It would be very valuable to certain interests if such a thing could be consistently created and leveraged for some specific purpose, such as for a product or idea or presidential candidate, but mostly when these things flare up, it strikes a nerve (or more often a funnybone) with such a wide swath of the public that it would seem impossible to predict the whim of the people.

Today I was sent a quote via text message about which I am 100% certain is going to lead to such a cultural phenomenon, and may even rise to the level of Saturday Night Live skit. (If Tina Fey was still at SNL, I could practically guarantee it.)

I am referring to this quote from ALLA KUDRYAVTSEVA, who upset Maria Sharapova by handily beating her at Wimbledon today:

"I don't like her outfit," Kudryavtseva said. "It was one of the motivations to beat her."

Oh snap. Instead of a sportswoman-like, “She played very well, it was a great match and I am very pleased with my performance against such an able competitor,” we got the humiliating vitriol, "I don't like her outfit. It was one of the motivations to beat her."

Truly awesome. What makes this a cultural spark worthy of massive imitation and distribution is the sheer audacity of it all. It wasn’t enough to beat her. She had to shame her.

Read it again with a Russian accent:
"I don't like her outfit. It was one of the motivations to beat her."

Yes, comrade, that makes it a little funnier.

This woman is a literal caricature of unsportsman-like behavior. It is funny because someone ELSE said it. Someone ELSE crafted this beautiful example of ridiculousness that had never existed in the lexicon of professional sports, which gives me the ability to use it with impunity. And I will. Whenever I beat anyone in my life from now on, you can bet I am going to shame them by lowering my voice, assuming a very serious countenance and saying in my best Russian accent, “I did not like your outfit. It was one of the motivations to beat you.”

Yes, I am officially replacing the time-honored Mortal Kombat “Fatality” with this much longer insult. When I win at golf, “I did not like your outfit.” When I win at Quake, “I did not like your outfit.” Even when I successfully call shotgun and beat you to the front seat on the way to lunch, “I did not like your outfit. It was one of the motivations to beat you.”

It occurs to me that, while very funny coming from Alla, it will be even funnier coming from Will Ferrell. Can you imagine him in a tennis dress, being interviewed and delivering this comment with deadpan precision. Or for a more contemporary example, how about Chad Vader? Or how about the thousands of creative examples that the creative consumer base will come up with. Someone will even do a song, and it will be funny. I want to see ALL of these in one place, right now. I want to accelerate the development of the wave of creativity that is going to be unleashed and I want to see it all organized and ranked in terms of funniness and popularity.

And if I owned one of the world’s largest traditional media companies, I would also want to capitalize on the creativity that is going to be unleashed, because this is so obviously what the media company of the future is all about. It is less about producing the right content and more about being able to accelerate the distribution of the right content that perhaps you didn’t produce. I think there is a huge role to be played there, which is just a different version of the model that media companies have already figured out – give people what they want. (This is true even when the people have created it.)

We are obviously very happy to be working with T-Mobile and their set of chosen social networking sites, which we expect to grow over time. There are a few things about this deployment that are notable:
- The My Social Sites link off the main menu of T-Mobile phones goes directly to the ANTHEM white-labeled interface
- Discoverability is high due to this preloading and low friction for consumers
- Consumers see a "dashboard" view of their favorite social sites, making it easy to check messages from multiple providers
- This thick-client approach enables PIM and Camera integration, which empowers consumers in a way that is not possible with WAP

This brings up a good point about WAP: To us, WAP is an important element of any mobile strategy. In fact, the entire ANTHEM solution is agnostic of any presentation layer, which means we can (and do) deploy the social networking category for our carrier partners in WAP, as well. However, the limitations of WAP make it best suited in the social networking vertical for mostly "read-only" deployments. Think of WAP as the widest part of the funnel to provide social networking users with a mobile experience. The more a mobile user centralizes their social networking experience around their mobile device, the more important it is to provide enhanced functionality, which is where a pre-loaded Java or BREW interface comes in.

As more mobile social networking users become "super users," demand for greater functionality will increase. We see it happening now as we look at our server logs, btw. The more functionally complete sites enjoy higher usage and greater customer satisfaction and lower churn. Mobile social networking is on a path to become as addictive to a certain set of consumers as mobile email has become for a certain other set of consumers, and a better interface can make a big difference.

