text message, but by texting in, they were guaranteed five credits, which equals two and a half texts or two minutes talk time. That was an enormous success. We received 13 million texts from 1 million people in three months.
The great thing about a campaign like this is that the consumer can’t lose. Everyone gets the guaranteed minimum, but you may get more. In this campaign, for example, we gave away 2009 credits and 500 minutes of talk time every hour.

DM: And what sort of revenues are you generating from mobile marketing?

MT: We estimate that in 2009, there will be $91 million (£55 million) of revenues from mobile marketing in Turkey, and we will take a 70% share of that. Next year, we are forecasting $125 million, of which we will take 69%, and in 2012, $260 million, with Turkcell again taking 69% of those revenues. These revenues are made up of all three operators in Turkey, plus the agencies. We have around 20 agencies who are selling our products to advertiser brands.
We are also now selling advertising on other publishers’ sites, and within iPhone applications, as well as our own mobile portal. We have set up a mobile advertising sales house to do this.

DM: And of course, many people will associate Turkcell with the Tone&Win campaign, where Turkcell subscribers get credit in return for using advertising messages as a Ringback Tone that their friend here when they call them. We came out and criticised the idea when you launched it, but it has been winning awards, so I guess you must be doing something right.

MT: Yes, Tone&Win was selected as the best mobile marketing and advertising service in the GSMA Global awards, Visiongain’s Mama and the Meffy Awards. This could only be explained by a technically well-powered service which is built on a good business model. Tone & Win is now hitting record levels with Pepsi’s new promotion in Turkey. Earlier this year, Turkcell cooperated with Pepsi for the brand’s summer promotion. Although the promotion mechanic is a typical text & Win, consumers are experiencing a one-of-a-kind interaction throughout the campaign. Pepsi’s new viral advertising on mobile has been so unique and well received by the consumers that 3.8 million consumers took part within the first month, outperforming all previous promotional campaigns.

DM: And what else are you planning?

MT: We have recently launched mobile surveys. It’s like a ‘fast-food’ survey service. The market research firms are still trying to do surveys on the streets, but you need a lot of people for that and it costs a lot of money. But with a mobile survey, we can profile the database, send them a WAP Push link to the survey and they can answer it right there on their phone. We are also talking to the big research firms about the service.

DM: Is anyone using it?

MT: Yes. One client, Garanti, has a credit card called Flexi. When they run a TV ad, we send out a WAP Push link to a mobile survey asking people what they thought of the ad, whether they liked it, whether it would make them want a Flexi credit card. 
For the future, we are launching 3G this summer, so we will have new products like Mobile TV with advertising, video calls and ad-funded video, so there will be even more mobile marketing and advertising products. We are also giving out information for free to subscribers in the form of ad-funded text messages, things like weather updates, lottery results. For the Weather service, we have 2 million subscribers, and Pepsi have bought the entire inventory for June, July and August. In fact, the whole year is sold. And when 3G arrives, we will offer video versions of these services.

DM: You have won lots of awards this year for mobile marketing and advertising, what is your secret?

MT: As I said, we are a leader in the sector, and the job of a leader is to educate and share best practice.  So that leads to appreciation in the local and global arena not only in mobile marketing articles and research studies, but also reputable awards. Tone&Win was selected as best mobile advertising service by the GSMA, the Mobile Entertainment Forum (Meffys) and Visiongain, and Visiongain also named our permission database as the runner-up for the best network for delivery of mobile marketing and advertising.

DM: Good stuff, keep us posted on what you’re up to, sounds like there’s plenty to talk about.

MT: Will do.

Open Season

David Murphy talks to Airwide Solutions Chief Marketing Officer Jay Seaton about the company’s Open Services Framework

DM: So Jay, what exactly is the Airwide Open Services Framework?

JS: It’s a solution that enables operators to use network intelligence on messaging and browsing, location, user profiling, presence, security, micropayments and other activities, in order to create and enhance high quality, relevant applications, without disrupting existing infrastructure.
We conducted a survey recently with 20 operators, Tier 1, 2 and 3, spread across developed and developing regions. We wanted to explore attitudes towards mobile applications, because the issue for operators is whether they compete against, or co-exist with, app stores. So we asked them: What percentage of mobile apps do you expect to be able to control? The answers surprised us a little. 45% said 10% or less, which was  surprisingly low. 36% said between 20 and 30%. So that’s the vast majority of operators saying they expect to be able to control less than 30% of the apps their subscribers access.

DM: And what do you mean by control?

JS: That will vary from operator to operator. For some, it’s control in the sense of, make sure the apps are not corrupting the network or creating spam. Others may take a tighter view, so for them, control will mean which services and applications the subscribers can access.

DM: So why the Open Services Framework, and how will it help operators?

JS: Right now, the operators are being forced out of the discussion and the picture. Brands and mobile content companies do not think of the operators as being in the mix or of messaging as being in the mix. And that is the underlying problem with these services for operators – they are being forced out of the equation and they are getting less revenue. They are also being cut out of the relationship with their subscribers, so it’s heading towards this idea of the operator as dumb pipe.
So the question is, how can operators enhance these apps and play a more significant role? There are things they could do. Take something like a Wine Reviews application. In this instance, the operator could say, based on your location, here are three stores to buy it from, or here’s a 20% discount coupon, and you can pay by SMS. Also, the same app will look different on different devices, so the operator could adapt the content for each device.

DM: And how would the operator know what apps I have on my phone?

JS: By dealing with the developer community at source, exposing those apps in the form of APIs (Application Programming Interfaces), to say, we can LBS-enable the app for our subscribers if you write to this API. For the developers, the issue is, with any one operator, they only get 20 - 30% of the subscribers in that country, and if you consider that these apps are largely being developed with Smartphones in mind, which is 20% of the handset market, then it’s 20% of 20%.  As part of our platform, we enables them to adapt these apps for any device, so instead of 20% of 20%, it’s 100%.
So the Open Services Framework, is really a foundation to enable operators to enhance these apps. Realistically, for this to happen, the exposing of the APIs has to be separate from the underlying infrastructure. Operators are slow to deploy mobile apps because they have to run on some hardware platform that has to go into the network, which brings in delays. When you look at the number of devices, network components and capabilities, every one takes dozens of connections. This is why it can take 12-24 months for an operator to launch an application. Then you compare that with the Apple App Store, where there were 25,000 apps in four months. So this is why we bought First Hop in Finland a year or so ago, because they had developed leading gateways and established an unprecedented level of connections to different systems.
So we have been working with our customers to develop an Open Services Framework, which gives operators a service innovation module and service creation platform, which are independent from the underlying infrastructure.
It includes two modules, the Service Innovation Module and the Delivery Optimisation Module. These are entirely separate, so as an operator, I could deploy one and not the other. Operators make tons of money from SMS and they have a good infrastructure, so they don’t want to touch it. This platform enables new possibilities for enhancements without touching the infrastructure, so it solves the time to market problem.

DM: How does it work?

JS: The Service Innovation Module looks at what the operator needs to create and manage apps – the ability to expose APIs for what they are interested in, profile management, and the mapping of the operator’s capabilities, brokering those to the services. The developer does not care how it happens, he just wants to know that his app can be mapped to SMS and MMS.
Then the Delivery Optimisation Module, which is SMSCs and routers and infrastructure, optimises the delivery of the message in terms of things like what speed, format and quality do things get delivered at. The operator will know what devices he has on the network and where they are, so the app developer does not have to worry about any of that.
So if you take that Wine Review app, for example, the operator can decide that I get an MMS showing the wine label and you just get a text version because that’s what your phone can handle, using the Service Innovation Module to determine who gets what.

DM: And who is going to pitch this idea to the developer community?

JS: It’s up to the operator’s primarily, but as we build this out, we will develop third party partnerships in key categories. So an operator could say he will expose the API to any developer, or he could partner with someone. If they want more control, they will pick one wine review app and that will be their recommended wine review app. Others will say their subscribers can access whichever one they want, they would just say to the developer community, any of you can write to our API.

DM: Is this a concept that developers want?

JS: The operators are crying out for it, developers less so. But they do want a common platform to write to, partly due to the success of the iPhone, which is one platform with wide coverage, so developers want wide applicability for anything they write. 

DM: And does this Open Services Framework actually exist or is it a work in progress?

JS: Every element of this exists, we have done it for social networks and content services and have deployed elements of this to 40 operators. We are now taking it and packaging it up into one solution. For the operators, it enables them to take part in all mobile applications, both in terms of earning revenue and providing value to the subscriber and maintaining the relationship with them, so we think this is something that operators will want.

