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May 29, 2005

LBS and the Future of Media

My Thoughts On LBS
In case you cannot make the LBS panel at BREW2005, here is some food for thought on Location-Based Services: The most compelling consumer apps are also the ones that scare the hell out of the carriers, and there is a chance that they will never see the light of day.

In case you don’t already know, LBS only exists because of E-911. The E stands for Enhanced, not Emergency, as might seem logical. It is the ultimate Caller ID – no numbers can be blocked, not even unlisted numbers, etc. When you call 911 from a landline, your phone number and physical location are passed to the PSTN (Public Switched Telephone Network.) It is called ANI/ALI – Automatic Number Identification/Automatic Location Identification. This information then routes your call to the PSAP (Public Safety Answering Point) dispatch center closest to you so that they can send an ambulance or whatever you need. Think about it – you don’t dial an area code before 911, so how else is the call going to get to the dispatch center nearest you without knowing your location?

The proliferation of mobile phones created a problem. The wireless networks are like their own clouds in that their network of base stations and towers form a closed communication system. For simplicity’s sake, imagine them plugging the whole wireless network cloud into the PSTN via one big cable. So without the ANI/ALI system used for landlines, all the PSTN could possibly know is that a call originated from someone somewhere on the wireless carrier’s network, which could be anywhere in the country. Not good, when you get connected to the emergency dispatch center in New York but you live in LA.

So then the industry had to develop their version of ANI/ALI to pinpoint the locations of mobile consumers who call 911. There are different ways to do this. You can put a GPS transponder in every handset or you can triangulate a user’s location based on how close they are to various cell towers, or you can do a combination of both. The goal is to get the closest proximity of a user to route the call to the correct dispatch center and then quickly dispatch emergency assistance without having to get further location details from the caller, which is sometimes impossible.

This stuff still fascinates me - I started my career as an engineering wireless consultant at a firm that specialized in trunked radio communication systems for public safety. We helped deploy regional wireless trunked VHF and 800 MHz radio communication systems. (And some UHF, but don’t take that as a sign of my age – analog UHF and VHF arguably propagate better through trees, so the fire chiefs used to like it better.) I don’t think I was very good at it. I liked flying around in helicopters with topographic maps deciding where to put towers, but antenna tilt-down calculations were not my forte. It is a nontrivial problem to solve the communication needs of Fire/Police/EMS all using a scarce spectrum resource and having to share maybe only a few channels among dozens of groups to coordinate an agency-wide response to something major like an earthquake or other disaster. 911 dispatch centers are intense places, particularly at night and on full moons, when everything bad and weird seems to happen. The entire emergency services communications infrastructure is an awesome thing to contemplate, from wireless 911 to call routing to dispatch centers back over closed wireless networks to mobile emergency personnel in the field. Now picture it all held together with spit and tape.

Anyway. The wireless industry has done a fine job of addressing the issue even given various delays, as I am sure it has not been easy. And now we have handsets that know where they are, which is an engineering feat. Nevermind that the whole reason for it is safety – what about all the cool and useful applications that could be developed if the carriers passed this information to application developers? Location adds a sort of Z-axis to many existing applications and creates the very reason for other to exist. The opportunity in value that can be created for consumers is easily in the billions of dollars per year.

So What’s The Problem?
The biggest challenge facing our industry is not a technical issue, it is a policy issue. We need to decide how exactly we are going to handle the very personal information that is a person’s specific location at a specific time. Fleet management is one thing. That is a low-risk deployment that can be fairly well controlled. But what about the guy using LBS to stalk his ex-girlfriend? Weird creepy guy, and his approach was decidedly low-tech, taping the handset to the bottom of her car, but still it shows the dark side of real-time specific-location applications. Or how about the guy who got fined $450 for speeding - not by the cops, but by his rental car company that had installed GPS on its cars. Parents are tracking their kids' whereabouts.
Read about these here.

I am reminded of the Sopranos episode where Tony gets a new SUV and the first thing he does is rip the navigation system out of the dashboard because he doesn’t want to risk the feds possibly knowing where he is.

Real-time specific-location applications can only be developed on a slippery slope, and I must say that I personally side with Tony Soprano on the issue. Just because I am paranoid doesn't mean they aren't out to get me.

I should note that we worked for a very long time with our carrier partners to understand their tolerance for LBS pain. As such, Rabble handles location in a very unique and intuitive way that enhances the application’s functionality without ever revealing a user’s location, not even if they want to, and not even to someone they trust. This is another reason carriers love Rabble – it is a location-aware application but not necessarily a location-based application, and it was built with a carrier’s view of the world in mind. Once you see Rabble, I think you will agree that it makes perfect sense.

I do not know of any industry-wide agreement on a policy around LBS, but it is the first thing that has to be addressed before carriers start handing out LBS APIs to everyone.

I wonder if the ACLU is going to question the way LBS handles location information. It is one thing to transmit my location only after I dial 911, but what about constantly pinging the network with my specific location? Is that an invasion of my privacy and a violation of my civil liberties? How accessible is this information? Who gets to see it at any given time? What are the policies around it? Does the user always have the option to turn the feature off so that he or she cannot be tracked?