I feel like I should discuss an important point regarding the deployment of social networking on mobile carriers: There is a divergence of interests between carriers and social networking providers.

The wireless telecommunications industry is NOT optimized for deployment and management of mobile data applications. This is a slow-moving industry with long development timelines and high friction to reach consumers. BUT, once you reach those consumers, they are worth their weight in gold.

Social networking sites are web-based companies that owe much of their success to their speed of execution and high-leverage model for deploying services.

When the two industries try to come together, the result is sometimes frustrating for both sides only because they are promoting different agendas. A social networking site may say, “We only want to support WAP because the development effort approximates our web-based model, making it easier to reach as many of our consumers as possible and we do not have the bandwidth to deal with each carrier individually.”

This agenda, while certainly sound, may be at odds with a carrier, which may say, “We want to bring social networking to our users in a way that integrates it as closely as possible into the native handset experience, which requires more effort and longer deployment timelines, but ultimately is better for our consumers.”

Both sides want what is best for THEIR consumers, but the truth is they are sharing the same consumers since the overlap of “social networking user” and “mobile phone user” is significant. These two parties are not at odds with each other in that regard, and the best outcome comes from working together.

We have found that the best solution is a multi-faceted approach. Offer WAP because that appeals to a certain segment of the user base, and also offer applications and device integration to address other user segments and further position social networking as a highly discoverable and usable feature.

The bizarre observation here is that preloading and device integration are incredibly significant value drivers, and instead of begging for this kind of placement, certain social networking sites have in the past pushed back, not understanding the high value and perhaps assuming the level of effort is not worth it. To that, I can only say that no matter what the effort is, it is worth it. But that is where the ANTHEM platform comes in anyway: A social networking site with mobile plans but not a dedicated mobile development team integrates once and then rides the coattails of the carrier’s plans to deploy the category deeply into its user experience. This is a complete win/win. Both sides benefit tremendously.

Many carriers are now asserting that their strategies for serving the mobile consumer are as important as a social networking site’s strategy for serving their web-based consumer in the mobile environment. They do this by making sure that WAP is an important part of the consumer offering, but also by providing a more feature-rich interface that encourages long-term use, and integration that drives discovery.

T-Mobile is a carrier that fully understands the value of providing a comprehensive consumer offering and we are proud to be serving them. With their commitment to T-Mobile through ANTHEM, Bebo and Piczo have also illustrated their understanding of the importance of a complete offering in the mobile space that engages their users almost as fully as they do on the web, and we are happy to be serving them, as well.

It basically states that markets mature to support three big “generalist” players, leaving the niche markets to more focused “specialists.” The mid-sized generalists get forced out one way or another.

Mature markets end up looking sort of like the structure of the modern American shopping mall, with the big department store anchors at the ends and a bunch of specialized stores in between.

You know this intuitively across many industries:
American Airlines, UAL and Delta
Experian, Equifax and TransUnion
GM, Ford, and DaimlerChrysler

Sheth indicates the four forces that affect market evolution toward efficiency:
- industry consolidation
- government intervention
- establishment of de facto standards
- shared infrastructure

It is a brilliant book, and you should buy it and read it.

So, Verizon Wireless is buying ALLTEL, driven by a desire to further consolidate the industry. That leaves:
VZW, AT&T and Sprint
…as the three big generalists.

That leaves T-Mobile, which just crossed the 30mm subscriber mark, and U.S. Cellular as the mid-sized generalists. Virgin, Boost, (yes I know they are technically Sprint) Leap, metroPCS, Tracfone and a host of regional players are the niche specialists.

