December 12, 2007
Piczo and ANTHEM
Piczo rocks! Yesterday we announced that Piczo is deploying on the ANTHEM platform. We love Piczo and are happy to be serving them in the mobile space. Given their strong presence in Europe, this may hint at our upcoming carrier deployments in that region. While the U.S. is our backyard, and it is a very important social networking market, the trends we are seeing point to a worldwide phenomenon. Social networking is not a “fad” – it is an evolution of personal communication. Facilitators of this evolved communication, like Piczo, are seeing huge unmet demand in the mobile space. Ask any carrier what search terms they are seeing, and among the top 10 across the board are the most popular social networking sites like Piczo.
Now look at the market opportunity: The internet is comprised of fewer than 500,000,000 internet-connected PCs. Compare that to around 3,000,000,000 mobile phones in the world, and the opportunity for social networking providers if they focus on the mobile space increases dramatically.
Just “going mobile” is an important strategic move for any social networking provider, but much will depend on how they do it. Throwing up a WAP site and calling it a day is not enough if you want to be integrated into the mobile communication experience. What Piczo and many other social networking sites we serve realized is that the closer they can get to the mobile consumer, the better, and the ANTHEM roadmap includes carrier access and deep device integration that WAP cannot provide. Further, our distribution footprint is so large now that we offer turnkey access to the mobile market that would literally take years to build carrier by carrier.
We are basically a gateway provider, doing our work transparently in the background, but an important part of our relationship with SNS providers is philosophical: IF you believe that mobile access to your social site is going to be predominantly mobile one day, then deploying through Intercasting Corp provides a path to deep customer involvement. If you do not believe that mobile is terribly important, then churning out a WAP site is fine in the near term. I’ll tell you what though – if you DO NOT want your site to be an integral part of the mobile communication experience, then you should look at the number of mobile consumers in the world and then revisit your long-term strategy. Also, spend some time trying to navigate various mobile phone decks and use some WAP applications and you will realize that discoverability, rediscoverability and usability are key issues.
At any rate, we are happy to welcome Piczo to the ecosystem and look forward to bringing them to mobile subscribers through our growing list of carriers around the world.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 01:05 PM
November 15, 2007
MTV and ANTHEM™
MTV and ANTHEM™
Yesterday we announced our relationship with Viacom unit MTV Networks. The first of their properties we are enabling through our award-winning ANTHEM™ platform is Tr3s, which is their latino-focused channel.
I am excited about MTV for many reasons, but mostly because MTV entering the mobile social networking space represents a broad shift from the current mindset in the category which is either mobile-specific social networking providers (mobile social networking) or well-known internet sites provisioned in the mobile space (social networking on mobile.) With MTV moving in this direction, it signifies two things:
1) “Community” is decouping from “Communication”
2) Major brands, with their reach through broadcast channels, have a chance to win big.
Regarding the former, ANTHEM™ was architected from the beginning to enable a single user identity to pass from community to community. It is basically what the opensocial initiative is supposed to achieve, but we already have it built for the mobile space. All of the credentialing happens on our server, which makes registration and login across multiple sites nearly transparent to users. This enables a user to literally take their PIM into, say, MySpace, attach a bunch of new friends, and then sync them back to a centralized friends list and then all the way back to the handset itself. A user who wants to take his friend list into an MTV community can do so easily, and that community is the context for the communication that we facilitate.
Regarding the latter, what I mean is that a brand like MTV is like a nucleus around which people can interact with each other. It provides the context for the experience. The unique opportunity for major media companies is to engage their audience in a two-way channel before, during and long after a broadcast event. It is a bit like American Idol text voting, but long after the spike is gone, the audience can still be engaged in the community.
Because of this, I see the opportunity for MTV (and media companies in general) to evolve the way they think about what used to be a broadcast-only medium. I think they have the opportunity to engage an audience that could be many times larger than the current spate of social networking sites in the same basic behavior, but within an ever-evolving context. This doesn’t even really compete with “pure” social networking sites, in fact it complements them very nicely. When I am inside Tr3s and I can share that content with my friends on MySpace because there is a single backend that facilitates the communication, everyone wins.
I would like to see MTV set the pace for media-centric mobile social networking. If they do it right, it could establish a paradigm shift in how media companies engage their audience. We will work hard to support them in that regard. More to come on this over the next few weeks.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 12:43 PM
October 16, 2007
FierceMobile just named ANTHEM one of their top 10 applications for 2007
Well this is nice. FierceMobile just announced their top mobile apps for 2007, and ANTHEM made the list.