The network operators see an opportunity to monetize location information in consumer applications, but they also see risk. They have the data, and it would be a shame not to offer compelling new functionality for their subscribers. This is basically an issue of privacy, and this discussion has been going on for years. I stated my personal opinion in the last sentence of this USA Today article a couple of years ago. Generally speaking, I believe that privacy is something that people are willing to give up in increments, based on the cost and benefit of doing so. You want to rescue me from a ravine I fell into while hiking? Yeah, track my location. You want to give my boss the ability to see that I am drinking at Harry’s Bar on my lunch break? Now that I don’t like. (We only occassionally drink at Harry’s Bar at lunch, btw.)

Personal privacy in the mobile connected world will be available, but it will be expensive and only a very few people will pay for it. The rest of us will plug into the location-based grid because of the efficient markets that will be built around location information. At some point, the risk will be bled out of the system and there won’t be any other way to participate in society. The network effect takes over. I remember a time before fax machines, and my life didn’t seem incomplete. Then all of a sudden everyone had one and they simply expected that they could send you a fax. It became a part of business society. Email was the same way. Then IM. Now everyone I talk to in Europe asks where they can find me on Skype. When you think about it, IM sort of transmits your location in a way. It tells people right where you are – in front of your computer. All communication is converging into the simple concept of presence: The right communication medium for the right place and time. I think LBS is going to play a huge part in the mobile connected future because location will become an aspect of communication. The market will find the sweet spot, and the network operators and content providers will agree on a solution for location information that makes sense for everyone. In the meantime, the market will not wait for policymakers to bring value to consumers if they are willing to pay for it.

LBS is the key to the citizen journalism future
(Okay, maybe this is a post about populist media.) Privacy issues aside, the network operators should be looking to media as their biggest opportunity to monetize location information without incurring the safety and privacy issues of real-time location applications. As a populist media company, we built Rabble purposely as one such application, btw. Location of a person is one thing, but the location of the media they create is another. One of the keys to building a trusted citizen journalism network is a network-certified and generally tamper-proof time and date stamp. If Reuters is going to employ a million amateur stringers around the world armed with mobile connected camcorders recording content as it happens, such a content collection system has to be trusted – the content simply has to be real. The vetting process won’t exist when you are dealing with the ordinary rabble of the world, so something else has to take its place. If Reuters is going to act as an editor of such content, they have to know that they can stake their reputation on it. This is easy to solve with a network-certified time and location stamp. Without it, how can Reuters know for sure that I didn’t Photoshop the picture I sent? Or that the picture I sent is happening in the location in which I claim it is happening? The network operators hold the keys to this information and they can charge for it.

Now think about the collection side of citizen journalism. Imagine a map of the world with little dots lighting up whenever someone sends Reuters an interesting picture or video. When something big happens, a lot of people take interesting pictures and you will see a particularly bright spot on the map. Imagine combing the world for hotspots in this way and being able to zoom in with a click and extract the media and represent it to the rest of the world through your distribution network. In fact, the purest form of this would not even have an intermediary, rather consumers would be in control of the interface, freely combing the world for whatever media interests them by location and topic.

That is the future of the news media: Enabler, not editor. And this media future cannot exist without LBS.

Posted by Shawn Conahan at 06:47 PM | Comments (0)

Qualcomm’s BREW Conference Is June 1-3

A post not about populist media
I am writing this from Boston at the moment, having endured last week’s unseasonally cold nor’easter. I am therefore happy that the BREW conference next week will be in usually sunny San Diego. It has always been a very high quality event, not just as it relates to Qualcomm’s BREW platform, but for mobile application development in general. I think you should attend. I have been involved with Qualcomm’s BREW group from the beginning – in fact the very first BREW application, serial #00000001 (they all have serial numbers) has my name on it. Rabble is #00074615, so clearly there have been a lot of applications developed to date using the platform.

We are unveiling Rabble at the conference and will be showcasing it in our booth. If you are tired of hearing me talk about it and actually want to see it, please stop by. Better yet, why don’t you download it? ;-) Over the next few months following the launch we will be adding content and features from our various partners and will announce them as they happen. There has been a lot of excitement around this application so far – our carrier partners love it, (and the favorable business model around user-generated content) and the media companies see it as a huge opportunity, as well. I am pleased to be the first to market with the kind of application that blogging is supposed to evolve into in the mobile space. It is totally unique and we (and our partners) are very happy with it.

I am also speaking on a panel at the conference on Thursday at 3pm:
How to Rapidly Develop LBS Applications with BREW
Moderator:
Sachin Deshpande, Sr. Product Manager, BREW Developer Relations, QUALCOMM Internet Services
Panelists:
Joe Astroth, Vice President of Autodesk Location Services
Shawn Conahan, CEO, Intercasting
Tasso Roumeliotis, CEO, WaveMarket
Dai Yamazaki, Vice President, NAVITIME JAPAN CO., LTD.

Come see our panel, won’t you? The only person on the panel I have met in person is Sach. I have chatted with Tasso. His company is doing what appears to be a sort of user-generated city guide type of application. Looks pretty cool. I hear their real sauce is the polling technology they developed to track real-time locations of a massive number of users without sapping a carrier’s network. This is something that will be very useful in two or three years or so when LBS is finally truly ready for primetime across multiple carriers and there are robust location-based consumer applications. We are going to get a beer (a brew) one night and talk more.