Getting Personal

David Murphy meets Rebecca Prudhomme, Marketing Director at Amdocs Interactive

DM: So tell us about Amdocs Interactive please Rebecca.

RP: It’s a business unit of Amdocs that’s focused on the online experience, so we are all about self service, digital commerce, personalisation, all aspects of the interaction between the service provider and the consumer, so we try to help service providers (mobile network operators) increase the personalisation of the online experience.
The online experience has become incredibly complex, with users not just browsing on the operator’s portal, but going off portal too, and with the growth of Smartphones, we think this trend will continue. People want to get relevant content, so our focus is on helping service providers personalise the online experience.

DM: So how do you do it?

RP: Our personalisation assets came in with our acquisition of Changing Worlds in December 2008. We do it by personalising the mobile portal, building in intelligent navigation and personalisation. So if you have an interest in sport or particular hobbies, this will influence what the portal looks like. It will push you links to your favourite content, and we have some stats from our own research that tell us that if the click distance (the number of clicks required to get to your desired content) goes down by up to 50%, this drives a 20% lift in ARPU.

DM: And what’s the personalisation based on? Usage? Self profiling?

RP: It’s based on usage. We build a profile of the individual by looking at the content they use and the sites they visit.

DM: So how many deployments do you have?

RP: there are 45 service providers worldwide using Changing Worlds, equating to over 300 million subscribers.

DM: Any names?

RP: In Europe, we have some of the Vodafone operating companies, plus O2. In the US, Sprint, and we also have some deployments in Asia Pac.

DM: And apart from the personalistion, are there any other aspects to Changing Worlds?

RP: Yes. When the user moves off-portal, the platform can track the sites they are visiting, and feed that back to the operator so they can continue to build the profile.

DM: So essentially, whatever content they are browsing, on- or off-portal, gets fed back into this personalisation engine for the operator’s benefit.

RP: Exactly.

DM: Looking beyond Changing Worlds, you announced an app store solution at Mobile World Congress, which begs the question, does the world really need another one?

RP: When we talk to our service provider customers, they say they realise this is an opportunity, not to drive additional revenues, but to create stickiness. If they can provide applications to their consumers to help them maximise their devices, this creates stickiness. So we have launched an app store solution for service providers, including the tools to allow them to create a developer community to support the app store, developer tools and storefront capabilities. And we are currently working with many service providers on their app store strategy.

DM: How many?

RP: That I can’t reveal, but we definitely see strong momentum in the operator community around app stores. China Mobile has announced its intention to launch its app store, O2 has announced one, and Orange has announced plans for its app store. It’s interesting because their concept is provide applications to their consumers to enable them to maximise their use of their device, and they have a significant subscriber base. Handset makers are limited to owners of their devices, but some of these big operators have an unbelievable reach, and they can offer some unique assets that the handset makers don’t have, like personalisation, for example. This can help them to provide a differentiated app store. Apple has over 15,000 apps in its app store, and consumers can get lost. But the operators have rich customer information, and a billing relationship, and this is a unique asset that they can leverage to enhance the customer’s experience.

DM: So we’re not talking about one new app store, but potentially, dozens, or even hundreds, as different operators launch app stores as another point of differentiation between themselves and their competitors. Isn’t this going to lead to a lot of confusion?

RP: If operators take the right approach and use their unique assets, they can actually make it less confusing. The ones that will win are those that make it easy for developers to develop applications, and that make it easy for consumers to find relevant applications and buy them. These are the defining factors and where service providers are concerned, they have an advantage in that they have a unique capability to help developers to fine tune applications and target them at consumers, based on their user profile.

Christian Values

Towards the end of last year, David Murphy met with Christian Lindholm, ex-Nokia handset designer and now a director of digital innovations and design consultancy Fjord, to talk about the iPhone, Android, mobile wallets and much more  

So tell us about Fjord, Christian. What do you guys do?

We’re a design company, so we conceive new innovations. We go from nothing to something and then from something to something better. We’ve done work for the likes of Nokia, the BBC, Orange and Yahoo! We won a 3GSM Award for our work on Yahoo! Go, and we were involved in the first tangible manifestation of the iPlayer in 2005.
There are four elements to what we do. Firstly, Services – this is the funnel; how you get consumers interested, engaged and then monetise them. Second, Interfaces, which is at the heart of everything we do. Then there’s Research - user shadowing, ethnography, contextual enquiry, advanced benchmarking, usability testing. Then finally, the System – this is all about designing the system, the collection of different services and how they interact with each other.

So what’s caught your eye in the mobile space recently?

MMA Man with a Mission

David Murphy talks to incoming Mobile Marketing Association (MMA) President and CEO, Mike Wehrs

DM: So Mike, when do you start?

MW: I already have. 2 January was my first day.

DM: So what attracted you to the job?

MW: For me, it’s about the opportunity the MMA has to really open up the idea of mobile as a marketing channel for large branded companies, to help them get their message out over the mobile channel.

DM: Laura Marriott is going to be a pretty tough act to follow. How do you summarise her achievements while in the post?

MW: Laura has done a fantastic job. Take any metric you like, whether it’s the number of members worldwide, the number of conferences held, the growth in the level of participation, or just where we started and where we have got to, and all of that is fantastic. The question now is, what comes next? It’s about the maturation of a trade body and this is an area where I have a background that I think will enable me to help in a pretty dramatic way. I want to build the MMA so it becomes more of a business rather than an enterprise growth opportunity. Yes, we need to see growth in membership, but we also need to put processes and procedures in place to meet the expectations of our members and we need the ability to scale beyond 1,000 members, and this is the sort of thing I’ve been doing for a long time, at board and Chairman and Executive Committee level.

DM: You’re joining the MMA at a tough time. It’s going to be difficult to convince big brand marketers to put money into a relatively new channel isn’t it?

MW: Given the current economic conditions, you could easily draw that conclusion, but I think marketers need to look at what are the benefits of mobile that can’t be achieved through other channels, and what is the ROI. If you look at conversion rates, the opportunities for personalisation, location-based services, the personal nature of the device, these are all incredibly attractive to anyone who would like to sell anything.

DM: Are there any areas of the MMA’s operations where you see room for improvement?

MW: I think we need to focus on the infrastructure and member services. We have to make it easy as possible for members to get information and to interact with the MMA on a regular basis. The MMA has done a great job so far, but as we become a bigger company, we have over 700 member companies now, and these are not all large companies with lots of resource, so we need to make it easier to access the information we provide, and as companies start to recognise what can be done with the mobile channel, then we need to look at what they need in order to become conversant and an expert in marketing in the mobile channel so there’s an education component there, and then we also need to look at expansion into additional markets. The MMA exists pretty capably in four regions of the world, but that still leaves a lot to go for.

DM: So what’s at the top of your To Do list?

MW: The MMA has a relocation plan to move from Denver to Manhattan to be closer to Madison Avenue and the ad agencies, so in the short term, I need to get the New York office up and running and transition our expertise from Denver to NY. Laura has done a great job, so it’s my job to hire the remaining key staff and make sure everything runs smoothly on 1 February.
I also want to tighten and clarify our messaging around the value proposition of being an MMA member and improve our responsiveness to members, both through our existing programs and through the new ones we have in mind.
Finally, I want to look at our participation with the industry, partnerships, and how we work with other industry trade associations. I want to look at all the trade associations that touch us in one area and make the relationships we have with them more clarified and more formalised.

Indoor Issues

Sudhir Tangri, Marketing Director of “innovation, technology and outsourcing” company Aricent, explains to David Murphy why femtocells will be a vital part of future high-speed mobile networks

DM: So give us the low-down on Aricent if you would please Sudhir.

ST: Sure. Aricent was formed in 1992 as an offshoot of HNS and initially, we were called Hughes Software Systems. In 2004, we became part of Flextronics Software Systems, and then in 2006, a private equity firm invested in us, and we became Aricent. But we have always been extremely focused on the telecom space for the past 16 years, and we have more than 8,500 consultants and engineers working in this space on a variety of technologies.   
Our headquarters are in Palo Alto, California, and we have 19 offices and delivery centres based in India, China, Germany, the UK, S. Africa, Mexico and Ukraine, which means we can be close to our customers.

DM: And how long have you been working on femtocells?

Dutch Courage

There’s a new name on the UK mobile agency scene. David Murphy caught up with Geert Kolthof, Managing Director of Service2Media, to find out more

DM: So give us the background to the company if you would please Geert.

GK: Sure. The founders of the company, including myself, originally worked for Logica CMG, where we created SMS switches, MMS systems and mobile Internet gateways for network operators. In 2004, a few of us decided to leave, because we believed that the future of mobile applications does not lie with the operators, but with major consumer brands; mobile is a fantastic tool to connect brands to their customers.
The only issue was that there were not many companies focused on that in 2005. There were a lot doing SMS and ringtones, but not many doing relevant applications for big brands. So three of us formed the company in 2005, and we are now 42 people and cash-flow positive.