Click here to see the whole list.
Fierce lists their favorite 10 companies for 2007 and the applications that are driving their success. They provide an explanation of why each was chosen, too. Here is the blurb on ANTHEM.
They give the example that Friendster used to be #1, but now it isn’t. I understand they said it to make the point that ANTHEM gives carriers a platform to enable ALL social networking sites so that they are not forced to try to pick winners in this constantly changing category. I would like to point out, though, that the whole category is growing, and Friendster, for instance, is rising with the tide and still ranks in the top 20. It's not so much that certain sites go away, rather more and more sites get added.
I don’t know which social networking site is going to be the biggest in a year or two, nor do I know if it is going to be a web-based SNS that dominates the mobile space. But that is the point of ANTHEM: To give carriers and SNS the platform to evolve in the mobile space toward a more robust user experience while preserving the branding and functionality that resonates with consumers.
Anyway, thanks to Fierce, and thanks to our growing list of clients who agree that social networking is a strategic category in the mobile space that requires a strategic approach to fully realize its potential.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 01:39 PM
September 26, 2007
Boost Mobile using ANTHEM
Boost mobile launched their "Social Zone" social networking category today using our ANTHEM platform. This is our typical single client solution, so what the user sees is an application that is essentially the category: All SNS providers show up in a menu screen, and the one selected rebrands the application and the user enters that community. With a similar UI across multiple SNS providers, the user learning curve is flat, enabling consumers to focus on interaction and content instead of UI quirks.
Whenever Boost wants to add a SNS provider in the future, there is nothing more to deploy to the handset - we handle everything through backend integration. This approach is great for preloading, because OEM footprint constraints disallow a carrier from putting, say, the top 10 social networking sites on a device, though they can put a single interface on a device and be able to provision any number of providers into the future.
This also enables them to integrate deeply to the device's key usage drivers such as the camera, gallery and PIM - something you cannot do with WAP.
Boost is technically a division of Sprint now, though they act completely autonomously, which I think was a wise decision on Sprint's part. Their subscriber base is very differentiated demographically, and they are an important addition to our market share footprint.
Boost is a great partner with a great demographic and we will bend over backward for them as we do for all of our partners to bring their subscribers the absolute best mobile social networking experience possible.
I wish I had more time to write today about our roadmap with Boost - they will be doing some great things - but I have a lot going on today and limited time. If you have any questions, please feel free to email me.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 10:13 AM
August 22, 2007
Virgin Mobile USA
Today VMU announced that they are using the ANTHEM platform for their social networking category. This deployment is a little different from the way Sprint used the platform. Sprint used it to churn out individual applications, whereas Virgin deployed a single application. Both ways are fine, but as a user I personally prefer the single application approach because I use more than one social networking site. Now there is nothing more for VMU to do when they want to add more SNS. The “application” is already out there, all a new SNS has to do is plug into ANTHEM and the next day it shows up in the main menu.
I am in sales, so I demo our product a lot, and I have been using the Virgin demo because it shows how vastly different all of these sites are and how even through a single interface those differences can be shown to the end user to create very unique experiences but with a transparent UI.
We love Virgin Mobile. They have done a great job of reaching some very important demographic groups and have been careful to match those groups with a diverse set of community sites. The next phase of their deployment will focus on layering in key mobile functionality to better serve their subscriber base.
On that point, it is important to reiterate that “mobile social networking” is not “social networking on mobile.” The latter is a web-centric view of the world that makes the broad assumption that all users that matter are primarily on, or came from, the web. The priority of a web-centric social networking site is to drive the web experience. Their interest in any mobile carrier will be A) to get a messaging bind and B) to deploy a free WAP product, if at all.
The messaging bind is to facilitate alerts from the web to mobile. The use case is that an online user got a message or a friend request or whatever and they want to be notified of it on their mobile phone because they are not in front of their computer. The user gets the alert, which compels them to go to their computer to take action.
If this is a social networking service provider’s only interest, ANTHEM can provide that functionality but make it even better for users. ANTHEM has a messaging module that can handle the one-way alerts I mentioned, but it also enables proxy messaging through our gateway. This means users can get the alert as in the example above, but can also take action, like respond, select options, view content, and so on. Aside from providing immediate gratification to consumers, it also has proven to drive messaging usage, and there is an attractive business model built around it.
We view the mobile social networking experience as being complementary to the web-based experience, and see it as an important consumer touchpoint to keep the user base engaged. The web experience is obviously very engaging, but a 2-inch mobile screen is a comparatively difficult environment in which to fully engage consumers who are used to the joy of a 20-inch monitor. Trying to replicate the web experience fully doesn’t work, but presenting certain aspects of the web experience can work very well.
