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.

GSM World 2009 - just another iPhone beauty pageant

Forewarned is forearmed

I went to GSM World in Barcelona in 2007 and the person who picked my pocket bought a motorbike with my credit card! This year, I vowed, it would be different. I am now back in Sydney having made it there and back without being robbed, unless you count the cafe prices!

Captains Log

So what was there to report on you might be wondering? Well in 2007 the biggest story was of a company which didn't exhibit and their product which wasn't available. The company was Apple and the product, you've guessed it, was the iPhone. Everyone laughed that the biggest story wasn't even bothering to turn up. Well this year again we have the most obvious biggest story as the iPhone again, and again no Apple.  It is the biggest story now, not because the iPhone product has changed but because everyone else has piled in to join the 'me too' tribute.

For example this handset from Toshiba, the TG01 is a pretty nice looking device. Toshiba will bring all of their production qualities to the product that they have developed from their other businesses. But it can't be said that that they haven't at least nodded a debt to the iPhone in terms of industrial design.

Even Nokia with their 8800 seemed to be trying a bit too hard to have an iPhone.
Though as the photo shows, just when you thought it was a complete wannabee out pops a stylus and you start thinking of the P900! Especially once you look at the handwriting recognition.

Such was the desperation to have an iPhone that some manufacturers even employed designers to make their models a bit too close to the real thing. Why I wonder did Huawei make us delete all our photos of their touch-screen phone? Well we didn't let some strong arm tactics stop us getting the photo as you can see.

And Sony Ericsson seemed to be reaching a point of full convergence in an attempt to beat off the opposition in one fell swoop.

Their new handset the iDou  has 12.1 mega pixels of camera power, plus flash, something looking like a PSP in terms of user interface, touch screen super powered Walkman with oodles of memoery, oh and a phone.So whereas Mr Jobs from Apple wanted to merge an iPod, a Phone and the Internet into the iPhone; Sony Ericsson want to emphasise much more the multi-media player aspects of what they have. It does appear to be everything including the kitchen sink and I did hear a couple of commentators wondering if it smacked of desperation. Either way it will be a must-have toy for recreational users, so long as the battery life holds up.

So if everyone has an iPhone clone or at least something which may one day come off the production line rather than the 'artists impression'  drawing board, then how are we going to tell the difference between these devices? Well by the quality of their applications I hear you reply. Quite so, so that is the reason all have an App store. Pity the poor developer trying to support his or her application across so many environments. Makes you wonder whether there is a business in writing a runtime environment which works over each operating environment - but that would be java and probably not a wheel anyone wants to reinvent. Maybe web apps are the way forward?

One conclusion we can draw from this severe case of  "imitation being the sincerest form of flattery" is that the Mobile Internet is now very much a reality and whereas people only went there from old phones in small numbers, the iPhone has seen to it that people not only want to go there, but in some cases don't need to go there with any other kind of device. That is at least one bit of great news for Dialogue and its fabulous Mobile Site Builder. That has iPhone optimisation and I expect will be optimised for all these other devices once they hit our streets. Then you can really have a build once strategy and an easy life.

Notes from a world tour

Iam sitting in a hotel lounge in Santiago, Chile with just one flight (albeit an 18 hour flight) between me and my home and family in Sydney, Australia. I have just been visiting Dialogue present and future offices on four continents, and I thought I´d put down a few thoughts on how things look from my perspective.

It is nearly 30 years since I first went travelling and twenty years since I last went travelling, so I expected to find a few changes. There was no internet 30 years ago, at least not for civilians. So there were no internet cafe´s. Just normal cafes.
There were no mobile phones twenty years ago, but there was Post Restante and there was a lot of enjoyment to be gained from receiving messages which may have taken three weeks to travel to whatever far-flung corner of the world you were sitting.

So apart from noting that things have moved on a bit, what does all this mean for the business? Well the real change is not the technology but the culture. You used to go abroad from the UK to other parts of Europe and see different cars and different food and drink but that has all substantially changed.

Now I find that whatever country I go to, whatever language is spoken by all the races and religions you can think of. The things which are common are the way in which the mobile phone pervades daily lives.
Everybody has a mobile and everybody is using it in just the same way as they do back home. Calls, texts, mobile internet browsing. Less developed countries have a greater need for mobiles as fixed line infrastructure is just not there. Economies and economics dictate that high proportions of users are pre-pay and that sometimes the cost of mobile data is very high. But guess what it doesn´t seem to matter to the kids on the street. They all have the latest handsets and all know how to do things which must boggle their parents´minds!

