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January 23, 2007
ANTHEM
For over a year we have been working on ANTHEM, our mobile social networking platform. (This is the mother of all platforms - it really takes that long.) We were going to announce it around CTIA along with the launch of several carriers that are using it as the core of their social networking strategy. That timeline got accelerated for us today by an AP reporter who started asking the carriers about their social networking strategy, and it came out that we were supplying the infrastructure to many of them.
Here’s the overview:
To millions of consumers, social networking is a mission-critical communication tool that is perfectly suited for the mobile environment. Most social networking sites are truly “18-inch screen” experiences that don’t lend themselves easily to a 2-inch screen on a mobile device. ANTHEM fixes that by mapping the key functionality of any social networking site and re-presenting it on a mobile device in a way that feels more like a web-based experience.
We have seen some companies try to build WAP versions of their sites, and they are not terrible, but there is only so much you can do with WAP. Social networking sites are increasingly media-rich, and maintaining increasingly large amounts of information, and the 5k caching limitation of WAP (as an example of one limitation) degrades the user experience because it requires more key clicks, more waiting, etc. If you compare a social networking service through our platform with the same service through WAP, there is a significant difference in look and feel, usability and, well, slickness, through our platform.
Why the platform approach
I think until now that social networking in the mobile space has looked more like a marketing opportunity, and the net benefit has been to the social networking sites, and mostly MySpace. Helio paid MySpace a large amount of money for an “exclusive” deal to provide a WAP version of MySpace. Then so did Cingular for a J2ME version. This “marketing view” of the opportunity is by no means bad – I think Helio associating itself with MySpace, given the popularity of MySpace in the press, was a good idea. Plus, not many carriers have so far fully embraced social networking as an application category, so Helio and Cingular get points for blazing new trails, too.
But now the carriers are shifting their view of social networking from a marketing opportunity to a product opportunity. Spending millions of dollars on marketing is fine, but now there is a clear path toward monetizing social networking and that is causing a shift. The big question last year was, “What is MySpace doing in mobile?” And that question was answered. Nobody really cared if their mobile product was making money or not – it was more important that they were moving toward mobile, and I fully agree with their path because it showed the industry that there was a big opportunity in mobile social networking. The big question this year is, “What are the wireless carriers doing in social networking?” The second part of that question is, “And how will it make money?”
What our wireless carrier partners told us
Carriers are fairly resource constrained. These are big companies, but they usually have fewer business development people than you might imagine. When they want to do a deal with an application provider, the timeline can easily extend to a year or longer just to get the deal done and the product pushed live. If they are resource constrained on the business side, they are certainly constrained on the technology side, and each implementation touches a great many people, often in different timezones, which is very costly.
There are literally dozens of social networking sites that need to be presented to consumers to comprise a complete offering, and there is no way any carrier could process so many deals and integrations. So when the carriers started looking at social networking as a product opportunity, they needed a solution that offloaded the business development and technical integration, which is what ANTHEM does for them. Through one touchpoint with us, they can light up as many social networking partners as they want, ensuring that they are always providing a current offering of the most popular sites to their subscribers.
What our social networking partners told us
The SNS (that’s “Social Networking Service,” a term I have seen many of the SNS providers use to refer to themselves, so I am using it now) providers that have already plugged into the platform told us that it was very important to them to preserve their branding, their differentiated functionality, and their look and feel. And that’s exactly what ANTHEM does. We give SNS providers a turn-key mobile strategy and their users a pocket version of their web-based experience. There is a one-time integration to the platform, and then nothing else to do except possibly building new APIs when functionality changes in the future. This deep integration enables a fully customized version of every SNS partner. The SNS providers get to offload development to us, and since an increasing number of carriers are plugged into the platform from the other side, they are ensured high-profile distribution without having to go through the whole carrier business development process.
What consumers told us
The end user sees a carrier-branded single downloadable client that has a menu of SNS providers from which they can choose. So from the “Sprint Communities” category, you might choose Xanga, then the application rebrands itself and shows the functions specific to Xanga so you have a scaled-down version of Xanga on your handset. Then you can go back to the main menu and click on Friendster, for instance, and now the application turns itself into a pocket version of Friendster.
It turns out that a good percentage of consumers use two or more SNS providers. Maybe you’re in college so you have a Facebook account, but you also host your blog at Xanga or LiveJournal. One of the early lessons we learned was that consumers HATE the learning curve of mobile applications. The consistent feedback was that the highest barrier to adoption is usability. So we designed ANTHEM to offer the consumer a very light but intuitive UI so they can use their favorite social networking sites without having to suffer through a learning curve as to how to do it. Since the UI is transparent to the user and the same across all SNS providers, consumers can spend their time enjoying the social networking experience, which leads to increased adoption overall. Everybody wins there.
Anyway, we put some of the popular WAP social networking applications in the hands of several consumer groups and observed. They struggled. I think WAP is just hard to use for this application category. It just takes too many clicks to get to many important functions. Then we put our application as I described it in the hands of the same consumers and observed. It was like night and day. We did this several times to arrive at the right mix of features and functions, and I think we really got it right. When you see it, I hope you’ll agree.
Which reminds me, if you would like to see it, please send me an email and I’ll get you a demo. ANTHEM is up and running now, hitting live data over the air. We are finalizing development and integration and should launch our first carrier in Q1/Q2. There are other partners that didn’t make it into the AP article, and we’ll have some announcements over the next few months, so look for that. As always, I welcome your questions and comments.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at January 23, 2007 03:16 PM