ANTHEM provides SNS providers with a sort of “conversion ladder” to present consumers with the level of interaction they desire and gives them a frictionless way to get to other interfaces as well. There are three primary presentation components to ANTHEM, each of which can function on its own, but combined they present a very rich experience to users:
Proxy Messaging – An SNS or carrier wishing to deploy a messaging-centric mobile social networking solution can do so with our Proxy Messaging Gateway. It is better than one-way alerts because A) it is two-way, which drives messaging revenue and B) protects users because while it feels like SMS and MMS, the user’s phone number is never revealed.
Thin Client (XHTML) – Any mobile developer will tell you that WAP is not “easy” the way it should be. ANTHEM provides a turnkey WAP interface of any social networking site. This makes things easier for SNS, but it is mostly to accommodate carriers who want or need to provide an XHTML interface to the entire category. (Virgin Mobile is a good example here – many of their handsets do not support J2ME, so having a full WAP deployment is important.) Even if a SNS has their own WAP site already developed, many carriers’ social networking categories are going to use ANTHEM to be provisioned with a thin client interface that is messaging-centric, so integration provides users a more robust top level experience, but then they can click off to a different WAP experience if an SNS wants it that way and the carrier will allow it.
Thick Client (J2ME, BREW) – The most immersive experience is the thick client. Aside from providing the most relevant web functions but in a mobile interface, a thick client enables carriers and SNS providers to do things that are not possible with WAP. First of all, carriers can preload a single white-labeled client whereas they are unlikely to preload the top 10 social networking sites. (Also, when they want to add more partners in the future, it all happens on the backend.) Preloading is a proven way to drive discovery and usage at least an order of magnitude over downloading. It also enables some key handset integration touchpoints, namely with the camera, the PIM and the gallery, all of which are proven to be key drivers of usage and revenue.
The key mobile functionality that I alluded to includes functionality that only the mobile users of a particular SNS provider may see. This is because there are things that make sense in the mobile space that may not make sense to a web user and vice versa. We faithfully represent our partners’ web-based content and functionality, but then we provide them the option of adding mobile-centric options that engage those users in a unique way. (I’ll talk more about these functions in a month or so.)
The end result is an approach that respects the SNS providers’ need for a unique branded presentation to users but that is simply better for mobile users because of how it is presented.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 10:44 AM
August 07, 2007
Community Connect on ANTHEM
Community Connect is the most recent Social Networking Service (SNS) provider to plug into the ANTHEM platform. Community Connect is an interesting company: They have a well-developed publishing platform that extends the social networking construct across multiple ethnic verticals. They operate BlackPlanet, MiGente, AsianAvenue, GLEE, and Faithbase. I am excited to be serving Community Connect because so many of our backlogged carrier partners have asked for vertical communities.
The reason for this is anecdotally obvious: The mobile data consuming segment skews young, and within that consuming population it segments into ethnic verticals.
Philosophical discussion: Labels are a handy way to organize. I have a friend who played water polo in college and wanted to play as an adult and was therefore looking for an adult league. There isn’t one in San Diego. But there is a “gay” water polo league in San Diego. He isn’t gay, but he likes to play water polo so he called up the league. Of course, they were happy to have him on one of the teams, as “gay” is obviously not a requisite for playing water polo. He explained to me that he learned that once you put a label on yourself like a big yellow PostIt note on your forehead, it makes it way easier to pick each other out of a crowd. There are certain lowest common denominators that define us and that may be a good starting point for other shared interests.
For instance, calling yourself a “Republican” communicates a lot about you because there is a well-developed and reinforced understanding of what it means to be a republican. You may be socially and fiscally conservative, tend toward certain moral and religious beliefs, etc. This may only be in contrast to existing alternatives: How can you accept the label “conservative” unless you know what “liberal” means and what the delta is between them? Then, of course, splinter groups evolve. You may be “moderate” or you may be a “fundamentalist” or you may be “radical” and all of these labels may be children to a parent label that makes everyone better able to identify with each other and find each other in a crowd.
Every network operator deploying our platform has a similar strategy for their social networking categories, and they all involve providing a “complete” offering to their subscribers. What does “complete” mean? Well, across the board that means the top 20 social networking sites, large general brands like AOL, large affinity brands like MTV, and most importantly to most, key ethnic or special-interest verticals.