Then we look at value added services and we have the same things everywhere (and I do mean everywhere):

• SMS used in TV eviction voting.
• Premium SMS TV Quizzes
• Advertising for sexy chat services
• Mobile content advertised inside the back cover of TV listing magazines.

And if all of those things are  present, then there must be companies out there doing the same thing as Dialogue. Are these global conglomerates who Dialogue competes with in the UK and Australia? No, they are companies that are operating in one or two countries, just like Dialogue but in a parallel mobile universe.

I find it facinating that as well as the obvious homogenisation of our world through the ever growing international footprint of companies like Nokia, Starbucks, Esso and the Accor Hotel group; there is also the halo effect of the ancilliary industries which service the missions of these global giants.

 I could always understand how all parts of the world would separately evolve places to stay, places to eat, clothes to wear and music to listen to. Those things were almost primative common characteristics of being human. I just wouldn´t have included things like SMS chat and downloading ringtones as part of the same genre.

Perhaps it is no bigger deal than Sir Walter Raleigh bringing potatoes to Europe from America. Once the Europeans realised they could grow their own, they didn´t need to import them. Perhaps I´m just witnessing the same principle of good ideas travelling well.

So apart from noting that this is an interesting phenomenon, does it have any business value? Well for me at least it confirms two things:

1. These mobile services are catering for common human desires which are present almost everywhere. Desires to communicate, participate and decorate.
2. My old quest for justification to expand internationally has just got a lot easier. Whereever we find mobile phones we will soon want to find Dialogue.

In 1980 I used to be amazed at how even the most remote parts of Africa had been reached by both Coca Cola and football. One day people will be amazed at how far and wide the short code has spread!

Dialogue Mobile Site Builder

Dialogue Communications has today announced that they have been selected by Sony to provide the mobile promotional campaign for the Australian release of the new Rambo movie on DVD.

This site can be viewed on a mobile at http://uc.dmcr.mobi/rambo

The story is reported quite widely including the following locations:

Digital Media Asia

Mobile Entertainment News

Telemedia-News.com

TMCnet

IT Analysis

It has been promoted as the first use of the Mobile Site Builder (MSB) in Australia. It is the first time it has been used by Dialogue for a campaign delivered by Dialogue, however MSB has been used extensively in the creation of mobile campaigns by agencies working for Vodafone Australia since the start of 2008.

These campaigns include the Melbourne F1 Grand Prix results service in March 2008 and multiple campaigns which are part of Vodafone's Mobile Advertising business.

Sony has shown great vision by utilising a mobile channel for their communication to the general public. It is a lead I expect others to follow in the near future.

We have to remember that these are relatively early days for the Mobile Internet and that there needs to be a few pioneers before others decide to take the plunge. One of the great elements of mobile advertising and marketing is that it is possible to show up to the minute campaign response rates. This coupled with detailed reporting and analysis can bring significant value to leading brands like Sony.

Look out for more of these kinds of stories from Dialogue over the following weeks and months.

 

The new mobile battleground

The announcement of the iPhone 3G from Apple’s Steve Jobs, together with the detail of what will be possible with this device and details of its widespread availability; should stun the rest of the mobile world. However, several commentators have been remarkably underwhelmed.  I read some early reports of the impact of the new device on the world and they ranged from indicating that the iPhone would slightly increase its market share of the smartphone market, to claims that the introduction of 3G and GPS would not be enough to really have an impact.

My personal view is that we are about to witness a paradigm shift in the use of mobile phones which will redefine the future. It is quite simply the most exciting thing to happen in mobile in a dozen years. Here is my reasoning for this opinion:

1. iPhone beats Blackberry. The Blackberry is well recognised as the ‘must have’ device for the enterprise. However, the iPhone 3G has achieved the following to probably knock Blackberry off its perch:
   • Support Exchange natively. This is the single most important email system in the enterprise, and this support  alone will dent  Blackberry’s dominance.
   • Support Push-email. This will give the iPhone users the Blackberry-like experience. Another step towards unseating Blackberry.
   • Application support. The iPhone 3G SDK is providing application developers with the tools they need to provide ‘line-of-business’ enterprise applications to each and every employee. This should not be underestimated.
   • Price. At $199 the iPhone is now a realistic enterprise option.
   • Infiltration of Fortune 500 businesses. There is no better purchasing driver than seeing your fellow corporations taking the same steps.
2. iPhone beats Nokia. I have always admired Nokia’s ability to define the future with its devices. Right from the very first days of using a Nokia 2110 back in 1994 and basing my business around what Nokia had achieved in terms of mobile connectivity; I have always resisted betting against Nokia. And in spite of probably having a better list of features and usability that set the standard for mobile phones, I have to say that now the iPhone has moved ahead. Here are my reasons:
   • Featureset. The iPhone 3G has almost all the toys you need on a mobile device. Nokia has video calling and FM radio but that is about the only difference, other than the low specification of the iPhone camera.  But at least it is a good camera.
   • Application support. Nokia’s Series 60 has been around for 4 or 5 years and there are a few dozen applications available for the device. The iPhone has been around for a year and there are hundreds of applications available already. Add to this the ‘App Store’ that Apple plan, which is said to be worth $US 10bn during the first 18 months alone and you have some idea of the scale of the iPhone dominance in this area. Again, please do not underestimate the importance of this to the future.
   • iTunes. Nokia has its own music store, but how can it compete with something that was based around the market dominating iPod? I don’t think you can.
3. iPhone applications takes the mobile internet and makes it better. For nearly a decade the mobile internet has meant two things, email and browsing. Not web browsing but a cut down web known as WAP.  Although the original iPhone claimed that you didn’t need the ‘baby internet’, which was the internet sub-set created for mobile. It is my opinion that you do need to re-purpose existing internet sites to make them mobile device compatible. It is down to the physiology of being able to put the viewing device in the palm of your hand.  Facebook and many others have created iPhone versions of their applications and many are better than the grown-up web applications. But the iPhone now shows us the really impressive next step of the mobile internet and that is the creation of applications which use internet connectivity and do very specific jobs in the best way possible. For example the eBay application doesn’t expect you to browse, doesn’t expect you to use email or SMS, it does what you want it to do which is to find items you want and help you to ensure you buy them. There are heaps of other applications which also do very cool things, but most importantly there is an application development environment, from the OS to the development tools and the coding language that means that we will see an explosion of creativity.  I haven’t known this since I used Visual Basic for the first time in 1991 and realised that building software applications didn’t have to be geeky. Now for the first time we can do the same with mobile phones the most prevalent devices on the planet.
4. iPhone re-invents SMS. Well not exactly in terms of a point to point communication tool, but in terms of alerting and triggering applications. Apple has its own ‘push alert notification’ technology. I’m guessing that those guys at Apple realise that SMS is the most profitable mobile data on the planet and they want a part of it.

So where does this leave the rest of the mobile food chain. Lets consider the field I’m familiar with:

Handset manufacturers
Well although Apple has raised the bar as far as I am concerned,  there is little other than iTunes integration to prevent the competition from catching up and they can even be better in some respects. But they have to really work at it and take the iPhone very seriously.

Mobile Operators
Well there is a danger that they will be relegated to ISPs in this value chain. But they do control at least one billing relationship with the consumers and they do provide the bearer services for most mobile connectivity. The question is do they settle for this, or do they use their considerable resources to take more value from the market?  The pragmatic view is that it is very profitable to keep adding subscribers and to expand geographically, even though voice and data are fast becoming commoditised. There are still juicy areas of profit like SMS and roaming charges. However if you want to compete in areas like Mobile Advertising, (and which mobile operator doesn’t?) then you need to think about embracing the mobile application environment or investing in the fledgling businesses that can. There is also a tantalising question of whether, or when Apple and the mobile networks will work together to charge for content. I suspect that Apple wants to get a better revenue share deal than the mobile operators will allow at the moment, but lets see how this story unfolds.

Mobile Aggregators
My company Dialogue Communications is in this space, and we can see the iPhone as both an opportunity and a threat. Our Mobile Site Builder is already optimised for the iPhone and I’d urge any business to ensure it has a mobile site that looks good and works well on an iPhone. But there is a threat in the mobile content space from iTunes and a threat to the SMS business from the ‘push alert notifications’. The big area of opportunity is to embrace the applications components and to help the mobile operators to add the value they so keenly desire.

Content Providers
These are threatened by the closed shop of iTunes in many respects, although the largest companies can probably partner with iTunes. Again the opportunity is to get involved in iPhone application development and to create content portals for specific niches that can be more customised to the consumer’s preferences than iTunes.

Of course I could be wrong and the experts from the research organisations could and should be right. But  I'm not going to hang around waiting to see if I'm wrong I'll be acting on my hunches.

Beyond iPhone - where are we going?

I bought an iPhone in Dubai at the start of January 2008. It was 'unlocked' and I didn't enquire further about its origins. Once back in Australia I put my Vodafone Australia SIM into the iPhone and set about configuring all the features. Most things worked a dream as I have come to expect from Apple. There are a few glitches but I imagine that they will be resolved in the regular maintenance releases and also as Apple moves the product across the world. We pay a price for early adoption, but we also get to use all the toys before everyone else.