DM: So where have you been operating up until now?

GK: We started in Holland because it’s a very innovative market, the most advanced market for the mobile Internet and mobile applications in Europe, in fact.

DM: Really? That might surprise some people to hear that.

Ad Man

David Murphy catches up with ‘Mobile Advertising Evangelist’ Andrew Grill

DM: So Andrew, tell us a little bit about yourself and what a Mobile Advertising Evangelist does for a living.

AG: I’m an Aussie by birth, have worked in marketing in the telco industry for 20 years, for Optus and Telstra, then I left to run a commercial property start-up and came back to the industry in 2004 with Legion Interactive in Sydney, who are a bit like an Australian version of WIN. After that, I worked with a company called Seeker Wireless providing Location-based Services. I was the company’s third employee and I took them to the world and opened their London office in 2006. Then I got a taste for the mobile advertising space and I realised that with my background in marketing, mobile advertising was a perfect fit, so I left the company in July and set myself up as a Mobile Advertising Evangelist.

DM: So what’s keeping you busy right now?

AG: I’m consulting with some companies that are doing some interesting stuff. I’ve also being doing a blog called London Calling for the last four years. For the last year, it’s been focused on mobile advertising, but it also covers social networking, location and other stuff, but it’s all firmly focused on mobile

DM: So who are you working with?

AG: Just now, a lot of my energy is focused on a company called Gigafone, who have a very smart mobile application. To my mind, for mobile advertising to be successful, there are three boxes it has to tick: Permission, Privacy and Preference
So it has to be permission-based, it has to respect the privacy of the individual, and it has to take account of their preferences. A lot of mobile advertising solutions I think are ‘pay and spray’. They just put ads out hoping someone will see them, and I think this has to change, and this is what I like about Gigafone. With their solution, the user is in full control, they can tell the advertiser what sort of ads they would like to see, and the platform rewards them when a call or a text comes in and full screen ad delivered to handset related to what interested in.

DM: So how does Gigafone work?

AG: They’ve been up and running in Russia for the last three years and they have 600,000 users there. When you receive a call, you’re rewarded, either by talk-time minutes or free content. The platform enables the operator to go out to their pre-pay customer base, and offer them free minutes of talk-time if they are prepared to accept advertising on their phone, as a way of retaining them. Or they can offer them free content. It’s really down to the operator how they choose to reward the customer.

DM: And this is just in Russia?

AG: For the moment, yes, but we will be live with operators in Asia very soon, and there are also operators in Europe trialing the platform.

DM: So for the consumer, the appeal is free talk-time or content. What about the advertisers?

AG: We’re seeing great interest from brands and agencies, because this goes beyond the mob banner. It allows creatives to develop interesting mobile ads; it could be a short video, an animated wallpaper, anything. It allows brands to design something interesting.

DM: And what sort of advertisers are we talking about? Is it all very mobile-centric?

AG: No, we’re seeing FMCG brands, car rental companies. It’s across the board, and it needs to be, because every user is different. They only want to see advertising that’s relevant to them. If the ads are relevant to what people are interested in, they like it.

DM: And the ads that Gigafone is serving. Presumably these are all direct response ads, clicking through to a mobile site?

AG: It works best when it’s done in conjunction with a mobile website, for sure, but it  comes back to preference, because all the time, we are asking people what they are interested in. This is why smart advertisers like the technology, because it provides a feedback loop. This is really the elephant in the room. Mobile operators don’t have access to the data advertisers need. Once you start asking people what they are interested in, there’s a step change in the perception of advertising.

DM: I would imagine, then, that you admire what Blyk is trying to do.

AG: Blyk have been groundbreakers because they were the ones that said that this was possible. It’s permission-based and its opt-in and they have turned the whole thing on its head. I guess the challenge now for Blyk is how do they take that model into a different demographic, because 16-24 year olds like the idea of a conversation with a brand. It may take some time to work out how to make that model work with older consumers who have more disposable income. But fair play to Blyk, they broke the mould, and they can take a lot of credit for the fact that advertisers are now thinking about mobile.

Social Services

David Murphy talks to Refresh Mobile CEO Scott Beaumont about the company’s latest development, Mippin Social

DM: So Scott, I’m familiar with Mippin, a very clever, very useful service that creates a mobile version of any website with an RSS feed. What does Mippin Social do to move things on?

SB: Mippin Social is really a simple way to discover, connect, share and recommend content with users like you via your mobile to a global audience. It works by cross-referencing content consumption and user recommendations, so that we can enable Mippin to connect people with other like-minded people.

DM: So where did the idea come from?

SB: We’ve always tried to help people discover and share content, and a little while back, we started to do some sophisticated things that allowed people to personalise their own page without having to register. So you might go on Mippin and read Mobile Marketing Magazine, so we would let you know that other Mippin users who read Mobile Marketing Magazine also look at the following sites. So it was a recommendation engine basically. But it was Mippin doing the recommending. So then we thought: ‘Why do we need to do this? Why don’t we just introduce users to other users and let them decide who they want to interact with.’
So we have created an individual page for every user. Mine is scottbeau.mippin.com, for example. So any user who wants to can discover me and see what I’m looking at and what I’ve shared and recommended, Facebook-style. Then you might want to follow this person’s stream and they can follow you in return. We’re excited because we can see immediately that people are much more engaged because you tend to respond better to what people you want to follow are recommending to you.

DM: So how does it work?

SB: When you visit Mippin on your phone, you’ll see on the homepage a link called ‘Featured Users’. If you click on one of these, you will see more details about them, including their Mippin username, the sites they look at, the people they are connected to, and how similar they are to you, based on their profile and the sites they look at on Mippin. You can also see what stories they have shared, and you get the option to Follow them as you would on Twitter, to see what sites they’ve been looking at.

DM: So when I click on the Featured Users link, are the users that are returned completely random? Can I search for someone I know who uses Mippin because I want to see what sites they look at? Because that to me is when something like this starts to become really useful.

SB: Right now, it is random, but that functionality will come with the next release in there or four weeks time. The next release will also enable you to search for people who look at sites about a particular subject, such as fishing, yoga, or whatever.

DM: So how does this benefit users?

SB: Well it’s easy to use for one thing. There’s no download required. And it’s just another way of finding relevant content. I use it all the time now, I can dip into my social stream and see what stories people are recommending. It helps me bust my boundaries, because I think we all tend to get stuck in a rut in terms of the stories we follow. What’s really beautiful about this and Twitter is that it helps you get through the boundaries that are put up by yourself.

DM: And how long has this been up and running?

SB: It’s been in private beta for the past four weeks with 1,000 users. It went live last week, and we’ve had great feedback on what people like about it and on how it can be improved.

DM: And where is this heading ultimately?

SB: There are two parts to our DNA. We always wanted the end consumer to get content  for free, and we always wanted publishers to be able to put their content in front of consumers without necessarily going via an operator, so for the publishers, it’s an opportunity to monetize their content, because if content is being recommended, that’s going to drive incremental traffic and revenue. And for the consumer, we want to make Mippin more engaging and more relevant to them so that it becomes either their default homepage, or one of three or four mobile sites they visit daily.

Flirting With Success

David Murphy meets Mark Curtis, CEO of mobile and online flirting company Flirtomatic. As Curtis explains, the Flirtomatic proposition may be based on fun, but as a business, it’s deadly serious.

DM: So Mark, tell us where the idea for Flirtomatic came from

MC: I was working at Fjord at the time, and we were keen to try and get Nokia as a client and Christian Lindholm (now a Director of Fjord), challenged us to dream up five ideas that could be big on mobile in the next few years. So we sat down and asked ourselves what was big on the web, and we could see that online dating was growing phenomenally. So we asked ourselves: ‘What will dating look like when it goes mobile?’ And we decided it would be more fun, more light-hearted, quicker, and someone said: ‘That’s flirting’, and the idea took root immediately. It just sounded exactly right, so this turned into one of the five ideas and Nokia helped us develop it. They introduced us to Avi Azulai, who was the Joint MD of iTouch, who were one of the big mobile content firms in the first wave of that sector, and are now part of Buongiorno. He loved the idea, and a few months later, came on board as a seed investor and Chairman, and I started building the first iteration in late 2004. As time went on, it became clear that Flirtomatic would need a permanent CEO and I was in the best position to take up that role.

DM: Did anything come of any of the other four ideas?

MC: Not yet, but one of them is a stonker. You may see that one. 

