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.

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.

WAP Billing the natural next step for mobile payments

Representing my company Dialogue Communications I have had a number of recent meeting with mobile operators where I have outlined how we can help solve the problems hitting the mobile premium rate industry. These problems are three fold:

1. Premium SMS (or PSMS) reaches what is perceived as a saturation point and growth drops from 30% per year to about 5% per year.
2. PSMS Content Providers work harder to make their money and some of their efforts cause increases in complaints.
3. Mobile Carriers scale back the human resource available to run the PSMS business at the very same time as there are more complaints and an increasing need for responsible leadership in the industry.

Once we get into this 'perfect storm' of conditions, it is easy to just say the industry is not working as well as it should. But we could also introduce a WAP billing strategy, similar to Payforit in the UK. This strategy will do the following (according to research by Dialogue):

1. Reduce consumer complaints by 85%.
2. Increase click-through rates from 3% to 12%.
3. Increase premium revenues by 15% without cannibalising pre-existing PSMS.

These benefits are excellent in themselves, but when you combine it with other factors you have an industry poised for growth. The other factors are:

• Trusted payment frameworks like Payforit attract new players to the market. For example Soccer clubs in the UK Premier League are typical and are being signed up fast. They were reluctant to get involved in PSMS as it had a slightly tarnished image.
• Traditional mobile content providers are more and more shifting their advertising spend to online rathen than print and TV. A seamless click-through process such as that offered with a good WAP billing solution really simplifies the job of launching new services in new countries.

Dialogue provides good WAP billing infrastructure solutions for mobile carriers and content providers and it is well placed to help many telcos take this natural next step as PSMS revenues start to slow down.