If the rule of three is correct, logic would dictate that T-Mobile and U.S. Cellular would now get pulled into play, with AT&T as the most likely suitor for T-Mo, and VZW or Sprint as the most likely acquirer of U.S. Cellular, given the respective GSM/CDMA standards. (I do not think Sprint is feeling spendy at the moment, though putting everything else aside, they almost have to buy U.S. Cellular.) Logic would further dictate that if those deals are going to get done at all, and if government intervention (or lack thereof) is a driving force in the Rule of Three, they are going to get done during the Bush administration. But whatever, that’s not what I want to talk about…

Let’s assume for a moment that the middle players do, in fact, get consolidated and we are left with three generalists. Then what? Maybe Starbucks. Let me explain. Quoting from Sheth’s book:

“In 1987, the Big 3 in coffee – General Foods, Procter & Gamble and Nestle – controlled about 90 percent of the U.S. Market. But Starbucks appeared on the scene, creating a market for upscale coffee that dramatically challenged the Big 3 and the commodity-like nature of their offerings. All three had produced canned, ground coffees that were made from the inexpensive beans of the robusta coffee plant of West Africa. Competition between the leaders was based strictly on price, since the tastes of their products were virtually indistinguishable.”

So who is the Starbucks of the mobile telecom space that will challenge the eventual Big 3? The sands are shifting, for sure, so it is not entirely out of the question that it could happen. Also, like circa 1987 coffee, basic wireless voice service is virtually the same among the various carriers, in as much as I cannot tell a difference when someone calls me from a particular carrier or phone. On the other hand, the competitive dimensions are certainly different in this case.

If “wireless service” today is the “West African robusta plant” of 1987, then what is the wireless equivalent of the “Peruvian-Sumatra organic hand-picked sustainable micro-farmed espresso roast”?

Some would argue that in the landline space, Skype (or VoIP, more generally) was the new coffee to challenge the incumbent long distance carriers. By that logic, maybe WiMAX/LTE will be peddled by a Starbuckian challenger.

Or maybe that aspect of the consumer experience is not where the opportunity lies. Maybe the future opportunity lies outside the network. Here are some thoughts:

With all the talk about “openness,” it is possible that wireless carriers start to look more like utilities, or maybe closer to the current internet “backbone” that is really a cartel of tier-1 ISPs. That structure is interesting to me because the cartel reinforces margins while keeping competitors out via tacit price collusion. (The consideration of connection to the PSTN clouds this possibility a bit, I know, but even without a true closed free peering arrangement, the U.S. carriers can certainly approximate “pipes” or “backbones” or whatever you want to call them.)

This structure will create the greatest opportunity for two major players on the consumer value chain: Device Manufacturers and Media Companies, and both stand to win big over the next few years.

Let’s start with Device Manufacturers, which are on their own path to consolidation, btw:
Nokia, Samsung and Motorola (generalists)
LG, SonyEricsson (middle players)
RIM, HTC, ZTE, Apple (niche players, and I should note these are some large and growing niches)

Nokia is embracing a Software and Services strategy, and the rest of the OEMs will be fast followers down this path. This makes perfect sense: As the carriers are ironing out their business models, functionality is shifting to the edge of the network. No wonder the smart phone market is finally taking off. The bigger the pipe, the more horsepower I need in my phone to process the data. Nokia could be the Starbucks of the mobile industry by shifting consumers’ expectations of what their phone is and does. No longer are the lines between hardware and software clearly defined. The discreet address book on your phone will soon be a “social address book” that maintains live linkages to your friends on MySpace or Bebo. Your phone’s camera, originally built for 1-to-1 transmission will soon include one-click and no-click upload to your favorite photo hosting or social networking destination. Location will finally be meaningfully integrated horizontally across services on your device, opening the door to new data services such as grid-based always-on directory. That a device manufacturer would endeavor to increase competitive advantage by presenting the BEST device-integrated service offering is a logical evolution of that industry segment.

The media companies also have a chance of being the Starbucks in the wireless telecom industry. Google has made no secret of the fact that it wants to own the wireless consumer, as does Yahoo, Microsoft, AOL, News Corp, Viacom, NBC Universal, Vivendi, CBS, and many others. As we move into the mobile media era, there is a requirement to redefine what “media” is and make sure that you have a strategy for capturing audience with the right media that people want to consume. For instance, I don’t think any traditional media company would consider “location information” to be “media,” but in the mobile space it absolutely is, making Nokia’s acquisition of Navteq a fairly brilliant stroke.