This all comes down to Affinity. When a consumer has an affinity for a certain vertical, the value of everything delivered by that vertical increases. This effect can be attributed to brands, to people, to political parties, to products, to demographics, to ethnicities, to religious beliefs, etc. There are now social networking sites for baby boomers, for tweens, for democrats, for doctors, for people who own iPhones, for practically every niche you can think of. Some of those niches are larger than others, and Community Connect reaches some of the largest. The point is that consumers are segmented into definable groups, and there is nothing wrong with giving those consumer groups applications tailored to their specific demands.
So now Community Connect can provision its mobile service on every network operator that uses our platform, which is a zero-cost, turn-key mobile strategy for them, and the network operators deploying our platform have a turn-key vertical social networking offering to give their subscribers. Hitwise recently ranked BlackPlanet the 4th largest social networking site, while MiGente was 19th.
A note on our integration with Community Connect: The ANTHEM platform is very flexible. Any SNS provider can bring their own UI if they want, or they can use ours. (Community Connect is using ours.) Either way, the functionality can be very deep or very light depending on the preferences of the SNS. Every social networking site has similar features like messaging, profile, friend list, etc., but every social networking site also has very unique functionality. In the case of Community Connect, there are some unique differentiators that we enable nicely in the mobile version. Also, like every SNS enabled through ANTHEM, deep integration to the device makes for a great user experience. Subscribers can take pics right from the app and send content to their friends via the device’s address book.
Several carriers directed us to integrate with Community Connect, and we’re glad they did – we think this is a key part of any network operators offering, and now that Community Connect is plugged into ANTHEM, it is a zero-effort deployment option for every other carrier, too. Community Connect’s integration to ANTHEM took about a week, which is typical for most SNS partners, and now there is nothing more required to execute on their mobile strategy.
As we continue to build out the ecosystem around Intercasting Corp., I am really excited to welcome Community Connect as an important partner, and we will bend over backward to make their users happy with the absolute best mobile experience possible.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 04:38 PM
July 17, 2007
Sprint is using ANTHEM to power its social networking category
This week we launch the first of a growing list of wireless carriers that have chosen ANTHEM as the core of their social networking offerings. On Sprint, it is called “social zone,” but on others it may be called “social networking” or whatever. ANTHEM is not a consumer brand – it is a platform to manage the social networking category that puts carriers and Social Networking Service (SNS) providers (and their brands) first.
We are deeply integrated into the Sprint network and meaningfully integrated with their devices. Sprint had to do this technical integration with us only once, and now they can deploy any number of social networking sites through our platform. All they do from now on is call us and tell us to plug in whatever social networking sites they want to launch in the future.
Integration to the ANTHEM platform for SNS providers takes a few days. (Compared to a few months to build a standalone application, for instance.) So if you are a social networking site and want a turn-key mobile strategy, send us an email and we’ll get you set up. Sprint will soon be launching more than twice as many SNS providers as they chose for day one, and we are integrating additional SNS providers on an ongoing basis.
The Sprint deployment is a good example of the flexibility of ANTHEM. In this case, Sprint has chosen to offer each SNS individually. This allows them to cross promote applications on different areas on their deck. Other carriers will be launching ANTHEM with a single monolithic application that in fact looks to the end user like the category itself. This one application then rebrands itself according to the SNS the user has selected. This makes more sense for when ANTHEM is preloaded on handsets because there is never anything new for the user to download, and with one thick client on the handset, the footprint requirement is relatively low. Come to think of it, for most carriers, this is the ONLY way they will be able to bring the entire social networking category to their subscribers in a preloaded or OS-integrated fashion, but more on that some other time.
There are some notable differences between ANTHEM and other social networking providers that are currently available:
- Camera integration: ANTHEM gives users the ability to take a pic right from within any SNS offered through the platform. This may seem like an obvious requirement, but no carrier that I know of has allowed any other social networking site to access the camera API. This makes the content creation user experience through ANTHEM comparatively outstanding. Really – you have to try it next to an social networking site that does not have this functionality to fully get how much better it is for users.
- PIM integration: To make it as easy as possible to share content, ANTHEM enables users to access their phone’s address book from within their chosen social networking provider. The address book on the phone is typically a silo, but when combined seamlessly with any social networking site, it feels like the bridge that was missing between “social networking” and mobile.
- Registration: You can sign up for, say, Xanga right from your phone. Does this seem like another obvious requirement? We think it is, but you will find other social networking sites outside of our platform that do not allow you to create a new account from your phone. For someone who already has an account, this is perfectly reasonable, but we always remind ourselves that there are TWICE AS MANY MOBILE PHONES IN THE WORLD AS THERE ARE PCs, which means that however many people are using your social networking site on the web, you can double that number if you have a well-defined mobile strategy.