DM: So where did you go from there?

Mobile Publicist

David Murphy meets Alexandre Mars, CEO of Publicis-owned mobile marketing firm Phonevalley, and Head of Mobile of  Publicis Groupe

DM: So give us the low-down on Phonevalley if you would please Alexandre.

AM: We were founded in 2001, and initially, we operated only in France. Then in September last year, Publicis bought us to scale up their mobile presence, so now we are the mobile arm for Publicis Groupe, and we have offices in the US, Asia, Singapore, Russia and Europe, including the UK, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. We are the only mobile agency with a global reach, a real presence, with people in all those countries.

DM: And you believe that’s important?

Fast Talker

David Murphy catches up with Jeremy Copp, CEO of mobile advertising technology company, Rapid Mobile

DM: So Jeremy, there seem to be a lot of mobile advertising firms out there these days, what makes Rapid Mobile different?

JC: We have three points of difference. The first is that we are a technology provider. We licence our platform, which fits the needs of the advertising value chain but hides the mobile complexity. So it’s a white-label solution that the publisher takes and integrates it and it delivers a mobile advertising channel for their properties. It’s designed for larger publishers with serious mobile properties. So one example is Metro, who publish the free daily newspapers. Metro Mobile is their mobile web property and it uses Rapid technology to serve the content and deliver advertising into it. 
Our second USP is the breadth of the types of ad that we can deliver. We are not wedded to standard types of advertising. We can do text in SMS, graphics in MMS, display ads on mobile Internet sites, or within mobile applications, or interstitials, where you click on a link, and while you’re waiting for it to load, it displays a full-screen ad.
And the third point is that we understand the different phone types. We have a device knowledge database that understands the optimal format for delivery to each phone, so we can optimise it so that the user gets best the experience of the advertising, and the creative only needs to be produced once.

DM: So do you work with operators, D2C companies or both?

Instant Success

David Murphy catches up with Pascal Lorne, CEO of mobile Instant Messaging company Miyowa

DM: So Pascal, you’ve just closed an $8 million (£4 million) funding round. What are you going to do with the money?

PL: We’ll use it to finance the development of our US operations. We’re now a leader in Europe and Asia for mobile IM (Instant Messaging) and we want to take advantage of this position to go to the US market. 
We’ll also use it to invest more deeply into our new product line. This is an intelligent dynamic address book which will be officially launched by the end of July. It allows the user to get on their phone’s contact list a kind of dashboard showing who is doing what. So you get their name and number of course, but you also get a small icon showing who is listening to music, who is updating photos on their blog, who has video files to share, so at any time if you browse your contact list, you have this dashboard of the activities your close friends are up to, so you’re never alone, you’re always connected. It’s a purely optin system, so it’s not intrusive, but the first tests we have run show that teenagers are very willing to let other people know what they’re doing.

DM: Will you charge for it?

PL: It will be distributed by carriers and we are pushing very hard for the carriers to give it away for free, because they will accumulate the data usage. It’s a great way to stimulate data traffic

DM: Where will it be available?

PL: In Europe and the US initially. We will have deals in place with three carriers in Europe by the end of the year, with the first one launching in September.

DM: So what else has been happening since we last spoke?

PL: Well the company now has operations in Europe, Asia and US. We have 86 people, and offices in London, Paris, Madrid, Munich, Berlin, Singapore, Taipeng and Cupertino. In the last 12 months, the company has doubled its revenues, just as it has for the last four years, and we are predicting that we will double our revenues again this year to achieve a revenue of between $12 and $20 million. 

DM: And how do the revenues break down?

PL: 50% comes from mobile IM, 30% from mobile email, and 20% from blogs, picture sharing and social networking.

DM: And if you fast-forward 12 months, how will the split look then?

PL: Well we think the new product line, the rich address book, will generate 50% of our revenues by 2010, based on own research, and the footprint and the traction we are getting from our customers today. Our carrier customers have all shown a very strong interest in the new line of products.

DM: So how difficult is it to stay focused on what you do. You haven’t jumped on the mobile advertising bandwagon, for example.

PL: It is hard to stay focused, but having said that, as CEO, my main role is  to lead the vision and focus of the company, and in order to do that, I don’t  go to the office every day. I talk to customers all over the world, and I visit Japan every month, because this is the most advanced market. We have run trials in Europe and Japan on mobile advertising, and I can tell you that these tests show that there is interest from the end-user perspective, but as far as advertisers are concerned, there is not much interest in replacing the commercial (paid-for) model with the advertising model.
When we see sufficient interest from advertisers, we will get involved; we have a mobile advertising platform, we are plugged into Google, AdMob etc., but the inventory is not there yet, even if they say it is. We can bring them millions of page views per day, but they don’t have the inventory, even though they claim to. 

DM: And are there any other areas that you’re looking at?

PL: We have built our reputation on doing what we do well and remaining focused. We have a leading position in Europe because we are focused. We do look at other ideas, but unless they are a very good fit with where we want to go, we don’t go there. There are so many opportunities, but to be the best, you have to focus on the areas where you are

Monetizing Mobile Applications

Berggi is a mobile applications developer that wants to help other developers monetize their applications though advertising. David Murphy caught up with CEO Babur Ozden to find out more

DM: So Babur, you’ve just launched your Ads@Berggi mobile ad platform. Give us the background to it if you would

BO: 18 months ago, we launched a mobile email service and then added additional mobile products such as mobile IM (Instant Messaging), mobile search, and in January of this year, Berggi video, which lets you watch videos on your phone. We give these applications away to the end user and our revenue model is to make money from advertising from the traffic generated by the users. As usage of our applications has increased, we have built a critical mass of daily mobile traffic.
So last summer, we started working with third party mobile ad networks to turn the mobile traffic in their networks into revenues.
And what we found was that, despite the fact we were providing high-volume, good-quality mobile traffic, the return in terms of revenues from the third party networks was dismal, extremely dismal, so the launch of Ads@Berggi is us trying to find a way to find way to solve our revenue problem as a mobile applications provider.
So we asked ourselves why our high volume traffic cannot turn into revenue through third party mobile ad networks.

DM: And what did you come up with as an answer?

Transcoding: the Riposte

When we ran our interview with Novarra a couple of weeks ago, we thought it would create a stir, but even so, the strength of feeling it provoked surprised us. After the interview appeared, the comments started coming, and along with them, support for Luca Passani, mobile consultant and the man who runs the WURFL open source project, who many people felt had been unfairly criticised in the interview. We caught up with Passani to get his reaction to the interview

DM: OK Luca, so we ran the interview with Novarra, in which we invited the company to defend itself against some of the criticism that its transcoding solution has attracted. The piece generated a lot of debate and a lot of comment, with many people coming out against Novarra, and in support of the “one guy still going on about it” which was widely assumed to mean yourself. What was your reaction to the interview and to Novarra's defence of its technology deployments?

LP: I was surprised by Jayanthi's interview. I did not expect it. I can only think of two explanations. Either Jayanthi is being lied to by the people who work for her, or Novarra is making a bigger mistake by confusing marketing of a generic software product with the marketing of a product which completely disrupts the way companies have created mobile content so far, which is Novarra's situation.
They should have expected that their product (and their public position) would end up under the scrutiny of the whole mobile world. Apparently, not only did they not see it coming, but they even continue to make believe that I am the problem.
The fact is that they are effectively disrupting everyone else's effort to create mobile applications and this is considered unacceptable by most. Readers' reactions to the interview prove this. A whole industry is negatively affected by the introduction of transcoders.
Of course, Novarra is not the only vendor of reformatters. Openwave and Infogin are Novarra's direct competitors. Yet they had no problem acknowledging transcoders' potential to cripple the user-experience of mobile-optimised sites. In fact, they went even further and took the necessary measures to mitigate the problem.
Novarra had been silent for a few months, so I was assuming that they had got the message and were silently working to a remedy. Jayanthi's interview has shown that this obviously is not the case and Novarra still hopes that everyone will silently accept their attempt to redefine the mobile Internet for their own personal advantage.

DM: Tell me why transcoding seems to be so universally despised in the mobile content community?

Talking Transcoding

Novarra came in for a lot of criticism last year when it deployed its transcoding solution for Vodafone UK. The solution effectively rendered some WAP sites invisible to Vodafone users. We caught up with President and COO, Jayanthi Rangarajan, to ask her about the affair

DM: Now when you deployed that transcoding solution for Vodafone UK, you came in for an awful lot of criticism from some quarters. Was it justified?

JR: The criticism is aged out. The problems were in the first few weeks, and while there is a community that continues to complain, the facts are that the operators are very happy and the mobile content partners are very happy. The actual fact, versus the hype, is that Internet usage in Vodafone UK is now around 1,000 times what it was before we launched with them and it has increased mobile content consumption.