I know firsthand that many media companies have a sense of what the redefinition of media means for them and the critical role the mobile audience plays in their future. I just re-read The Highwaymen. People like Redstone, Murdoch, Turner, Gates, Malone and Diller are not likely to sit idly by as the mobile media opportunity grows to billions of dollars. Or I may be wrong and they will sit idly by and watch people like Yang, Schmidt, DeWolfe and Zuckerberg divide the pie. The very fact that the media collective as a whole comes from outside the wireless industry may be reason enough that any one of them could evolve into the Starbucks of the wireless telecom industry.

In any case, consolidation (perhaps counter-intuitively) has historically created opportunity for various reasons, and I think the coming opportunity in the mobile space is huge, particularly for those few companies that are positioning themselves early.

In summary, as the lines blur between hardware, software and services, creating a Venn diagram with a sweet spot in the center, I believe we will see each of those three dimensions collapse in toward that sweet spot. When subscriber growth stabilizes and consolidation commodifies the basic service offering, the value to the consumer will shift to complementary services, creating the next opportunity in the mobile space.

If you have questions or comments or want me to deliver this presentation at your conference/meeting/class/retreat/bar mitzvah, you can email me.

I cannot get Powerpoint to respect file associations even when I attempt to embed video and audio, so below are the links to the videos in the presentation. Feel free to reassociate them yourself.
Cat flushing toilet
Welcome to the future
Green day Oasis
Live the Flavor
Nokia cat
Saddam
Sand

For the entirety of my career in the wireless space, I have always worked for a small company selling something to or through wireless network operators. As such, I have made a good number of friends who work at these various carriers. I have observed that the most reliable way to get their dander up is to casually insert into the middle of any conversation, “Well, it doesn’t really matter because you are eventually just going to be a dumb pipe anyway.” Then I sit back, sip my mojito and watch the ensuing rant. Fun times.

Last week I tried this with a friend of mine who works at a carrier, and he said, “I prefer to think of it as ‘an open marketplace of ideas and innovation.’” Attitudes on this topic are changing. In fact, there is great enthusiasm for what most people agree will be a reduction of friction if we all embrace the word “open.” This got me thinking. First off, my friend is absolutely correct: When cast in a slightly different light and without the derogatory descriptor, a “dumb pipe” has the potential to be a very good thing. That simple realization led me to wonder how good it could actually be, and specifically from a financial standpoint. Could a major wireless carrier flip a switch to full “dumb pipe” mode and in so doing, take massive operational cost out of their equation and increase their value overnight?

What follows is an admittedly rough analysis of that possibility, so the conclusion may only be within spitting distance of the truth, but if it is even that close, I am very surprised by the conclusion.

BASELINE
I started by looking at the financials and structures of some of the world’s largest wireless carriers. There are certainly some differences between them, but at a high level, the structure is essentially the same. I could have used any of them as a model, but for my exercise, I happened to use Sprint’s publicly available financials from 2004 which I found to have a very readable structure and some useful details. (Also, I looked only at the wireless division, and not the consolidated financials.)

At the end of 2004, Sprint had 24.7mm wireless subscribers, 7.7mm of which were also data subscribers. Here is the revenue and margin analysis for that year: (numbers are in millions)

Net Operating Revenues $ 14,647 100%
Operating Expenses
Costs of services and products 7,096 48.4%
Selling, general and administrative 3,406 23.3%
Depreciation 2,557 17.5% (includes amortization)
Amortization 6
Restructuring and asset impairments 30 .2%
Total operating expenses 13,095 89.4%
Operating Income $ 1,552 10.6%
Adjusted Operating Income $ 1,577 10.8%
Adjusted EBITDA $ 4,140 28.3%

These are solid financials, and a 10% operating margin is quite respectable. Here is some other important data:
- 26,288 employees
- $557,000 in revenue per employee
- $2.5 billion in capital expenditure
- ~$62 ARPU
- ~15,500 retail sales outlets
- 800 branded stores and kiosks
- 17.5mm direct customer base

The gross add distribution mix is interesting and also an important part of the analysis:
Stores and kiosks: 38%
Alliance partners: 22%
Other direct: 18%
3rd party national/local: 22%

ANALYSIS
So now let’s make some assumptions and do some back-of-the-envelope math. First, I define “dumb pipe” as “branded access” with the closest analog being an ISP. I also roughly estimate the employee functions into four buckets, and used percentages based on anecdotal information from a few sources at different carriers:

Salespeople 20%
Customer Care 40%
Network Operations 25%
Management and HQ 15%

(The first time I heard that it is not at all unusual for a present-day carrier to have Customer Care represent 40% of their employee base, I was astounded, but it is fairly standard across the industry.)