Joe and Dai I don’t know at all, but you can guess at what they are focusing on. It should be a good panel – I am looking forward to it.

Posted by Shawn Conahan at 06:04 PM | Comments (0)

May 23, 2005

Media Is Truth

...and sometimes that is good, and sometimes not so much
Interesting few weeks for Newsweek. So let me get this straight: I can establish a magazine tomorrow and by doing so I am automatically protected by the first amendment to publish whatever I want, which is a fundamental freedom that separates this great country from many others. As a test of this great freedom, I can print a story that based on my diligent fact gathering and vetting process I believe to be truthful, however inflammatory, in the interest of reporting the Truth. If I can publish a story that is offensive enough, people in other countries might riot and I can singlehandedly damage international relations for years to come.

Getting The Shit Back In The Horse
When things get really out of hand, my government’s State Department will conduct international damage control to quell the unpalatable results of my offensive story. Then when my country’s president finally calls to tell me my inflammatory story is threatening our nation’s interests abroad, I will just rescind it. I will issue a brief press release that says, “I retract the story,” and all will be fine. And that is when the party really gets started.

One needn’t discuss the morality of war, political tactics or the influence religion can have on a great many people to understand the fundamental issue here. The Newsweek article has turned into an examination of the concept of Truth. Was the Newsweek article true? I don’t know. And it doesn’t matter because in any case Truth is very much a matter of public opinion, and the damage has already been done. But it puts the incumbent media companies in a difficult position: If the story was not true, then the vetting process, the basic journalistic integrity of the organization and the very notion of self-regulated freedom of the press gets called into question. If the story was true, but was rescinded because of political pressures, then the vetting process, the basic journalistic integrity of the organization and the very notion of self-regulated freedom of the press gets called into question. Either way, the media incumbent loses. Either their process is broken and some senator somewhere is preparing a bill to regulate news media and we are a few strokes away from losing the freedom of the press or their process is sound and their retraction was based on political pressure and we have already lost the freedom of the press.

Truth in a one-way distribution channel is Propaganda
Media Is Truth, and that truth has been flowing one-way for so long that we had come to believe it until it really started to get out of hand. “They couldn’t print it if it weren’t true” is a cliché we now use to mockingly defend supermarket tabloid headlines. “Man stuck in refrigerator eats own foot to survive.” But a tabloid is just entertainment, and even though the information is presented as fact, the journalistic construct does not apply to them.

Then the NYT had their scandal, and it was shocking for a moment that the NYT would fabricate news. Shocking. But in the back of your mind you were calculating the likelihood of the very same thing happening at other newspapers around the world just based on sheer numbers the same way you rationally calculate the likelihood of life on other planets. “Well, there are billions of stars, and we assume a lot of them have planets, and some of those probably look like Earth…” and so on, and you come up with a very good likelihood that life exists on other planets, just like there is a good likelihood that many other newspapers around the world have fabricated stories.

Then Dan Rather ended his career in a fairly spectacular way, and it was shocking for a moment that CBS News would fabricate news. Shocking. But again it made you think, didn’t it? I mean, you don’t believe everything you see on TV, but you did generally assume that you could trust CBS News to convey the Truth, right?

And so you went to the internet. Now, if you cannot believe everything you see on TV, then you certainly cannot believe everything you see on the internet. But the internet is different in that you can plug into the blogosphere for a few minutes to explore an issue and weigh the thousands of results you find for yourself. You find some opinion, some fact, some agenda-promoting half-truths, some lies and some pure fiction. But there is strength in numbers. What you find in the blogosphere is a sort of user-generated zeitgeist that enables you to arrive at the truth or whatever version of it you choose to believe in. It isn’t perfect, but at least it engages the consumer in a dialog of truth rather than pushing it at them primetime news-style.

Distributing Truth at the edge of the network
Rather than making one organization the arbiter of truth, with their story told through the lens of their one camera and spoken from their reporter’s one voice, put the cameras into everybody’s hands and give them a tool to swarm around the truth from multiple perspectives. When the masses are able to render their version of the truth in a forum of public opinion, interesting patterns emerge that can act as a sort of populist bullshit meter. When citizen journalists are connected in a massively multi-user environment that enables them not only to record events as they happen but also to distribute their media rapidly, corrupted elections can be identified, unfavorable leaders can be ousted from power and false police reports can be refuted.

This distributed network of content creators can have other benefits, too. For instance, recently T-Mobile upgraded their voicemail system, and it has caused me and several other people problems that are evidently difficult for T-Mobile to identify and correct. Derrick wrote about it on his blog a few months ago, and now he gets a dozen hits per day from people searching for “tmobile voicemail problem.” So apparently many people have had the same problem. This would be valuable information for T-Mobile to know as a way to collect these edge-case user problems and more rapidly address them. All they have to do is give Derrick a special number or link to post on his blog so that he can route the hits to them. (He asked them to do this, but customer support does not currently acknowledge that there is any problem.)

There is also a huge opportunity for incumbent news media companies. Rather than look at mobloggers as a threat, the news organizations should be embracing these mobile citizen journalists as stringers. If I worked at Reuters, I would love to have a million people out in the field recording events as they happen working for me for free. People would do it for attribution alone because they simply want to share important news.