DM: So just run us through the problem if you would please.

Mobile Wif-fi Made Easy

David Murphy catches up with Devicescape CEO Dave Fraser, to find out more about the company's  solution to simplify access to wi-fi networks

DM: Dave, regular readers will know that Devicescape simplifies access to wi-fi networks for wi-fi equipped phones and other devices like cameras where data entry is less easy than on a PC. We heard back in October that you had done a deal to make your application available on some Nokia devices. What else has happened in the past 12 months?

DF: Well we launched in 2007 and built outstanding device relationships with a number of companies, including Nokia. We also added several more that we have not announced yet, and we saw lot of interest in dual-mode handsets. Handset makers seem interested in accommodating wi-fi because of the amount of data traffic on the 3G network. Every handset maker is looking at our technology or thinking of some way to use it. Media player makers too, are embracing wi-fi as a service access mechanism.
Then on the network side of things, we had 300 signed up last October, and now it’s over 1,000, so we have every commercial hotspot network in our system. We added those first, but our real achievement has been in getting the assistance of the community, so ordinary folks can add networks they care about, even down to single point locations. So we have 300 universities, big networks, and then we get down to coffee shops and single locations, so you can get access where you want.
We have also cut some deals with operators to licence our technology, including BT, The Cloud and Deutsche Telecom.

DM: Sounds like a good year.

Flying the MDM Flag

David Murphy meets David Ginsburg, Vice President, Marketing & Product Management at MDM (Mobile Device Management) firm, InnoPath

DM: So give us the InnoPath story if you would please David.

DG: We launched in 2003 with FOTA (Firmware Over The Air) deployments in Japan, expanded to Tier 1 operators in N. America in 2005, and we are now extending our OMA-DM (Open Mobile Alliance - Device Management) footprint globally.
We have gone through five quarters of profitability. In September, we announced that Verizon had launched a FOTA service using our software. We are currently deploying with China Unicom, the second largest operator in the world, which is adopting MDM for FOTA updates, advanced customer care, and security, and we have also been selected by KDDI as the basis for their next-generation common platform, a BREW implementation spanning all handsets in their network in Japan.
We are firmly focused on device management, and we are seeing 2008 as a watershed year, with deployments in places like Europe and Latin America. We have a complete server-side solution that we sell into operators, and a client solution that we sell into OEM partners (handset makers), so we bring a unique understanding to the market of the problems and concerns that both the operators and the OEMs have in deploying an end-to-end solution. These solutions are part of our Integrated Mobile Device Management (iMDM) product family.

DM: And what’s on the cards for this year?

Don't Stop at WAP

David Murphy meets Meidad Sharon, Director, Product Marketing and Business Development, Content Solutions at Comverse, a company with some interesting ideas on how network operators can make money from mobile advertising

 DM: So Meidad, I believe Comverse has a pretty unusual approach to mobile advertising, can you tell us about it?

MS: When you’re talking about mobile media, the operator has two assets. The first is the ability to touch the user through multiple touchpoints. When people think about mobile advertising, they think of the mobile web, banners, search etc but operator has much more inventory than that to sell.

DM: Such as?

MS: There’s a host of things. Off-portal inventory. Messaging channels A2P (Application-to-person) and P2P Person-to-Person). And voice channels, so a bit like a ringback tone, but instead of hearing a ringback tone selected by the person receiving the call, the caller hears an ad because they have opted in to the programme.

DM: And what’s the second asset?

MS: It’s the fact that mobile media is the only 1-on-1 media, compared to TV or billboards or print advertising. Even the web, because on the web, I might think I know who the user is from the IP address, but that could be me in the morning, my wife in the afternoon and one of the kids in the evening. Also, the operator has a lot of detail on the users, historical data about where they have surfed in the past; what they are doing now. Are they on a news site or a sports site? And also socio-demographic data like age, gender etc. So they can run targeted campaigns.

DM: Can you give us some examples?

Waterfall Guy

David Murphy talks to Matt Silk, Co-founder and Executive Vice President of Waterfall Mobile

DM: So tell us all about Waterfall, Matt.

MS: We founded the company in August 2005. Myself and my Co-founder Matt Sechrest, our CEO, were both at E*TRADE at the time we looked at the US mobile marketing and mobile content sales landscape and saw that it was an extremely complex market, much more so than Europe and Asia. The situation seemed to be that if you wanted to do things on mobile you went to an ipsh! or an Enpocket or a MindMatics and you paid them 25 or 50 or 100 grand and they would get you a shortcode solution and you would get your campaign up and running and three months later you would go back and do it all again.
And we thought there had to be a better way. I was at E*TRADE for five or six years, I rebuilt the site many times, and we just thought that we should be able to hide all the complexity behind mobile marketing and mobile content sales in the same way we had hidden the complexity between trading shares at E*TRADE via a simple, clean easy-to-use website.

DM: So what was it that attracted you to mobile?

MS: That’s actually hard to say. I think we just looked at the complexity and saw a great opportunity to make things simple.
That was the hypothesis and we have just been charging forward ever since. We have built a core technology platform to empower marketing managers, to build out mobile messaging and marketing campaigns so that they can do it themselves without spending 50 grand on the solution.

DM: So tell us about the platform.

 

Eye to Eye with IMI

David Murphy catches up with Vishwanath ‘Vish’ Alluri, CEO and Founder of IMImobile, to find out more about the company

DM: So Vish, tell us about IMImobile.

VA: IMI is an infrastructure technology company. We operate in 51 countries, supporting over 200 operator deployments and over 400 content partners, and our customers include Yahoo!, Google, Jamba and Reuters along with operators such as Vodafone, Telefonica, Cable & Wireless, Maxis in Malaysia and Airtel in India. In total 3 billion messages were sent last year using systems built and managed by IMImobile.
We deliver a VAS (Value Added Services) infrastructure for content services on a managed model to operators. This includes carrier-grade messaging platforms and gateways, content management systems, and voice platforms, and through these platforms we deliver interactive portals, community and User-generated Content (UGC) applications, caller ringback tones and video streaming. 

DM: So how does it all work?

Peer-to-PeerBox

David Murphy meets Alex Lazovsky, CEO of Nareos, which operates the PeerBox Mobile content-sharing and social networking service

DM: So Alex, give us the low down on Nareos and PeerBox if you would.

AL: Sure. We were founded in 2005. Our headquarters are in Israel and we also have an office in LA. We employ 20 people. Our flagship offering is PeerBox Mobile, which is a combination of technology and supporting managed services that enable online content owners to deliver content to a network of mobile users. The service is based on our multi-peer-to-multi-peer file-sharing technology, which makes mobile content available for access and sharing by mobile users, and supports any type of content such as videos, music, ringtones, wallpapers from a diversity of sources, including User-generated Content (UGC) created online or from the mobile. For the user, it means they can access and share mobile content easily, and the partners benefit from the generation of revenues from beyond their own portal.

DM: So who are these partners?

The Ad-funded Approach to Mobile Content

innerActive provides a turnkey solution for portals, media agencies, content providers and mobile operators, enabling them to offer entertainment content at a reduced price, or free of charge, with dynamic ad placements embedded in the content be it games, video, IM or other WAP applications. David Murphy caught up with Co-CEO and Co-founder Offer Yehudai to find out more

DM: So give us the Inner-active story if you would please, Offer

OY: Sure, we are just over two and a half years old, we have 15 staff and a mix of private investors and venture capital funding. We are in the mobile advertising space, but we try to take a different approach. We are not an ad-serving technology company like Screentonic, Enpocket and others. Our focus is on ad-funded entertainment channels. We create and manage entertainment channels where users can find free or discounted rich media content for their mobile, such as video, games etc.

DM: So how does it work?

OY: We partner with content providers and give them the tools to implement our ad-serving technology to create a catalogue of ad-ready content. Then we approach the leading off-deck portals such as Jamster and Buongiorno and say that we can give them a complete ad-funded entertainment channel solution, including both the content and the ad sales. Then we launch the content on their deck, sell the inventory and offer the subscribers free content.

DM: And how many deals do you have in place?

Joining the Dots

dotmobi is planning to launch a Device Database. David Murphy caught up with dotmobi Vice President, Advanced Services and Applications, Paul Nerger, to find out why

DM: So Paul, tell us why the mobile world needs another Device Database?