Now then, how would turning a present-day carrier into what would essentially be an ISP change our key metrics? First of all, all the company-owned stores and kiosks would close. (Have you ever seen an Earthlink store? No.) This is not to say that all the salespeople go away, but there would be a shift to consumer commodity sales practices, relying more heavily on retail channels like big box retailers. Direct sales would be limited to large accounts and “1-800” ordering. Let’s say roughly half of the sales personnel go away. The effect to overall sales would be negative, and I will assume it isn’t effectively replaced. So that means 38% fewer gross adds, which shrinks the subscriber base.

A smaller base would obviously mean fewer Customer Service Reps, but how else might that cost be affected? I will assume a “Bring Your Own Phone” model, where all phones are unlocked, the consumer buys it at full price and chooses whatever carrier they want. It is reasonable that the large percentage of calls to Customer Care having to do with the device itself will go away, or more to the point that the carrier will make them go away through effective communication and education. Furthermore, our “dumb pipe” carrier will push “no-frills” plans for people who are smart enough to operate their mobile phone most of the time and don’t need to call Customer Care. Built into our marketing message will be that our customers are paying less per month for our “Do It Yourself” service. I will further assume the large number of all calls about the application they downloaded that won’t work will go away, because there is no storefront and no editorial function. Billing issues will still arise, so let’s say we cut our CSRs by 50%. This will also mean all the business development and product people who deal with application publishers and content providers will go away. So we can cut a few people out of HQ. Network operations basically stays the same.

The marketing expense of any current-day carrier is very large, and typically consists of an ongoing national television branding presence, an ongoing print presence and channel support. Given our reliance on channel partners now, I think I will keep the national television spend, kill the full-page newspaper ads and shift that part of the budget to in-store support, cutting a conservative 25% of our billion dollar budget in the process. I am also dropping the consumer price and killing the myriad incremental price plans. I like $50/month, all you can eat.

To summarize, we would lose 38% of our gross adds, bringing the total subscriber base down to 24.2mm. Total revenue obviously decreases given our new, lower price and smaller base. I lowered the COGS to reflect the historical 48% range then took our marketing savings ($250mm) off the top. I took our cost savings on sales, customer care and management (32%) out of SG&A. To be thorough, I upped our restructuring to $100mm to cover severance, etc. Here is what our new financials look like:

Net Operating Revenues $ 12,100 100%
Operating Expenses
Costs of services and products 5,558 45.9%
Selling, general and administrative 2,316 19.1%
Depreciation 2,557 21.1% (includes amortization)
Amortization 6
Restructuring and asset impairments 100 .8%
Total operating expenses 10,537 87%
Operating Income $ 1,563 10.6%
Adjusted EBITDA $ 4,126 34%

CONCLUSION
It really is not a compelling case. I shared this scratch analysis with a few friends who work at carriers, and they all agreed that it roughly made sense. I fully expected there would be more cost savings and more dramatically improved margins. The most interesting thing to me is that the bottom line is virtually unchanged in this exercise. Wireless carriers are generally very well optimized. The problem is that this is a very capital-intensive business. COGS and Depreciation are the big costs, and they are due to the high cost of spectrum, network equipment and operations.

For a final comparison, I took a look at Earthlink’s 2007 financials. As I mentioned earlier, as an ISP, they are the best example of a branded “dumb pipe.” At 5.3mm subscribers at the end of 2007, it is a much smaller business than some of the largest wireless carriers, but look at the leverage in their model. They generated $1.22 billion in revenue with just 996 employees. That is $1.2mm per employee, more than twice as much as our carrier example. Their COGS is 35%, so a little lower, but their total SG&A is higher at almost 50%. Operating income was a comparatively thinner 4.1%. Earthlink has swung to a loss in recent years due to the underperforming Helio investment, but even if you back that out, the “dumb pipe” model, even if it does create a vibrant atmosphere of innovation, is less attractive not least because such a company does not capture the value of that innovation itself. On top of it, the expected cost saving does not appear to materialize by handing the greatest driver of value – the services that consumers want to access – to 3rd parties. Lastly, if every carrier embraced such a model, I would also expect to see downward margin pressure as consumers perceive the commoditized “branded access” model as undifferentiated, which would increase competition on price, driving ARPU down.