The good thing about distributing truth is that if you have a very large number of people rendering their version of the truth, the chances of collusion and promotion of a singular interest are reduced, and what you are left with is a bell curve of opinions. The center of the bell curve usually represents the most reliable version of the truth, though it could simply represent the most people who are wrong about something. And that is where the journalistic vetting process could be applied to improve the entire process overall, turning news organizations into packagers and enablers of truth rather than editors of truth, which has led to a certain growing distrust of the news media industry in general.

The Upstream Truth
Whenever something really big happens, it happens before any reporter or newsvan can get there to report on it. The first pictures and video we see of a major event are always amateur footage. The truth is something we often find out after the fact. The biggest problem with Truth is that if you weren’t there to witness it with your own eyes, it cannot be trusted. So what if there was a marketplace to transact the truth? What if the people who witness the truth could share it with the world in real time as it happens? What if the actual pictures and video of life as it happens could be posted directly from the source to a place to share? That is the link on the value chain that is missing right now. People are buying camera phones faster than any other consumer electronic device. But they aren’t using them as much as they could be using them. Missing is the direct link between a user’s camera phone and a place to post media to show the world and a marketplace to transact that media across a massively scalable system or overlapping personal networks. This story on Reuters today concurs with this point of view.

Rabble solves this problem and gives consumers this missing link on the value chain. I have said before that the hype around downstream media (TV on your phone) is misplaced and overblown. The real opportunity in mobile media is providing the tool to everyone to create upstream media and share it as widely as possible.

Rabble is now ready to launch, and we are unveiling it at the upcoming BREW conference in San Diego on June 1st. Come check it out, won't you? If you would like to learn more, please feel free to drop me an email.

Posted by Shawn Conahan at 01:18 PM | Comments (0)

May 11, 2005

GOOGLMNO

As previously predicted, Google is becoming an LMNO. I had put them on the user-generated content value chain that we use in our discussions about the evolution of media networking. With Blogspot, (the consumer channel) Blogger (the backend platform) and Google (the search and directory link on the value chain) they were already a Media Networking Operator, or MNO. Today we heard that Google bought Dodgeball.com, a mobile social networking tool, thus adding the location-awareness to their eventual offering and the “L” to their LMNO.

I like this development because it is good for and further legitimizes the LMNO space. (We have been quietly meeting with potential investors who have all been really smart people, but a few of them just didn’t get the potential of an LMNO if executed properly.) It also shows that there are some smart people at Google who are looking at the future of media much differently than apparently are the incumbent media companies who are still trying to make a business selling CDs at retail. Who do you think is next into the LMNO space?

I have some predictions:
First, the most obvious ones: Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft.

Yahoo bought Flickr, which gave them the channel link on the value chain, they already have search and directory, and they recently did their Yahoo360 thing, so they have a platform. MNO. I predict a mobile application with some level of location awareness from Yahoo within the next three months.

AOL has their Journals integrated with AIM, which I think is pretty smart as a sort of fastblogging tool. They’ve got search, channels and platform. MNO. Rumor has it that they also are pushing a mobile blogging application of some sort. It probably won’t be very robust on the location awareness or social networking dimensions, but still, mobility adds an “L” to their MNO.

Microsoft launched their Spaces last December, so they have channels. They have search and they certainly have a platform. MNO. I’ll bet you their offering in the mobile space will ignore location and proximity but will be deeper on the social networking front than AOL and Yahoo. Have you noticed Bill is talking a lot about mobile lately? I think Microsoft sees more clearly an opportunity to turn every consumer into a storefront (which is the basic construct of LMNO) so they are going to pay more attention to media integration and personal selling, or “recommendations.”

Then of course there is Rabble, getting its finishing touches, which should quietly hit the market next week, but it may have to wait until the following Tuesday. I’ll let you know when I know for sure. In any case, it will be the first carrier-grade mobile media networking application ever. If you like Dodgeball, you will love Rabble. While there is a supporting website, unlike the others I mentioned it is a pure mobile offering rather than a bolt-on to a web-based experience. Though technically Rabble does integrate with many popular blogging sites, so it is also a bidirectional blogging tool as well as a mobile media networking community.

Now some not so obvious predictions:
Infinity Broadcasting – The Telecommunications Act of 1996 that deregulated radio generally served to increase consolidation of stations under two very large companies that control almost half of the market: ClearChannel and Viacom. This has decreased the breadth of available content, hurt independent musicians and increased advertising clutter. Consumers have responded by listening less – time spent listening is at a 27-year low. Infinity is experimenting with podcasting stations. I think they get user-generated content. They are the kind of company that could move more quickly than their competitors into the mobile space to build a sort of distributed media broadcasting network that feeds mobile devices instead of radios. Consumers are ready. Build it and they will come.

Reuters – They package and distribute media. When you are a media hub like Reuters and media production is moving to the edge of the network into the hands of people with mobile connected camcorders, it is a good idea to plug in. Think of a sort of realtime user-generated Corbis that also handles the brokering, transaction and clearance of a massively distributed participative media network and that is what Reuters could become if they embraced the mobile space. They’ll catch on sooner or later.

IAC/InterActiveCorp – I’ll mention Barry Diller only briefly here because I have written about his company before as my top LMNO pick, given the nature of his portfolio of companies. There is surprisingly little being offered in the mobile space right now, but I’ll bet that is going to change soon.