PN: Well I think there are a lot of indications that the mobile Internet is finally taking off, and this year could be very significant. ESPN.mobi did more traffic than the .com site in December, so that’s great. And if you go to their mobile website, it’s pretty good, but it could be better. They are working on improving it, but one of the challenges developers have when building a mobile site is that there are so many devices with different screen resolutions and different capabilities. So what tends to happen is that companies either build to the lowest common denominator, or they build to each specific device. Now the big guys, Google, Microsoft, AOL, they can do that, and they use a Device Database to do it. They detect the device and optimise the  content or scale the image or whatever, but it is expensive. They spend a lot of money to do that and smaller companies, and when I say “smaller”, I’m talking in this respect about companies like Disney and MTV, they cannot afford to do it.
Now our investors are 14 of the largest mobile Internet companies out there, and they said that they thought this problem needs to be solved, because the data is out there, but it’s strewn around all over the place. Developers don’t want to go to the Nokia site, then the Samsung site, then the Sony Ericsson site, then AT&T, then Verizon, so we have brought all data together, including copyrighted data from the likes of Vodafone and Nokia, but also from places like WURFL, to try and make it a bit easier for developers.
So we’ll put all this data in one place and it will be free to view. There will also be an API that will return the attributes like the display characteristics, whether it has GPS, anything you might want to use in your application.

DM: And this is all free to access?

A Question of Common PixSense

David Murphy talks to Paul Singh, CEO of mobile photo-sharing company PixSense

DM: So Paul, tell us all about PixSense

PS: We started out two years ago. We have raised $7million (£3.5 million) from ATA Ventures, Innovacom and Qualcomm Ventures. We provide a software platform for preserving, sharing, publishing and monetising mobile user-generated content (UGC). It’s a big market with lots of players, companies like ShoZu, Juice Wireless. We are all in the same space, but the space itself is very large and we think we have some unique points of difference.
Clearly, there is a lot of UGC on the Internet with sites like Facebook, MySpace and YouTube. But it’s still hard for me as a user to take a digital camera, connect it to the PC, upload my content, you really have to think about it from the point of view of a content creator, as well as a consumer.
So then you look at the mobile world. Data plans are expensive but coming down. You have phones with a good quality camera that also do video, high speed networks, so the user could be creating content from anywhere, any time but the issue we have found is this one of uploading, and there are lots of different solutions proposed by different companies. 
In our opinion, the best solution is to put the application on the handset, and we believe there will be many more businesses created in this space. We think the potential for this is three times what it is on the web, because there are 3 billion handsets compared to 1 billion PCs, and it’s any place, any time, anywhere.

DM: So you said you have some points of difference. What are these?

Fjord Focused

Christian Lindholm is known as the father of the Nokia Series 60 User Interface, and is the inventor of the Nokia Navi-Key, one of the most widely-deployed mobile user interfaces, with over 600 million units sold. He now works as a Director and Partner at digital innovation consultancy, Fjord. David Murphy caught up with him to get his thoughts on the current state of the mobile marketing nation

DM: So Christian, after working for Nokia and Yahoo! what was it that appealed to you about Fjord?

CL: I have known the founders since 2000, when we did some work together when they were at Razorfish and I was at Nokia, and we formed a pretty good bond and kept in touch after the meltdown of Razorfish. Then they formed Fjord and we worked together when I was heading the Lifeblog project at Nokia, and then when I moved to Yahoo in 2005, I engaged them in the design of Yahoo! Go Version 1 and 2.0, so I had done quite a bit of work with them.

DM: So when you look at the whole mobile marketing world today, where do we stand? Are things moving as quickly as you would like?

Going To The Dogs

UK company Intellistream aims to bring dog and horse racing to the mobile, using its technology platform to enable punters to place a bet before the race, then watch it live to see if they win. David Murphy caught up with CEO Jim Beagle to find out more

DM: So give us the Intellistream story please Jim.

JB: The development work on our platform was started in 2005 by our CTO, Jani Peltonen, and the company was founded in March 2006. I joined at the end of 2006 as part of an initiative to raise initial seed funding of just under £400,000, which came from the London Technology Fund. I was appointed as CEO, and John Leyden as CFO, as part of a move to strengthen the management team.

DM: So what’s your background?

JB: Telecommunication, software and IT services. I worked for ICL, which subsequently became Fujitsu. After that, I was at the European arm of what became Sprint, and I also spent six years in the US with a software and IT services business in Boston, before I came back to the UK three years ago.

DM: Can you tell us a little about your platform?

phling! Shot

David Murphy talks to Graeme W. Smith, VP Marketing at mobile music service provider phling!

DM: So Graeme, tell us about phling!

GS: The three founders of the company, myself, Michael Krasner, our President and CEO, and Lawrence Denenberg, our CTO, all worked for InTouch systems developing Voice portals for mobile operators. We ran Sprint TPS’s Voice Command voice-activated services, for example. The company was based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and was sold to Comverse in 1999 and there we built up the voice solutions division from 20 to 300 people. So we understand the mobile space. The key to mobile applications, as we see it, is ease of use for the end user.
We left in 2003 and started Oxysystems and spent a long time working with end users to really understand what they wanted in terms of mobile music and how they listen to it while they are mobile, and this has driven a lot of the features of phling!
phling! has had a series of incarnations, but it launched officially in November 2006 as a mobile music lounge where people can listen to their own music, Internet radio, independent bands and artists who upload and want to promote their music, so users can share music and opinions and find other people with similar tastes in music. So it’s like a social network tied into the mobile phone, trying to help people get more from their mobile music and to turn listening from a solitary to a social experience. Users can rate songs, find out which are the most popular songs in the phling! community and what others think of the artists.

DM: Where did the idea come from?

Get Mvolved!

David Murphy talks to Dominic Bignall, MD of Mvolve, the business networking service for the mobile industry

DM: So Dominic, what’s the big idea?

DB: Well, I decided to launch the Mvolve service after I became increasingly frustrated at the time and expense of trawling the conference circuit in order to develop relationships in overseas territories. Our service operates as a hybrid of an online networking service and a comprehensive industry directory, essentially an online, non-stop, 3GSM World Congress. 

DM: So it’s a networking service, first and foremost?

DB: It is in part, but not in the sense of the recent trend that has emerged on general business networking sites where users build huge personal networks but don’t generally extract any real value from them. Mvolve is primarily a telecoms resource hub which is underpinned with a networking element. We are about pure lead generation and providing our customers with the tools to find new revenues and at the same time market their services. The principle is simple: you have a product or service to sell and you want to sell it as cost effectively as you can, Mvolve provides you with the functionality to achieve that goal.

DM: So how does it work?

The myGamma Buzz

David Murphy talks to BuzzCity CEO and Co-founder Kok Fung “KF” Lai about the company’s myGamma mobile social network 

DM: As usual, KF, can we start with the 30-second guide to Buzz City

KF: We started out eight years ago as a dotcom company. We went through a few iterations, then around three years ago, we noticed a big uptake of the mobile Internet in some markets, so that’s when we launched our ‘myGamma’ mobile community
We launched initially in South-east Asia, so Signapore, Thailand, Malaysia and bits of China initially. Then we added India, S. Africa and then we started to grow really quickly around a year ago. We are now in 56 countries and adding two countries a month.

DM: And what’s the revenue model?

KF: Initially it was totally subscription-based. We decided to make it a paid community because we believe that guarantees the quality of the community and the level of the interactions. Then a year ago, we allowed third party content providers to sell their content in the community. And then at the start of this year, we introduced advertising, and we quickly ran out of inventory, because there is so much demand when you aggregate third party publishers. This is growing very rapidly every month now. So currently, 70% of our revenue comes from advertising, and 30% from our users. We have around 2 million registered users, and around 250,000 active users per month, and we serve 800 million ad impressions per month. 

DM: What sort of ads are you getting?

What's on the Gorillabox Tonight?

Start-up company Gorillabox aims to enable brands to engage with consumers via the medium of Mobile TV. David Murphy met CEO Christian Harris to find out more

DM: Where has Gorillabox come from Christian?

CH: Myself and the other members of the management team  have a background in developing and promoting mobile services in the UK and Europe. I started out in  broadcast TV, and have been in the mobile space since 1999. I worked for the mobile content company, Sonera Zed, and also on the mobile design side and on the operator side. Our CTO Mark Wakefield left T-Mobile to take this job. He managed a range of products in Web ‘n’ walk and t-zones for T-Mobile International. And our Head of Development, Mark Knoop, has been creating mobile applications from scratch for the past seven years. We’ve been working on the development of our platform for the past few months, and we launched officially on 8 October.

DM: And what’s the big idea?