Like I said before, this is obviously very unscientific, and maybe I missed something. But if the broad brushstrokes are about right, and the assumptions are close to reality, and the comparison to analagous industries is sound, then it is worth questioning whether the enthusiasm for “open access” is a catalyst for very welcome innovation in our industry or just a race to the bottom for the incumbents where the ultimate winners are today’s internet titans. Maybe it is both. Time will tell.

This week we presented at the Montgomery Technology Conference in Santa Monica. The format, aside from the very informative content track, is essentially a marketplace of startups, buyers and investors. Michael, Jamie and James sure know how to put on a productive conference, and they sure as hell know how to throw a party. (I have incriminating pictures to prove it. Just kidding. Not really.)

The most interesting meetings we had this week were the ones with media companies. Based on what I learned, the very definition of what a media company will be in the future is now completely in question. Broadly speaking, the media companies we met with see themselves in the “audience” business, which includes in various combinations the following key elements:
- content
- distribution
- audience
- advertising
- direct revenue

I guess it really is pretty simple on the surface of it, but it gets fascinating when you hear the visions and aspirations of these very different players in the same space. The universal aspiration seems to be “engage the audience no matter where they are.” People literally only have so many hours per day to be an audience, and of course the goal of any media company of any sort is to gain the largest possible share of an audience and its time and attention. So say you are a newspaper publisher and you see your audience leaving your medium in favor of the web. What do you do? You redefine your business from “newspaper” and engage that audience on the web. This is ostensibly why Time Warner bought AOL at the time. Ok, so now say you are an internet portal and you are losing your audience to a closed community you cannot reach. You further redefine your business from “content” to “communication” to further engage that audience. This is ostensibly why AOL is buying Bebo.

We spoke with a few different media companies and of course asked the same question: “So why are you interested in talking to Intercasting Corp?” And the universal response was, “Because engaging the mobile audience is an important part of our future.” Of course, we fully believe this as well, but 2008 is the first year that I am hearing a universal commitment to “engaging the mobile audience” from all media companies. (Viacom is a partner of ours and they had this vision over a year ago.)

I did not use it in my presentation this week, but the movement I see toward a Mobile Media Era is best described in the Shawn Conahan’s Media Eras Infographic. Catchy title. I pulled this together a couple of years ago to compare the differences between the media eras we have seen in the last century. When I talk about it, I give it these labels:
Broadcasting (TV)
Multicasting (Cable)
Singlecasting (Internet)
Intercasting (Mobile)

The key distinction I make about the concept of “intercasting” and why I think it is descriptive of the Mobile Media Era that we seem to be entering is the fact that the mobile phone is the first device to have a camera and be always connected. This means the flow of media in the Mobile Media Era goes in a different direction (namely upstream) than it has gone in previous media eras.

To simplify, compare it to the cable model. John Malone built a media empire by being the gatekeeper between consumers and the television programming they wanted to reach. Cable is a “downstream” model, where consumers sit back and let the MTV wash over them. Being the exclusive distribution point is not unlike having a license to print money. Between 500 channels and the hundreds of millions of people they want to reach is a lucrative business model.

But what happens when media is moving “upstream” instead? Invert the cable model and you have the media company of the future. If John Malone were starting today, he would see hundreds of millions of ordinary people like you and me sending our pictures and videos from our mobile phones to…where? How about roughly 500 destinations, including Bebo, MySpace, Flickr and wherever else people communicate using their personal media? Just like you cannot mandate which channels people watch on TV, you cannot control where people will send and share their photos and videos. But if there is a manageable universe of destinations, (the same way 500 or so channels is a manageable universe in the cable model) then being the broker of all of those transactions is every bit as valuable as being a broker in the cable model.

That is the general premise on which we founded Intercasting Corp, and we have made great progress toward enabling the link between consumers and communities.