Advance Publications – This quietly managed print media powerhouse could keep selling magazines and newspapers, but magazine sales peaked in 2000 and are now at 1994 levels, and newspaper circulation peaked in 1987, and the decline is accelerating. Despite the fact that Hollywood is getting all the hype right now about downstream mobile media (60-second mobisodes of whatever Paris Hilton’s television show is called) the companies that will have long-term success in the mobile space won’t just see mobile devices as a distribution channel, but will recognize how mobility integrates with their business. Among a great many other things, Advance owns a bunch of newspapers, Conde Nast and Fodor’s travel guides. All deal with inherently location-based information, and all could integrate upstream and downstream mobile media into their offerings. It is a company like Advance that Gartner Group would call a Dark Horse Media Titan of the future, and they could very likely become a hugely valuable LMNO. (If they are thinking about the mobile space, which I hope they are.)

Anyway, congratulations to Dennis and Alex on the sale of their company. I will be interested to see how it gets folded into the Googlesphere.

Posted by Shawn Conahan at 11:56 PM | Comments (0)

May 10, 2005

Rearranging Deck Chairs On The Titanic

I love that phrase. I cannot think of a better mental picture of someone putting forth a good effort to fix a problem that won’t exist soon because of a much larger problem that would obviate the solution they are attempting to implement.

“Bravo Jenkins - smashing job tidying up those deck chairs. Say, have you noticed the 39,000 tons of water pouring into the forward compartment pulling the ship down? Bloody unfortunate news – seems we only have an hour or so and that water looks chilly. Sorry to tear you away from this important work, but when you’re done here, let’s see if we can lend a hand, eh chap?”

It wasn’t Jenkins’ fault. He didn’t see it coming. Neither did anyone else. And that’s the way it goes. Steaming through icebergs at 20 knots requires some visibility into what lies ahead. If you read my previous posts on the Forces Shaping Mobile Media, (1, 2 and 3) you know where I am going on this. To recap, today’s mobile data business model relies upon closed networks and closed devices to sustainably monetize the content being sold. Like we noticed on the internet, the most open of networks connecting the most open of devices, when a consumer has a choice between paying for a song or getting it for free, they will choose free 99% of the time. And no matter how many 12-year-old girls the RIAA sues, consumers apparently are not afraid enough to stop doing it.

Do You See An Iceberg Out There?
WiFi handsets are here, enabling users to make (potentially) free VoIP calls from any hotspot.

Kyocera and Boingo recently announced a dual-mode handset that presumably will sense when you are near a hotspot and route your data over the free connection.

Which smells like a market opportunity to companies like Kineto Wireless which are filling in the spaces by bridging the gap between WAN and WiFi.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. (Get it?) Devices themselves are evolving, changing from closed “black boxes” to open hardware platforms with operating systems and software applications. Bluetooth and removable media represent progress for the mobile space, but they also present some problems in that they could disrupt existing and potential future revenue streams.

I don’t even have to offer you a link to one of the many articles about falling voice ARPU. Just look in this Sunday’s paper for the latest offer from any carrier to convince yourself of the simple fact that voice has reached commodity status: “10 billion minutes for just $29.99/month, including 5 billion evening and weekend minutes.”

So although as an industry we need closed networks and closed devices to make money selling ringtones, graphics and games, on the horizon we have open networks, open devices and dwindling revenue from our core product. What should we do?

Full Steam Ahead
No problem there, though, because even if mobile voice calls go to an ISP model flat rate for unlimited use (like what T-Mobile appears to be preparing for) or at worst follow the internet trend and go to free, (and they likely will, though I would personally always pay for some level of QOS if the alternative were to be even more dropped calls) data is the thing that will sustain growth in our industry.

Investment capital is pouring into mobile TV companies, and judging from the new Forbes cover story, (“It’s Cellevision”) we are all going to get rich off of mobile data. Hollywood came to CTIA this year and threw some great parties. There is a palpable optimism in the air.

It feels like 1998, doesn’t it? That was the last time I felt this much optimism - when the Internets was going to be the new distribution channel for all manner of media.

And it was, just not in the way the media companies expected. The original, cool Napster showed us that.

Let’s Try DRM Again
Albert Einstein said that the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. DRM exists on the web today. The very small percentage of consumers who actually pay for music and movies on the internet are usually downloading content in some sort of DRM wrapper. The vast majority of the rest of the consumers who are downloading music and movies for free via P2P networks are not. And so I wonder if anyone at the GSMA or MPEG LA or OMA have asked this fundamental question: Does it really matter? Is it possible that they are rearranging DRM deckchairs on the mobile data Titanic? If all the signs point to opening devices and opening networks, what value does any security scheme really provide? I read with great interest the latest rejection by the GSMA of the MPEG LA’s revised proposed fees for the OMA members’ collection of DRM patents. Well of course it is too expensive. DRM will exist in the open mobile space only to satisfy a legal requirement to make some effort to protect intellectual property rights. Then some geek will crack the DRM code and the genie will be out of the bottle. The vast majority of content in the open mobile space will get napsterized. If you are trying to build future value beyond the next two years, now is a bad time to start dealing in mobile content downloads.