Automatic For The People

The Pontis Integrated Marketing System is a comprehensive system for the definition, execution and analysis of targeted marketing offers, and it is gaining some traction with mobile operators around the world. David Murphy caught up with Pontis Senior Marketing Director Guy Talmi to find out more 

DM: So tell us about Pontis Guy

GT: We were founded three years ago. We are VC-backed, by Sequioa, Evergreen and others. We are more than 75 people, and our background is strongly telco industry. And we’re growing fast. We already have 12 commercial mobile operators on board as customers. 

DM: So what do you do?

GT: We automate the operators’ marketing offer management process, enabling them to continually present each customer with the most appropriate marketing offer, and then deliver that offer to them. We started out promoting content, enabling operators to promote any type of content. So information, ringtones, games or any other type of content. But in the past couple of years, we have spread into other areas, and we now cover a whole variety of operator services, including messaging, embracing SMS and MMS, and voice.

DM: And which operators you are working with?

Can You Hear the EQO?

A recent YouGuv survey found that only 13% of UK adults make international calls from their mobile phone because of fears over the cost of doing so. EQO’s mobile calling solution offers free international calls between EQO users, and substantial savings for calls to non-EQO users. David Murphy caught up with General Manager for Europe, Simon Edelstyn, to find out more

DM: Simon, can you start by telling us where EQO came from please?

SE: We have been around for three years. We first demonstrated our technology on mobile in 2006. We have a lot of technical knowledge and experience. Our founder, Colin Quon, is ex-Nortel and developed one of the first mobile soft switches. Our CEO, Bill Tam, was the founding Chief Marketing Officer at MetroNet, which was sold to AT&T for $4 billion (£2 billion). Todd Heintz, our VP, Products, is from the handset side, and myself and Rich Roberts, VP, Marketing, come from the consumer Internet side, so we have a good understanding of the integration of mobile with the web.

DM: So there are lots of solutions for people who want to cut the cost of international calls. What’s your USP? 

Highly Recommended

Miyowa was founded in April 2003. Initially, its business was producing and distributing low-cost mobile content, including games, ringtones and logos, under the 1€ brand. But this was just a means to an end, as Co-founder Pascal Lorne explains to David Murphy

DM: So where did the idea for Miyowa come from, Pascal?

PL: It goes back to 2002, when I sold Ismap, an Internet map-based search engine, to a Benefon, which was founded by Nokia founder Jorma Nieminen and makes handsets with GPS (satnav) capabilities. Soon afterwards, I decided I needed a break and some thinking time, so I packed my backpack and set off around the world for six months.
I visited 20 countries, and while I was travelling, organised various focus groups with young people around the world, in Japan, San Francisco, Madrid, London, Munich, around 10 people at a time. They were all teenagers and I wanted to know what they did with their phone, what kind of SMS messages they sent and received, and I came back with the conclusion that the mobile is a very intimate device, and that what people want to do is share emotions and text.
Now as a 34-year old, a late Internet adopter, I was amazed by this. But the fact is, kids teach their parents how to use SMS, and they spend 2-3 hours a day on MSN, rather than watching TV.
So when I got back to France. I decided to create a new company around the idea of people sharing emotions and giving them an umbilical link to their community 24/7. So four years ago, I went to MSN, Yahoo! and AOL and told them to mobilize their applications, and, in short, they told me where to go.
So I started to build a prototype, doing ringtones, logos and games to get credibility in the market, and then I went back to them with value propositions. By this point, we had signed with 10 carriers, we had a prototype approved by focus groups, and we had a successful business.
So then two years ago, step 2 was that we signed a deal with MSN and launched a mobile Instant Messaging (IM) service with the majority of the carriers we were signed with in Europe, Asia and Taiwan. This was a handset-independent, universal end-to-end client messaging technology, which we call ‘MoveMessenger’, that is compliant with all existing major standards. Then we signed with Yahoo and AOL and other local communities and carrier communities.
And we know that people like it. We still have regular sessions with teenagers, and one day one of them said: ‘This is the coolest application I have ever seen, MSN on my mobile.’ It’s obvious really, if you think about it. Most teenagers have no computer or no ADSL line of their own, so they have to do it at school or on the PC at home under their parents’ control. Now we are on to step 3, which is building the Recommendation Platform.

DM: Which is what, exactly?

Solving the Mobile Data Problem

Mobile transaction network mBlox was one of the first companies we interviewed when we launched at the back end of 2005. Chairman Andrew Bud had lots to say for himself then, and when David Murphy caught up with him recently, he found that he still has. So much so that we thought we’d run this latest interview in two parts, but having looked at it, there’s no natural place to split it, so here it is in all its glory. Fix yourself a coffee, sit back and enjoy...

DM: So Andrew, what’s new since we last spoke?

AB: We’ve carried on executing our strategy, which is built on our 8 year old vision that the mobile content and services industry finds it vital to have access to an international, specialised provider of transactional services between it and carriers to facilitate its growth. So we continue to be absolutely focused on connecting, clearing and completing these transactions, and we stick to our strategy of not getting into applications and services ourselves, and that makes us unique, and clients appreciate it because it makes partnerships much easier.
We have also continue to expand internationally, because scale is important in business as more and more content service providers find their business models scale internationally, and want a business partner that can take them in to many territories. Initially, it was the mobile entertainment companies out of Spain, Germany and Italy who first began to expand internationally, especially in to the US, and over the last couple of years, the US has been the most exciting, difficult, challenging and rewarding market for mBlox services, where we are number 1 or 2 depending on your definition, with a large market, share and where we have extended our services into participation TV.
The MMA says the off-portal market grew from zero to $200 million (£98million) in 2005 to $750 million in 2006. So the quintessential land of the portal has rapidly adopted off-portal with the support of the carriers.

DM: So what have been the main challenges?

Intelligent Interactions

SNAPin Software lets operators interact with their subscribers in real-time and in the context of their current mobile behaviour. The company’s handset-based SelfService product suite enables the delivery of interactive promotions, the resolution of many customer support problems, and allows operators to deliver a branded service experience to their subscribers. David Murphy spoke to SNAPin Vice President, Products and Support, Tom Trinneer, to find out more

DM: As ever Tom, can we start with a bit of background on the company please?

TT: Sure. The company was formed in 2003 by serial entrepreneur Brian Roundtree. Brian has been working with the same core development team for the last eight years writing software for mobile devices.
The first 18 months were spent building the core technology, with funding from an Angel investor. We raised our first round of financing in December 2004, and by that time, we had a trial product. We started commercial trials with operators in western Europe in 2005. The next stage after that was a series of pilots with real customers. These have ranged from a few hundred to low thousands, to the one we did with Orange in the UK last summer, which involved 10,000 people. We have another planned in Spain which could be as high as 300,000. We have also secured a commercial, multi-year contract with a US carrier, and the first handset will ship nationwide in a few weeks.
We’ve had three rounds of financing and raised $24.3 million (£12 million) to date, and we have offices in Richmond and our headquarters in Bellevue, Washington.

DM: So tell us exactly what your software does and how it works?

The 7 Message Trick

French company Key2Cell is preparing to launch its integrated technology platform in Europe in the autumn. The platform will enable advertisers to execute viable advertising campaigns using the mobile channel. The company says the platform can send hundreds of thousands of messages in one hit and can dynamically handle the needs of different devices among the recipient base, serving different ad formats, from SMS at one extreme, to streaming video at the other. David Murphy caught up with CEO Bruno Saint-Cast to find out more

DM: So Bruno, tell us about Key2Cell

BSC: The history of the company is that the technology was brought to me two years ago by Dominique Chouchana and Eva Benhamou. They took a thesis from the University of Tel Aviv relating to the profiling of a mobile handset or number in terms of its ability to receive different types of message, and turned this into hard code. It can vary depending on the network you’re on, the technology and the operating systems on the cellphone and various other factors.
We spent some money bringing the technology to a point where we have patent pending, due by early September. We have to be a little elusive about the core technology, but using the technology, we know, with a minimum accuracy of 70%, what the best message a phone number can receive is at any given moment.
So we stepped back and looked at the market and at various studies, including one from Cap Gemini which concludes that the market for advertising on mobile phones is huge, somewhere between $5-10 billion (£2.4 - £4.8 billion), in terms of how much money companies are ready to spend on it. But when you look at what is spent today, it’s only $250 million, and the gap is explained by a technology blocker. This is the fact that there are a lot of different formats and standards which are exclusive from one another. If your handset can only receive basic MMS, for example, there’s no way you can receive a video message, so you have to make a choice between sending a rich message that can only be opened by 30% max of the installed base, or sending an SMS which will be readable by everybody. And of course advertisers want to deliver the richest content they can to any given handset. 
Now the analysts say that advertising on mobile phones will not be feasible until 3G represents 70% of the installed base, which is not due to happen before 2010 in France and the end of 2009 in the UK. We do not believe 3G will solve all the problems, because companies like Motorola and Nokia will always bring new formats to market to differentiate themselves. The mobile industry is very competitive, so operators and handset makers will always develop new formats and ways to deliver messages. In any event, we offer an opportunity to successfully push messages out to mobiles right now, because we can identify the message which can be received by every handset and we can do this on vast numbers of phones.

