Hugh Spear's Blog

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.

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.

Uniques vs Impressions - the mobile advertising paradigm shift

Whilst many marketeers are keen to drive traffic to their websites, they are generally counting the page impressions on those sites and using that to attract advertisers. The problem with this is partly that in the past people have generated 'clicks' artificially in some cases, but it is also that we don't usually know how many visitors we get.

In a mobile advertising environment we have far fewer impressions at the moment, but we can track unique visitors and profile the pages they read on each visit. If we are smart we can also learn more about these people by working with the mobile carrier. For example we will already know the make and model of their phone. And some analysts try to make marketing assumptions based upon this fact alone. But the mobile operator can provide far more information as follows:

1. Pre-pay vs Post-pay customer.
2. Male vs Female
3. High vs Low propensity to spend.
4. Location current, and address where phone user lives/works.
5. Age Group.

If you have all the above information, then you are going to be able to do a great job of targetting viewers with banner ads, and  even though the  traffic  is  relatively low, you  should be able to reach the people you want at the time of day you think they will be most responsive.

The mobile advertising market may be taking off slowly, but I would expect that when the case studies have been circulated a few times that it will become important for every business to have a mobile presence. This is where companies like Dialogue with their Mobile Site Building tool and wealth of experience in mobile marketing can really help.

I talk to people regularly who are busy keeping up their Search Engine Optimisation efforts on their website. They all say they wish they had started a few years earlier when there were fewer sites and it was easier to get higher in the rankings. In my view it is going to be just the same with mobile internet. The people and companies who get in first will do much better than those coming along later.

So what's stopping you?

iPhone vs Blackberry

After a few weeks of using an iPhone I decided to compare it with the Blackberry Curve and the Blackberry Pearl. My conclusion is that RIM is probably going to need to respond to the challenge from the iPhone.

Here are my reasons:

1. Networking - most iPhone users will experience using their device over WLAN and GPRS/EDGE. If you are in a meeting in your office you can probably get better coverage from WLAN. The Blackberry devices just aren't scoring on this front. This become even more important when roaming and data costs can be substantial.
2. Email Reading - the iPhone is easier to use to read emails. It has a better and bigger display.
3. Email writing - the Blackberry has a keypad which has a better feel than touching a flat screen. However I see some iPhone users working pretty quickly at typing, and I wouldn't be surprised if I change my mind about this eventually. I would actually prefer a T9 (predictive text) version of the iPhone keyboard as I think I could work faster. I do like the fact that the iPhone keyboard can be silent whereas the Blackberry will always click a bit.
4. Applications - the iPhone wins this hands down. Not only does it have more applications shipped, but even after a year there are hundreds of independently written applications to do all manner of things.
5. Coolness - the iPhone says 'I want to do stuff', the Blackberry says 'my boss wants me to do stuff'. Its just a perceptions, but important to the attitude of the end user.

So for my money the iPhone is the more useful device. RIM has taken the Blackberry from an overgrown two-way pager to something which looks like a phone and can do all the normal phone things. Apple have taken a media player and added a phone and not gone too far wrong. Its time for RIM and the other market leaders to recognise that the iPhone is going to change the way in which people work.

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.

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.

Mobile Internet WAP or websites. Why bother?

I'm starting to wonder whether every business that wants a mobile site has really worked out why they want it. For many it is a reminder of the way in which many businesses obtained a website a decade or so ago. They decided they wanted one and then pretty much copied the style of someone elses site.

The problem with this approach on mobile is that in general it is impossible to cram all the details from a full size website, into the space available to view on a mobile phone, or other mobile device.  It is also going to be very difficult to navigate and probably frustrating to the end user.

So the approach we take at Dialogue Communications is to look at the business and what it is trying to achieve, firstly on the main website, which should be the place which all potential viewers should be directed. Then we look at why you would want to have a mobile site. What do people want to do when they are out and about and using their phone. With this approach we usually end up with a subset of the features of the main website, and may also have something quite different.

For example, a customer approached us with a Cycle Shop. A very successful business, with a very successful website. We didn't want to mess with this. But we thought that we could create a mobile site which was almost a 'must-have' accessory to the website. We used the mobile site for two feature areas: 'My Cycle' and 'My Rides'. The 'My Cycle' section included details about the bike the user had bought, when its next service was due and 'news' about any of the components. When a reminder was sent to the cyclists mobile to notify them of an impending service, the reminder would include a link to 'My Cycle'. The 'My Rides' section is all about organising cycling trips with a group of friends. You can send out invites and monitor who has accepted. You can then send out group messages, if the weather is too bad or you just stayed in bed. You can also 'blog' what happened on your trip.

In this way, we think you can give people something simple and useful which helps them and their customers and has them coming back for more later. So to answer the question I posed in the title of this posting. You bother if and only if you have something useful you can provide on a mobile website.