Jump Ship
I may have just tipped my hand that I am against DRM. True. I have written before that I am in favor of a closed network and closed devices as a better alternative to an open environment with DRM. The carriers have control of their networks and I think they should hold out as long as possible to monetize their very valuable infrastructure. As such, I am a true believer in paid mobile media. But the writing is on the wall. I ran the largest ringtone company in North America and I don’t even buy ringtones anymore. Now I record song clips on my phone and make them my ringtones. So if we are getting more and more indications that there is going to be an alternative mobile network that cannot be closed because it is inherently distributed, what’s a mobile media entrepreneur to do?

The answer is simple: Don’t deal in mobile content downloads. Today, you should. In two years, you should not. We will see dozens of compelling mobile data applications over the next few years. I predict that when devices and networks are open, none of them will be based on business models that rely on selling a discreet piece of content to a consumer. Services that enhance communication by giving users a multimedia publishing platform in their pocket are valuable future apps. Make my phone easily integrate with my shared distributed calendar to increase productivity – that will be valuable. Turn my mobile device into a location-based remote control to interface with the world around me – that will be valuable. Go beyond general search to verticalize applications by interest area so I can find a particular kind of person, place or thing with some reliability. Extend existing data services like mobile IM to include true multi-dimensional presence functionality – that’s a good idea. Network layers like lat/lon and time stamp, when attached to media, will be valuable certification services that carriers can monetize and will revolutionize the news industry. Then make every user part of a participative media network with the mobile phone as interface, blurring the lines between media, marketing and communication. Make the mobile device a commerce tool to replace or augment the current credit card industry – that’s a new value chain waiting to be built. Make my phone a personal assistant complete with seamless integration to my other modes of communication so that people who I want to talk to can find me, but those who don’t can view either my personal or work channel instead, complete with assignable rights to access certain information by individual.

This industry hasn’t come close to unlocking the massive value of data. There is literally nowhere to go but up. That’s good news. It is even bettter news that even if there is an alternative and free distribution channel for data, the carriers still have a seemingly limitless number of opportunities to monetize their subscriber relationships through applications and services that are future-proof because they cannot be napsterized. A little Hollywood is good, frankly, and mobile video is cool and it should have its place in our industry. I just hope to see more companies look past the current traditional media repackaging frenzy and capitalize on the massive opportunity in mobile data that lies just beyond the next iceberg.

Posted by Shawn Conahan at 03:09 PM | Comments (0)

May 03, 2005

Little Brother: Building The Yellow Pages of Non-Yellow Pages Information (3 of 3)

Big Brother tells you what to buy.
Big Brother tells you what to buy through big channels called advertising, the biggest of which has traditionally been TV. My Orwellian nightmare is already quite complete without having to add this to it, but alas here I am, the glow of my television’s advertisements for soap, cars, packaged foods and branded beverages washing over me, practically pulling me into the store. Or is it?
Media Networking is an important concept to make sure my Orwellian nightmare doesn’t extend to advertising, too. By pushing production of media to the edge of the network (into the hands of individual prosumers with mobile connected PMDs) we democratize information in two very important ways: 1) What gets produced and 2) How it gets distributed. In my two previous posts I discussed how these changes can increase the truthfulness of media, which can have an impact in some unexpected ways including on civil liberties, and also how this evolution of communication can be a huge opportunity for marketers so long as they understand that they are entering into a discussion with Fans, not pushing a message. Now how about Media Networking as the fully decentralized marketing channel of the future?

Remember when Jim Stengel, Global Marketing Officer for Procter & Gamble said “today’s marketing model is broken”? It’s no surprise that the world’s biggest advertiser doesn’t think it is getting a good value from Television advertising. The entire media model is decentralizing right before our eyes. The number of impressions may be increasing, but your ability to capture an audience of any size has increasingly less to do with scheduling and primetime programming paradigms of yore and increasingly more to do with your ability to create wildfire; distribution through a series of overlapping personal networks, Paris Hilton video-style. Get that kind of distribution consistently whether the message is for a bar of soap or a celebrity sex tape, and marketers will beat a path to your door. But of course you cannot, nor do you need to. You have to do something far easier but far scarier for marketers: You simply have to push the creation and distribution of the message to the farthest edge of the network, namely to the individual prosumer with a personal media device. Marketers need to get their heads around the concept of building a brand by sharing it with their customers.

Fans Create Media To Associate Themselves…
First think about how Media Networking leads to a redefinition of media. If I take a picture of my favorite band during a concert and I tag that information with a location, in this case the venue where the band performed, that additional information increases the shelf life of my media far beyond the point in time when I created it. In fact, in this example if my media is findable by other people, I have just created a location-based relational advertisement for the venue. Now what if I know that my favorite band is going to be at a different venue in a month’s time? I can use the same media I created before, attach it to a different venue and create a notification that an event is going to take place. I am using media to communicate, as a Fan, something important about my favorite band.

Here is what I like about this example: You cannot get this information in the yellow pages. I am seeing a lot of hype around mobile search and directory, and it is an important area, but I have Vindigo and it’s really useful and as long as they keep improving it, it is the only yellow pages type of directory I need. Google and Yahoo will offer mobile search products sometime in the future, but they can’t be much better than Vindigo except possibly in user interface and design because the data is homogenous and they all sort of get it from the same place anyway.