DM: What percentage of phones can you handle?

Free Games, Anyone?

David Murphy talks to Michael Chang, CEO of ad-funded game company Greystripe

DM: So Michael, tell us how Greystripe came to be.

MC: Andy Choi, our CTO, and I founded the company in September 2003, and we focused on mobile marketing in 2005. We actually started life as a mobile content publisher with location-based service (LBS) applications. We had a very innovative application for taking advantage of LBS, and we won the ‘BlackBerry Location Challenge 2005’ contest hosted by Nextel and Blackberry. The Finder product was a vertical content search application for mobile, so we would take databases of vertical search information, like a coffee shop database or a restaurant guide build on top of it a vertical search application, and people could then find a local restaurant. But we soon realised how difficult it was to get good distribution, and that there was a huge need in the market for publishers of applications and games to get wide distribution on an ad-supported model, because the carriers had so much control of content distribution

DM: And were you always ad-funded?

Fronde Feelings

Mobile payments, banking and two factor authentication company Fronde Anywhere recently launched a UK operation. David Murphy caught up with Caroline Dewe, Executive Vice President, Products & Marketing, to find out more about the company

DM: So Caroline, tell us about Fronde Anywhere

CD: We’re a spin-off of a New Zealand IT service company, very strong in telecoms. We have been a development partner for telcos such as Vodafone New Zealand and Australia for many years. Our parent company has a team in Auckland that worked with Vodafone on the delivery of 3G Live and other Vodafone global products. We have built mobile top-up platforms for telcos like Orange Netherlands on behalf of other product companies, and we also have a strong capability in the banking and finance, energy and government sectors.
A number of the spin-out team originate from an early joint venture with Ericsson to build products for the mobile Internet in 2001. We ended up building platforms for telcos for the Ericsson product development program, and included in this was a mobile messaging gateway. The team working on this folded to the Fronde Group side of the business, and ended up running the messaging platform in New Zealand, as a message aggregator.
This was in late 2002, and we decided from the start that we didn’t want to be a ‘text-to-win’ company. The company we sat within sold stuff to major corporations and banks so instead, we looked at how they could use technology to improve things for their customer base. So we are always focused on mobile solutions for business, and our applications always integrate with the client’s back-end systems.
Given the global focus of Fronde Anywhere, the messaging platform is retained within the parent company and the Fronde Anywhere product business has developed a new set of products tailored specifically for banking and mobile commerce in the international market.

DM: Can you give us some examples of your applications?

In Search of Spot Relevance

Acuity Mobile’s Embedded Mobile Advertising Platform (EMAP), promises to delivers ‘Spot Relevance’ in mobile advertising for consumers and advertisers, by targeting the right content at the right person, at the right time and in the right location. David Murphy caught up with President and Co-founder Alan Sultan (pictured, right) and Gregg Smith (pictured, left), Acuity’s COO and Executive Vice President, to find out more

DM: First up, Alan, give us the Acuity story so far if you would.

AS: The technology and intellectual property date back to March 2000. The Co-founder, Chuck Rieger, a Stanford PHD and serial entrepreneur, was driving back from Richmond, Virginia one day and saw a historic building. Chuck started thinking –wouldn’t it be nice to have all the information about this plantation? Wouldn’t it be great to have some sort of service where a company would know what his interests were, would survey the surrounding area and pull information into the phone or the car’s satnav system to tell him what there was of interest in that at area.
So in March 2000, he came up with the concept and filed a patent with the US PTO (Patent and Trademark Office) and the EU equivalent, covering the ability to take a piece of content, tie it to a point on a map and deliver it to a user in any medium, based upon them entering that area.
Chuck’s PHD was in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence, so he started developing a code set and technical infrastructure and architecture, and the idea from the beginning was focused on the individual, rather than the content provider or the carrier. Who is this person, what are they interested in, where are they, what sort of information do we need to make those determinations. So he worked on architecture that was extremely open, so that it could easily integrate with data sets from a client’s customer database, or third party databases, and be able to figure out what was relevant for that individual from a content perspective, and from an advertising and marketing perspective.
The company evolved and Barry Glick, the Co-founder of Mapquest got involved, and Acuity was incorporated in 2006 by Barry, myself and Chuck to take the technology and the IP Chuck had created and bring it to market. The other thing I should mention is that in March 2003, the US PTO issued the first patent on this, and we have filed a continuation and a part patent was granted in November 06. We also have a patent pending in the EU, which we expect to be granted this year.
So we have a strong and robust patent portfolio to go with the technical capability we have.

DM: So tell us how the technology translates into a mobile advertising proposition?

Snap Happy Scott

In the past few weeks, UK marketing firm Magnet Harlequin has rolled out a mobile campaign for ‘Mr. Bean’s Holiday’ that offered users free content for their phone, simply by taking a photo of a movie poster with their cameraphone. The technology goes under the name of ‘Snap Happy’, but the company behind it is relatively unknown in mobile circles. David Murphy caught up with Scott Seaborn, Head of the firm’s Technology for Marketing division, to find out more

DM: So Scott, what is Magnet Harlequin and how have you ended up getting involved in the mobile space?

SS: We are a marketing services agency with real focus on technology. The company has been going for 29 years. We are 76 people on two sites near Heathrow. We were were image and artwork specialists for Disney and various other blue-chip clients. Then 20 year ago when the Mac arrived on the scene we got into that, and then around 15 years ago, we saw the money that people like Sony, Universal and MGM, were spending biking high-res image files around on CDs, so at that point, we set up our Technology for Marketing department and built some of the first FTP sites. This was before the web really happened, so it got us a lot of work.
For the past eight years, we have been very much market leaders in digital asset management and marketing portals. So for clients like Universal, MGM, Sony and Nissan, we build portals where we centralise their marketing resources, so that if a film comes out in, say, Dubai all the marketing collateral will be on the portal and it will all be consistent and follow the brand guidelines. And we do that for 35 leading global brands and around 2,000 smaller ones.

DM: So how did you get involved in mobile?

Not Searching, but Finding

Yell.com launched its mobile offering at the end of January. David Murphy spoke to Yell.com Head of Mobile Marketing, Martin Wilson, to find out more about it

DM: So tell us Martin, if you would about Yell.com mobile’s strategy

MW: We have been championing mobile for five years, so we have a reasonable amount of experience. We started out with a WAP service, went into text a couple of years later, and then launched a pilot service two years ago that taught us a lot. In January this year, we took our first serious steps as a business to invest in mobile. We see the mobile opportunity as hugely exciting because the Yell brand has a high synergy to a user when they are out and about.

DM: So what is your mobile offering?

In Search of Repeat Business

July Systems offers managed mobile marketplace solutions that enable its clients to deliver “advanced mobile content retailing services” to consumers. By making personalised offers, and stimulating repeat visits to mobile content sites, July Systems aim to help its clients improve their ROI and generate loyalty among customers. David Murphy caught up with July Systems UK MD Geoff McGrath to find out more

DM: If you’ve seen any of the interviews we run on the site Geoff, you’ll know we tend to start with the potted history, so let’s have July Systems’. Perhaps you could start with the name.

GM: Sure. We were formed five years ago in July, which of course is the seventh month of year. The founders of the company are from South India, and they believe that seven is a propitious number which brings good fortune.  We’re headquartered in Santa Clara, with offices in the US, Banglaore, where most of the engineering is done, London, Hamburg and Madrid. We are 100 people, VC-backed, with the lead investors Motorola Ventures, Charles River and Sequoia Capital.
We are, and always have been, in the business of mobile content retailing from the outset. If you think back five years when people were building vending machines to distribute ringers games etc, we set out to build a platform form the ground up to meet the need for effective retailing of content and merchandising. Not so much around how to download to the phone but a platform that would allow people to create services that would replicate the experience of buying online and on the high street. For retailing to be effective, you can’t just build vending machines. You have to combine elements of effective marketing with retail, so you make people aware of the service, promote it and get people to use it in a repeat fashion, without obliging them to subscribe to it.
In the early years, the bulk of our efforts went on engineering a platform. Now, we have evolved to include elements more geared to community building and marketing to that community and nowadays customers tend to engage with July for the deployment of solutions, so we started with the technology, then built a team over the years to build knowledge of the markets we try to sell into, which include mobile entertainment, mobile marketing and media. 

DM: So who are your customers?