Check it out for yourself at the newly-created Social Zone category from your Sprint mobile phone. Today you will find many of the top-tier social networking sites, and over the next several weeks you will find many more. Notably missing is MySpace. What can I say? They are far and away the category leader on the web, and as such they exert a commensurate amount of influence in the mobile space. I personally think that while it is great as it is, their service would be even better through our platform, but it really doesn’t matter what I think. ;-) We work for the carriers, and whoever they tell us to integrate with is who we integrate with, and our goal is to provide the absolute best user experience to their mobile subscribers. We think by making that our guiding light and by serving equally the needs of wireless carriers and social networking providers, we will eventually represent the absolute best solution for the mobile social networking vertical.
Lastly, the deployment you see today is our “1.0.” I met with someone yesterday who works in this space and we were talking about how the vertical has to evolve. I was saying that we are keen to get to our version “3.11,” which was the first version of Microsoft Windows that was truly more useful than DOS. Between now and then, we will listen to our customers (and our customers’ customers) to bring the category-leading platform to mobile subscribers. So if you love something about it, I want to know, and if you hate something about it, I really want to know. As we evolve the platform over time, I’ll offer updates on key functionality, etc.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 08:28 AM
March 12, 2007
Digital music in a mobile connected world
I used to live in Beverly Hills. One of my favorite breakfast places was Newsroom café, but I stopped going because it got too irritating to listen to all the WADs (Writer/Actor/Directors) talking conspicuously loudly with their MAWs (Model/Actress/Whatevers) about their script/part/project which they just wrote/developed/were offered.
Silicon valley has its own version of this coffee house hell. The Sharon Heights Starbucks on Sand Hill Road should install ceiling-mounted cones of silence that can descend to encapsulate the hyperactive entrepreneurs fervishly refining their pitches before their meetings with the venture capitalists up the road. They gesticulate with their triple grande lattes and point meaningfully with their scones at their computer screens while explaining their particularly pertinent points of genius. Conviction and caffeine combine to raise voices above the ordinary din, and I know well the look in their eyes – a constant slightly desperate need for validation.
Next to me are two young guys crowding a small table with their open laptops, exchanging sentence fragments about the presentation they are working on simultaneously, apparently in a mad dash to add one last bit of brilliance before their next meeting. They are definitely out of college, but only recently so. One guy has a venti quadruple cinnamon dolce latte and a lemon poppyseed muffin. I watched him order it. (This is an amateur move [that much coffee raises your core temperature (which makes you sweat during your presentation [which is exacerbated by the sudden massive calorie load (the muffin alone is 560 calories and 30 grams of fat, [the exact same as a Big Mac, btw (but worse because and you run the risk of having to do your pitch with poppyseeds stuck in your teeth.)])])])
These guys have a social networking site for music sharing (of course) that enables people to upload their music, create playlists and share them with not only their friends but anyone. They are particularly proud of their MySpace widget, which they call their silver bullet. They have mistaken my multiple glances in their direction to mean “wow, that sounds unique and interesting, I think I will covertly listen to these brilliant young men,” whereas what I really mean is, “hey, you obnoxious assholes, keep it below a scream because the kids at Stanford are trying to study, and by the way, you just described the last seven years of business plans in the digital music space from Napster to iMeem, and MySpace just blocked all widgets.”
Have you tried iMeem btw? I love it in the same way I loved Napster when it first launched.
Anyway, digital music seems to be enjoying a bit of a resurgence to the limelight, and I have been thinking a lot about digital media lately, what with the recent spate of lawsuits around the MP3 format.
Microsoft has to pay $1.52 BILLION to Alcatel-Lucent for patent infringement.
And now Apple, Samsung and Sandisk are being sued for patent infringement, too.
I think we can expect to see more lawsuits, too.
A few weeks ago at 3GSM, Warner Music Group’s Edgar Bronfman Jr. lamented the current state of mobile music downloads, saying “…it’s expensive, it’s complicated and it’s slow. It's amazing that we've generated as much revenue as we have given how cumbersome the experience can be."
I think he is 100% correct.
But what can he do about it?
Clearly the music industry is a big business, and so I guess it is worth defending, growing, disintermediating, disrupting, consolidating and all of the other verbs that myriad businesses are trying to do. I have been thinking about Edgar’s comments and, specifically, how the music industry can make money in the mobile space when the internet is basically a machine that distributes their content for free.