…Then Share Their Media With Others…
I am not just talking about a way to build a sort of WikiPages. I am talking about tribal knowledge – the relevance of a community-generated directory is higher to the community than to outsiders. On a more personal level, it is also true that the relevance of user-generated content has concentric rings of relevance moving outward from the person who generated the content. The closer you are to that person, (I mean in concept, like Friendship, but this also now includes geographically) the more relevant the media is to you as useful information.

…As Customer Evangelists…
Here is an example: This past weekend we went to a fundraising thing for our favorite brewery, Stone Brewing Co. For a tax-deductible donation, you get to put a stone from your backyard into this gigantic wall in their new brewing facility and restaurant. I live in a high rise, so I chipped a big chunk of concrete out of my post-tension slab floor. That’s okay, right? I love Stone, btw. Their Ruination IPA is a liquid poem to the glory of the hop. Anyway, my friend Tristan and her husband from Switchvox (which powers our phone system for a fraction of what it would have cost with any other solution) were going to meet us there and so she sent me an SMS to get directions to the Stone Brewing construction site. She called me rather than dialing 411. This is to a construction site, so she knew 411 wouldn’t have an address yet and certainly wouldn’t have a phone number for it. She also knew that the number she could get for the corporate office wouldn’t have helped her on a Saturday anyway. So she called me as the most direct route to the information she sought.

…Who Add To Their Media Their Own Biases…
Think about how often we do this. The yellow pages might give a number for a restaurant, but does it tell you whether it’s a good restaurant? Even if it did, you would trust the opinion of a friend of yours more, and so you call your friend and ask their opinion. In fact, with surprising frequency, we call our friends to help us find places, get recommendations and connect with other people that we know they know. It’s all for a specific purpose and usually is just-in-time; the shortest path to the information we seek.

…Which Others End Up Trusting More…
Furthermore, we experience life based on our common interests and knowledge with other people – when we decide what movie to see, where to work, how to live, who’s cool, what’s hot, what’s not, and why. In fact, we tend to rely on people all around us who aren’t even our friends – every time we ask someone for directions or where the nearest gas station is, we are relying on a flash community of people around us to conduct our lives.

What would a tool that enables, amplifies and defrictionalizes this consumer behavior look like? I have seen it. This is Media Networking. The media I create may be useful to only one other person or it may be useful to many people. If they can access it using a remote control with a map interface to find Stone Brewing Co., a good emo band playing tonight or directions to the rave, that media turns into information. None of this information can ever be found in the yellow pages, and it is, at the right point in space and time, considerably more useful than the yellow pages and 411 combined.

…Which Turns Everyone Into A Storefront…
So back to my friend Tristan. Rather than me having to transpose the content from the back of the envelope I had written it on and push the content to her via SMS, she should be able to go to my channel and pull it across. And so should anyone else. In fact, to Tristan this is tribal knowledge because she expected to find that content there but to everyone else who may happen upon it by browsing the area or possibly searching for “beer” it becomes an advertisement, and one that they didn’t spend any time or money to create because I, a major Fan, did it for them. And customers will create your next advertisement for you.

…Which Means Big Changes For Incumbent Media Companies.
Media is changing is such a fundamental way that everything around it - advertising, directory, search, information, publicity, marketing, promotion – is changing as well. Blogging is just the nascent beginning of an avalanche of change that looks to me like the most exciting and wide-open opportunity facing us today. It will be interesting to see what happens to when a dark horse media titan challenges the status quo of some of the other segments of the $1.4 trillion media industry. I guess I'll say it again if you aren't getting too tired of hearing it: The Location-aware Media Networking Operator (LMNO) is the media heavy of tomorrow.

Posted by Shawn Conahan at 04:02 PM | Comments (0)

May 02, 2005

Little Brother: Media Sharing Isn’t Stealing (2 of 3)

Media Networking Is A New Form Of Evolved Communication With Massive Positive Implications For Media Incumbents
When Napster first came out (the first, really cool P2P one, not the current…one) it was evident that it existed for one very difficult to mask purpose: Stealing music. People said, “No no no, I’m sharing my music,” but let’s all be honest with ourselves – we knew we were getting away with something. It was produced content that was intended for distribution and consumption in a particular format, and we were punking the record labels by opening up another channel for the content that cut them and their business model out of it. That wasn’t media “sharing” it was media stealing. I believe intellectual property rights owners have the final say on what happens to their very valuable assets and should be able to embrace technology to the extent they choose to further promote and distribute their content safely and without the threat of losing control of their assets. Given the efficacy of P2P file swapping services, there isn't a record label executive alive who wouldn't want to use it to promote a new artist as long as they could define the promotional period after which the content converts to some other business model (like paid.) But such is the problem with transformative technologies - they force incumbents to rethink their business models and find another way to make money.

Media Sharing is P2P Marketing And Promotion
But there is an opportunity to invite consumers to talk about your intellectual property to promote it. That is what every intellectual property owner wants because it sells more of the packaged version of their intellectual property, whether it is an album, song, movie, book or whatever. When I go to a concert and take a picture of the band on stage and send it to a friend, I am promoting the band. But look at how I am doing it. I am paying money to send a piece of media to someone in my personal network of friends because I am such a huge fan that I wanted to share my positive experience with someone. Media sharing is the technological evolution of interpersonal communication.