That said, I am impressed with how many iPhones I have seen in Sydney as the iPhone is not yet launched in Australia.

So what can I say about this device that hasn't been said a thousand times already? Well the reason I bought it was to try to validate the Steve Jobs vision that "we don't want the baby internet". Meaning we don't want a mobile internet which is any different to the "grown-up" internet. That is the internet we have already. Why do I want to investigate this statement? Well my company Dialogue Communications has spent a good deal of time and money developing Mobile Site Building and publishing products which expect that we will continue to want this 'baby' internet for some time to come. So I want to know whether its time to hang up our coding gloves and make a living out of importing 2 wheeled skateboards into Australia.

"We don't want the baby internet".

So let us examine the claim from Mr Jobs. On the face of it we, meaning the world in general, do not need any more websites, and if we run a company we don't want to spend more scarce marketing dollars creating a second website for phones. But can we get away with just the big site? Well thats the question Apple think they have answered in the affirmative with the iPhone. So here is the case for the iPhone being able to handle a big site:

• It has WLAN as well as EDGE / GPRS. And guess what you are in a wireless hotspot more often than you'd imagine. So data rich sites are perfectly acceptable on WLAN.
• There is the portrait/landscape flip thing which gives a pretty good viewing screen for such a small device.
• There is the fantastic pinch-n-pan screen navigation. Without this the challenge would be a real joke. I think this is the real smart thing which Apple has got right.

  But is that enough?

Well it is enough in a "if the bars not open then a glass of water will be fine" kind of way. Meaning that its the best web browsing experience I have ever come across in a device which fits into the palm of my hand. But it isn't as good as I'd like in an ideal world where we can be picky.

So what is the case for being able to scale down the big internet? Well there are two areas really 'Control' and 'Display'. We are stuck in this world with a few things which are difficult to change here they are:

1. We want a device which will fit into our hands and pockets and bags. So they must be small. They should also be light so we don't think twice about bringing them, and forget we have them until we need them.
2. We have hands with fingers and whilst our fingers may be larger or smaller, they are still a bit clumsy when you have a querty keyboard on the space the size of a match-book.
3. We have eyes which need writing to be a certain size before we know what it says. Some of us use glasses to help, but even my 7 year old son can't read the smallest print size we see on the iPhone.

Paper is Big

There's no getting away from the above things, they are physiological, and they conspire to keep all these mobile device manufacturers in gainful employment trying to solve these problems. It reminds me of a product launch presentation Nokia ran in 1998 for the Nokia Communicator. The product manager in the UK was Mark Squires and although he was expounding the merits of what was and still is a fantastic device, he still felt obliged to point out that when it comes to jotting down a few notes or doing a diagram to explain what your new widget will do, then there is a competitor product which is cheap, portable, easy to use, doesn't need batteries and isn't totally bad for the environment - Paper.

So what I'm trying to say is that whilst the early adopters like me, and these generation 'Y' people will cope with the iPhone as a web browser. The average joe will tell you that it is stupid to try to pinch/twist/flick and pan your way around the big BBC website to get to the bottom of Kevin Keegan's decision to try to bring soccer success back to Newcastle United.

So if there is a reason to have a mobile site which is designed with the small screen in mind, and you have to do a bit more work to create such a site. Is there something beneficial that you can do with this site to justify all the hard work? Well my view is that there are plenty of reasons to be cheerful about mobile site creation. So here is my top list:

Reasons to be cheerful about the baby internet

1. There are about 100 time more mobile phones around than there are PCs. So you aren't exactly wasting your time on something for the minority.
2. You always have your phone with you. Keys, Wallet/Purse, Phone - you go back home without one of these (unless you're going surfing in which case you're excused!).
3. You can obtain more useful demographic information about someone who has a phone. For example, their location, their make and model of handset (which can indicate economic group and lifestyle), whether they are pre or post-pay, and their unique mobile number.
4. A phone is more personal so it is more reasonable to assume it is always the same person browsing so you can make your site or advertising more targetted, and use the information you know to personalise your site.
5. You can sell things to people who have phones and they can pay without needing to key in credit card details, they can even pay without divulging their identity.

So the baby internet, may not be something we want to avoid, instead it might provide some fantastic opportunities to reach people more effectively with your products or services. So what about the iPhone. Well guess what, just because Steve Jobs claims the iPhone can navigate the big internet, it doesn't mean that it won't do the job a whole lot better on mobile sites which re-size and re-configure themselves to fit the iPhone precisely.

Where does the iPhone go now? It goes to the mobile internet and does it in great style.