Of course, the real issue everybody brings up is that the music industry itself sells the bulk of its content on CDs, which is an unprotected digital format. If people are willing to pay for that, then why tax consumers of other versions of it with onerous DRM mechanisms?
I think I would start where the industry is most effed up, which is only in the technology – technology, btw, that was not vetted nor intentionally employed by the music industry. Here’s a brief history of the music industry:
- Wandering minstrels played their lutes to villagers for a few shillings
- Patrons of the arts sponsored composers and musicians
- Constanze Weber continues to commercialize her late husband’s (Mozart) work through commissioned concerts
- Tin Pan Alley consolidates printed music and monetizes it, though not necessarily to the benefit of artists
- Copyright laws evolve to protect and compensate artists
- The Phonograph changes music distribution and leads to the birth of and domination by the record industry
- Radio happens
- The record industry learns that applying new technology to replace their catalog of music periodically is a good way to make a lot of money, so we get casettes and 8-tracks and they lead to such conveniences as the Sony Walkman in 1979
- 1981: MTV happens
- 1982: CDs happen
Those last two points in history were crucial to getting us to where we are today in the music industry. Until 1981, the record industry didn’t understand that it should have been the music industry. The record industry viewed MTV much as it did radio – as a marketing channel to sell records. So, the record industry GAVE MTV it’s content for free and MTV went on to build a multibillion dollar business on the back of the record industry. Lesson learned: There is a lot more to music than records. Fine.
But then they did something that was, in retrospect, incredibly unfortunate. As technology evolved, as it had before, they took advantage of it and reprinted their entire catalog in an unsecured digital format called the Compact Disc. And it was great for several years.
- Then the internet happened.
- Then CD ripping happened.
- Then Napster happened.
It was like a perfect storm that absolutely could not be predicted. And thus a business model defined as “physical distribution of physical goods that consumers pay for at retail” changed completely into “digital distribution of content over the internet decoupled from its original form that consumers do not pay for.”
I find it ironic that:
- The record industry is itself responsible for unwittingly cutting its own value in half
- The largest patent infringement verdict in history is over a technology that only destroyed market value for the industry that created its importance
- Said technology did create value for consumer electronics manufacturers, which created an industry around providing portability to users of their music in MP3 format
- The consumer electronics manufacturer that saw the greatest benefit is suggesting somewhat convincingly that the music industry shouldn’t even try to protect its content
Technology changes things. We are essentially back to a form of electronic wandering minstel. Tower Records is gone, but Hot Topic and Starbucks are major purchase influencers for consumers. Independent labels can now survive on bands that might only sell 50,000 units whereas 10 years ago, anything less than 250,000 would be a failure. Bright Eyes gave away most of his early work electronically, became hugely popular, and later released a couple of albums in the top 10. Cool. Let’s enable that.
So back to Edgar Bronfman and the guys at Starbucks. I think the guys at Starbucks are right to put music in a social context. I personally think that putting anything in a social context is a good idea, given that recommendations from people we know are the most influential form of discovery. I know Edgar Bronfman is right, but the reason seems pretty simple to me: Any carrier has to organize their content and application offerings into a hierarchical pyramid that resembles an iceberg in that a small percentage of it is visible above the water and the vast majority is down deep below the surface. This is a reality of the devices we use to provision content. So what about putting it into a social context instead? In the mobile space, that would mean associating the PIM with meta data other than name, phone number and email address. Think about it: Every song you buy, every ringtone you download, every 411 search you execute, every “favorite place” you save you can choose to selectively publish to some or all of your friends through your device’s PIM, and so can they. So when I scroll to Edgar Bronfman in my phone’s PIM (and, weirdly, Edgar Bronfman actually is in my PIM, which makes a totally different statement about the value of the PIM, but I’ll think about that and make a separate post about it) I can see what he is listening to lately and maybe what his favorite restaurants are in New York, and I can click once to get to a view of it that is actionable to me. Remember that this is the mobile space, where data and billing are not distantly related, they are directly linked. It is one thing to see what Edgar is listening to, but through a monolithic platform that can make and maintain these relationships between people and content, Edgar Bronfman turns into a storefront to me. WIth just a click, I can buy that song off of Edgar's playlist. Pretty cool, and it solves a bunch of problems on the mobile media distribution value chain.
