Hugh Spear's Blog

Dialogue Wins Prestigious ACOMMS award for WAP Billing Service

Here below is the story. It is one of me shamelessly taking the credit for someone else's hard work. The someone else is Pete Neal Dialogue Australia's General Manager and sterling product manager for our Mobile Payments product stream, together with our UK based technical team. Just for the record, Dialogue were shortlisted for two awards and won one. Our other shortlisted entry was our Mobile Site Builder.

There are only 8 awards available for the whole telecoms and internet industries. I think we did very well.

Dialogue Wins Inaugural ACOMMS Award

 

12 August 2009, The annual prestigious 2009 Communications Alliance (ACOMMS) and CommsDay Awards were announced this week with Dialogue Communications and Singtel Optus winning the inaugural Innovation in Content Delivery and Services through Partnership Award.

 

Judged by an independent panel of industry experts, the Award had to demonstrate innovations, clearly show benefits to consumers and how the content was driving the uptake of services.

 

Accepting the Award on behalf of Dialogue Communications, Hugh Spear, CEO of Dialogue said, “It is very rewarding to have been nominated and then to win this Award against some tough competition.  Through our partnership with Optus, consumers can now make payments for mobile content seamlessly from within their mobile phone’s WAP browser.”

The off-portal, on-bill WAP billing solution is based on Optus’ industry leading Atomic Premium Plus platform.  The significant benefits derived from this solution are increased protection and ease of use for consumers.

“By scoping out the consumer experience and building connectivity to Optus’ Atomic billing engine into our Mobile Payments solution, we have been able to deliver further consumer protection to ensure they are fully informed on pricing and terms before each and every purchase, Hugh Spear said.  As the WAP billing payment pages are hosted by Dialogue, compliance with Optus’ WAP billing guidelines is guaranteed, removing much of the burden of compliance from the Content Provider.  He continued, “Merchants also see a benefit from increased consumer confidence, leading to more visits to their mobile content storefronts and higher levels of repeat purchases.”

Dialogue have signed a number of partners to the WAP billing solution in Australia and it is expected that this number will grow significantly through the next year.  Speaking on the market, Hugh Spear said, ”The widespread adoption of WAP billing has the ability to change the mobile payments landscape in Australia.  He added, “By protecting customers and lowering support costs the case for its introduction becomes a compelling prospect for the industry.”

Dialogue is an international leader in the WAP billing space, operating WAP billed solutions across six countries and three continents and was the first accredited payment intermediary for the UK PayForIt scheme.  Dialogue is also the sole Billing Aggregation partner for Hutchison Australia’s Bonus Sites WAP billing environment.

For me the significance of this story is that the Australian mobile content market desperately needs some good news. The industry has been damaged by high complaint levels and now a very strict Code of Practice. With current revenue share levels it is difficult for content retailers to do well.  This kind of solution tries to give the content providers back the chance to be innovative, but with a clear and easy to understand interface at the point of purchase. In a way it cuts through all the veil of regulations controlling opt-in and subscription charging, by clearly and formally telling the end user what they are about to buy and how much it costs. It is a solution which can really cheer up the Australian market. We now need the other mobile operators to follow the lead from Optus, so that we can provide a true WAP Billing experience to all mobile consumers.

2007 end of Year Update on Australian Premium SMS Market

I'm ready to provide an update on the Australian Premium SMS Market (PSMS). A briefing from Hutchison 3G last week, regular informal discussions with Vodafone, a briefing from Telstra yesterday 5th. December 2007 and lunch with Optus the same day, I now have a good feel for how things look at year end and a general view going forward for at least 2008.

So here goes:

Premium SMS Growth Rate All parties agree that there is now only slow growth in PSMS. It is positive but nothing like the 2006/07 growth rate of around 45%. The anticipation is that over the next year it will grow at 15%. This position is reflected in Dialogue's (www.dialogue.net) existing customers, but Dialogue is also winning new business due to better account management and higher quality of service. Interestingly this is true even when Dialogue's rates are not the best, our billing and settlement is more efficient.

WAP Billing Whilst everyone is still waiting for official results on the payforIT situation in the UK, it seems that the Australian networks have bought into the idea of billing from a WAP session, direct to mobile bill. Optus now have this solution completely in place, including MSISDN pass-through. I would expect to see this available on all networks with the possible exception of Virgin Mobile by this time next year. So its time to get your mobile SEO into place and pre-book your Google Adwords. Fortunately Dialogue has a superb 360 degree mobile internet offering which includes an excellent drag-n-drop Mobile Site Builder (MSB). It is fully payforIT compliant and will easily integrate into the the Australian WAP billing systems.

Premium SMS Complaints These are still on the rise and Telstra will, in the new year (2008) provide a score card to each SMS aggregator which rates their number of complaints as a ratio of the number of premium messages sent/received. My feeling is that this should be related to value of PSMS business, so we'll see if that idea can be sold into the very reasonable guys at Telstra. Optus have been providing this score card approach for 6 months or so, and it provides a good way of putting your own efforts into context. We believe that Dialogue has a good system, but we need to continually strive to improve things.

Offshore Bulk SMS Many aggregators are soucing bulk SMS from cheap off-shore providers, this enables them to offer cheaper SMS to their content providers, which helps them in turn to market and grow. Telstra has now given notice that they will be monitoring these overseas routes and apply interconnect charges, or shutdown international routes if they are abusing normal traffic exchange arrangements. I'm guessing that this will squeeze content partner revenues and may lead to even slower growth in PSMS. I think that 10c per message in Australia is a little high and 7c is a bit more in line with european pricing.

Restricted Access Services This is still stalled. There are probably only a few thousand consumers registered and purchasing 18+ content. I suspect that things may improve by the end of 2008.