Before the era of my Verizon Wireless VX8000 camcorder phone, my parents went to a concert, (well, not my square parents, but maybe yours did) enjoyed it and then had to wait until the next day when they happened to run into a friend and they would both dismount their dinosaurs and talk about how good the concert was.

The concept here is Media Networking. Because of the powerful technology baked into the device in my hand, rather than talk about it, I can capture multimedia of the moment and zap it to my channel immediately to share with the world. If one picture tells a thousand words, Media Networking is like a conversation on steroids, replete with pictures, audio and video to convey a depth of thought and emotion that mere words cannot adequately express.

Chuck Olsen is my new friend, though I don’t even know him. Check out his video of a concert he went to where The Soundtrack Of Our Lives was playing their seriously cool tune “Bigtime.”

TSOOL is a great band. I just bought their CD. You should, too.

Like I said, I don’t even know Chuck, but a friend of mine knows a guy who saw Chuck’s video on ourmedia.org and I really appreciate his sharing it with me. Chuck is a typical Fan. Rather than telling a few friends about how great the show was or going up to a mountain top and yelling it down to the valley below or writing a review of the show on his blog, he took a snapshot of the moment in very low quality video to give other people a first-hand idea of how great TSOOL really is.

Think of Media Networking as an indexing system connecting a database of people. Unlike social networking, where each record is related to every other one in a hierarchical fashion (she has two friend and they have two friends and so on and so on) Media Networking connects people through the media they create and share in a massively relational way. So you and I both like TSOOL and that is the glue that connects us, but we wouldn’t know it unless one of us expressed it in some way. And what better way than using the media production and consumption device formerly known as the mobile phone that you have in your pocket when you go to their concert?

Today, this isn’t really possible from your mobile phone - the one device that you carry with you everywhere that has the multimedia capabilities to produce and consume content in real time. There is a link on the value chain that is missing. You can take a picture or video clip and you can attach it to an email and send it to one person, and sometimes not outside your carrier’s network. Rabble is the link that has been missing: A marketplace to post the media you create with your mobile device and a media networking infrastructure that enables you to communicate with other people through the media you and they create.

Good Or Bad For Incumbent Media Companies?
Media companies would love to embrace Media Networking as a promotional mechanism, and many of them do. Every record label maintains a mailing list of their bands’ fans to try to create community and build hype, knowing that word of mouth promotion is not only free but has the added and crucial benefit of the associated street cred you simply cannot buy at any price.

The problem for incumbent media companies starts when they cannot control the message. The marketers nightmare is creating a frictionless flow of information about their product that propagates a negative message. This happens with movies today. It used to be that if you made a bad movie, you could at least buy your first weekend’s box office take by heavily promoting the movie in the days right before the weekend. Information used to move so slowly that by the time everyone got back to work or school on Monday to speak ill of your bad movie, you already had a decent weekend. But now, people are sending text messages and capturing video clips of particularly bad scenes and sending them to their friends before the movie is even over.

So what’s a movie studio to do? If your movie is really good, the same effect can propel your movie even higher than you expected with no additional cost. Do you try to tell people they can’t send text messages from movie theaters to protect yourself from the negative effect of making a bad movie or do you encourage it because it is a way to pump up your good movie?

In this way, Little Brother is making sure Big Brother doesn’t make bad movies. (Little Brother is also rewarding Big Brother whether the movie is good or bad with a sort of instant massive marketing feedback group thumbs up or thumbs down.) The movie studios should be ecstatic about this, btw, because it forces them to create better products so that they can better do what they do to make money: Pander to consumers by giving them what they want in exchange for ten bucks. Hollywood makes so many truly fantastic movies that it is always a little surprising to me that after decades of honing the business of making movies a bad one can even see the light of day.

Incumbent media companies have a huge opportunity to involve the consumers of their content in the promotion of their content by engaging them in Media Networking. By allowing the technologically evolved version of my best description of a song or concert or movie to propagate through a series of overlapping personal networks, media incumbents can enable a new kind of super-word-of-mouth promotion for their media. By doing so, they can create not just consumers but true Fans, who will go far out of their way to organize and promote to everyone they know (and many people they don’t know) something that they truly identify with. As long as the media they allow users to capture, attach to and associate with is truly promotional to all rights holders concerned and is not the same content that they wish to sell in some other channel, this is a huge and largely untapped opportunity to mobilize fans to promote their content.

TrustKill Records, Capitol Records and Columbia Records are all using Rabble to promote their artists in this way. In mid-May when Rabble launches, Fans of bands like Hopesfall, Aslyn and Acceptance will be able to connect with their beloved artists, view their blogs, find their tour dates and locations and interact with a community of other Fans built around the concept of Media Networking on their mobile devices. Because the content is all server-based, it cannot be punked Napster1.0-style and the media participants, in this case the record labels, can control to what extent they network with their fan bases. It's a simple concept, but one that the industry has been trying to figure out for awhile and now it is finally possible and I want to thank our partners with pioneering vision at TrustKill, Capitol and Columbia for embracing our mobile media networking technology.

Posted by Shawn Conahan at 10:46 AM | Comments (0)