What I just described is exactly what our ANTHEM platform does. It may be difficult to visualize from one paragraph, but once you hold a device in your hand powered by our platform, you’ll immediately get it. Send me an email to see for yourself. Derrick will be at iHollywood tomorrow, and we’ll be at CTIA of course, plus many other events coming up.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 02:17 PM
| Comments (1)
February 14, 2007
What is mobile social networking?
(And why ANTHEM makes sense for social networking service providers and carriers.)
I met with a venture capitalist today. We talked about ANTHEM and exchanged views of the future. He agreed that providing mobile subscribers access to multiple social networking communities makes sense, since increased consumer choice is always better, and popularity waxes and wanes. “But I am not even sure that putting social networking sites on mobile phones is ‘mobile social networking,’” He said. “I mean, will the dogs eat the dog food?”
(I have learned that last bit about referring to consumers as dogs eating dog food is a favorite platitude of VCs, along with “What’s your secret sauce?” and “What’s your China and India strategy?”)
Anyway, I understood his question and I think he’s right about “mobile social networking” being something different. Here is more or less what I told him:
First off, yes, the dogs will eat the dog food. And, yes, "social networking on mobile" is VERY different from "mobile social networking." I have used the MySpace and Facebook apps on Cingular, and they do pretty much what I expected them to do, which is provide access to my web-based social networking profile and some of the relevant features of their respective sites that allow me to browse other profiles and send messages to people. These applications are quite clearly “social networking on mobile.”
So is that enough? I mean, if mobile subscribers want access to the biggest trend on the net, shouldn’t we just put up the two or so biggest players like MySpace and Hi5 and call it a day?
Yes, it is enough for now, but is more of a great start for an even more exciting future.
Here’s why: This isn’t just a trend on the internet. This is an evolution in communication. What started with real-time point-to-point voice sessions via the telephone has turned into multipoint-to-multipoint asynchronous multimedia streams via devices with massive processing power.
Abstract your true “social network,” your friends and family and various acquaintances, from any means of capturing and representing them. A few of your best friends are in there along with several co-workers. Some family members, plus maybe one degree of separation like your wife’s friend who is married to that guy you would never interact with socially but are forced to because of your wife. Now think of the various ways in which you communicate with these people. Many of them are in your address book on your mobile phone, and you use it to initiate voice calls and to send SMS and MMS. Many of them, with a good amount of overlap, are in your email address book which is most likely tied to your PC via Outlook. A smaller number of them are in your IM buddy list, but still with pretty good overlap with your other address books. Now think of how many of them are in your friend list on any social networking site. I realize this post isn’t necessarily being read by 15-year-old girls, so you may not be the target demographic for social networking sites. But if you do have a social networking profile, you will agree with the following statement: There is very slight overlap between your friend list on [insert any social networking service provider here] and your true social network.
This is because social networking sites are not for maintaining social capital, they are for building social capital.
Great, but so what does that mean in the mobile space? If I can build social capital on my PC, can’t I also build it on my phone? Yes, of course, but dig into the details of the mobile value chain and things start to look dramatically different.
First off, wireless carriers operate closed networks in much the same way social networking sites operate closed networks. In fact, most wireless carriers consider their subscriber base to be a community and refer to it as such. Many carriers have had great success introducing intra-network services that only work with their community of subscribers. Boost Mobile’s Loopt is a good example of data-enabling their “chirp” PTT functionality through a visual map interface. It works because many people sign up for Boost in pairs, like a girlfriend/boyfriend, and their tagline, “Where You At?” is the most common phrase uttered into their phones after they chirp. 3 UK’s SeeMeTV is also a good example. (3 UK just announced that they adopted the ANTHEM platform, btw.) SeeMeTV is an exceptionally innovative feature that enables 3 subscribers to buy and sell user-generated content.
As popular as intracarrier features and applications may be, their primary function is differentiation, which means some features make more sense than others. For instance, SMS used to be an intracarrier feature, and carriers marketed it as a reason for you to tell all your friends and family (your social network) to use their network. But SMS is undifferentiated enough as a feature that usage soon hit a low ceiling. Since there was no difference to the consumer between Cingular SMS and Verizon SMS, it was not a compelling reason to adopt or switch carriers. Furthermore, consumers viewed SMS as an extension to voice communication and not as a unique feature. Nobody would use a phone that only called people on one network, so why should they adopt a messaging tool that didn’t allow the same freedom. Of course, when SMS turned into an intercarrier feature, adoption skyrocketed, and it is now the primary data revenue driver for all carriers.
Fine. So social networking in the mobile space definitely has to be a cross-carrier deployment. But what is the difference between “social networking on mobile” and “mobile social networking”?
Integration. By that, I mean integration to the key aspects of the mobile environment that create a truly mobile-relevant experience.
Go back to your true social network, and now tell me the tool that consolidates all of those separate address books and buddy lists. There isn't one. They are all little islands that you maintain separately. Your PC platform provides much of the glue that you use to maintain your relationships. You don't realize how important hyperlinks and cutting and pasting is to your ability to maintain linkages between separate programs. Furthermore, anyone who thinks that a mobile device with a browser is essentially a little PC with an internet connection and that a mobile consumer is the same as a web consumer, is going to make some mistakes in their mobile product strategy.
The few web-based social networking sites that have offered WAP versions of their sites have basically replicated web-based functionality and made it look pretty good on a small screen. Again, there is nothing wrong with this, and it is a great first step, but we aim to go far beyond simply offering web-based functionality on mobile devices.
The ANTHEM platform integrates deeply with SNS providers to offer whatever level of functionality they desire. So far, in addition to their branding and unique content presentation, our SNS partners are all offering core browsing, profile, search, messaging and alert capabilities that make their sites so sticky. That is the “social networking on mobile” aspect of the platform, and it really does look and act better than any social networking approach I have seen in the mobile space.
But then it goes a step further. 3rd-party content providers plug in to the platform and can provision their content via the SNS partners’ communities. So for instance, while it may be a web-relevant user experience to click on song download links, no carrier in their right mind is going to allow it without some degree of oversight. ANTHEM can replace those links with ringtone download links to create a mobile-relevant experience for users, but within the same context of the communities they are used to, and with a business model that suits the carriers' interests. Carriers typically have one or two content providers for such categories, and we plug them into ANTHEM and the experience is transparent to the user.
ANTHEM also provides SNS partners gallery integration. Whether on the device or a carrier’s server, ANTHEM removes the friction involved with taking a picture and sharing it with a user’s community. This enables SNS partners and carriers to create accretive business models around user-generated content. Add integration to the carrier’s billing system, and you have a way to share content in a marketplace that is defined as a social networking community that makes both carriers and SNS partners more money.
PIM integration is another important detail that differentiates “mobile social networking.” The carriers should view the PIM as a master list that includes all contact options including voice, PTT, IM, email, SMS, MMS, etc. Adding a user’s various friend lists from their favorite social networking sites is crucial because it enables users to blur the lines between “friends” and “Friends” and to seamlessly transfer their contact options across multiple modes. So while “social networking on mobile” might allow you to send a message to your friend on Xanga, “mobile social networking” would also allow you to ping that friend via PTT.
Mobile social networking is consolidated multimodal communication that blends the capabilities of the existing mobile ecosystem that enables you to maintain your actual social network with the community-based tools that enable you to increase your social capital. It’s the depth of integration to the mobile ecosystem and the extensibility of functionality that makes ANTHEM a useful approach for carriers and SNS providers. It also provides a more compelling experience for the mobile subscriber, which means better adoption and more usage.
There are other exciting features of ANTHEM that I’ll reveal over time. For now, I wanted to explain why I think it is important to enable this category with a structured, strategic approach using a centralized platform that allows for growth in the future vs. inking one-off deals with a few partners that may not unlock the full value of the opportunity for everyone involved.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 10:16 AM
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January 31, 2007
ANTHEM at 3GSM
We will be showcasing our ANTHEM Social Networking Gateway at 3GSM in Barcelona. (By “showcasing,” I mean showing it to various people with whom we have meetings.) I would like to show it to you, too. Please let me know if you will be in Barcelona and want to check it out. I will be at the INmobile reception on Monday evening at the Hotel Arts. The rest of the week I will be around the convention center, though it turns out that the best place to have meetings is in the hotel across the roundabout from the entrance to the convention area.
ANTHEM aggregates social networking services (SNS) for network operators. This reduces business development effort and provides a single point of technical integration, enabling carriers to offload the technical heavy lifting of integration to us. For social networking providers, we provide a turn-key on-deck (and on-device) mobile strategy. This requires one connection to our platform, and the rest is taken care of.
Already adopted by several carriers and SNS providers as the core of their mobile social networking strategy, ANTHEM is a true carrier-grade solution that solves many problems associated with bringing social networking to the mobile space.
UPDATE: Qualcomm called yesterday to let us know that they will be showing Rabble 2.0 in their booth. This is the newest version of the first carrier-grade mobile blogging and social networking application. It is very cool. Come see it.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 06:59 AM
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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 story.
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 03:16 PM