Of note lately is the realization by media companies that the upstream model truly matters in their future, and that it starts with the mobile consumer. The example I used in my presentation at the Montgomery conference was that you cannot roll a news van to a tsunami – when something happens, someone with a camera phone is there to capture it. The goal is to be in the stream of the content no matter where the user is sending it so that you can repackage it for other channels. So that tsunami footage from someone’s cell phone can be used in a media company’s broadcast news channel even though the user originally sent it to their Bebo page or to their Photobucket account. (Everything of course subject to the proper terms of service agreements, etc.)

The point is that the traditional media model is being augmented by an inversion of itself due to the popularity of social networking. “User-generated content” is really just a form of communication the same way that “mass media” is just a form of communication. It just happens that before social networking, the distribution friction of user-generated content was too high. Media companies like News Corp or AOL recognizing the importance of user-generated content by buying MySpace or Bebo represents the brilliant first step toward enabling the consumer. The next frontier is establishing the link between the mobile consumer – at the nexus of content creation – and the myriad destinations through which all the world’s content will eventually be shared. That so many traditional media companies are seeing the importance of the mobile audience is very exciting.

But for now, I want to share how I am seeing mobile social networking become a “replacement” technology on many levels and how that is incrementally changing the mobile space.

It is a strange time in communication history right now. In the telecom sector alone, we have observed decades of expansion and growth that is now reaching saturation. Many countries are approaching 100% penetration in wireless. At the same time, the dizzying pace of technology is creating overlapping curves of technology that are sometimes complementary and sometimes not, but my key observation is that all the trends I see are toward “replacement” of the consumer communication experience.

I see three dimensions:
1. Micro level: consumer communication behavior is changing. When I look at the world and think about our business, I try to add a social anthropology filter. Like, WHY do we communicate the way we do?

One of my favorite historical examples of a communication trend is the fax machine – something that nobody needed before they had it, which everybody needed for awhile, and which is now rapidly becoming something that nobody needs. Did technology create the behavior? Or was there an unmet need to transfer documents immediately and so the technology rose to the occasion? It seems that the latter makes the most sense, but if the fax machine had never been invented, would the world have screeched to a halt? No. But here is the big question: What asshole decided it had to be on hard-to-use curly thermal paper and why do consumers put up with it? (I know there are a lot of plain paper faxes now, but still.) Raise your hand if you have ever received a thermal paper fax and subsequently photocopied it onto regular paper. Yes you have.

It is interesting to me how consumers will put up with a tool that is substandard for their purpose for so long. That there is a nearly universal threshold of sufficiency for all consumers about the same product fascinates me. I generally expect that 0% of my landline calls will be dropped, but I fully expect 10% of my wireless calls will be dropped. I put up with it for the same reason I sometimes use a butter knife in lieu of a screwdriver: It is good enough for my purpose.

This relates to social networking, which is a technology that was introduced (the same way the fax machine was) to facilitate communication. The same general questions apply: Why do we embrace the notion of “social” communication so strongly? Did we all universally desire to be connected to our friends and strangers but just lacked a tool before MySpace? And regarding the threshold of sufficiency, why are so many legitimate business contacts “friending” me on Facebook, a tool created by kids for kids, complete with a “poke” function that I find radically out of context for all of the people who find me on Facebook? That these colleagues will torture Facebook into a communication tool in a professional context means that there is clearly a desire, if not a need to communicate “socially” that transcends a particular demographic.

That is a vastly important point. The very notion of communication is evolving to include a social aspect. Hundreds of millions of consumers cannot be wrong. “Social communication” is replacing other forms of communication along the entire spectrum from a one-to-one experience to mass media. I only have so much time in a day, and I am spending it more on MySpace and less on talking on the phone and watching TV. That is a big deal.

Which brings me to the second dimension.
2) Intermediate Level: Devices and other tools are evolving to embrace social communication. The number and variety of handsets and other devices will continue to grow as OEMs attempt to identify every minute consumer desire and create a feature for it. As true as that might be, it is also true that there are key functions that every device must have. A camera is a good example of something that nobody thought needed to be on a mobile device until someone realized that the cellular telecommunications industry is not in the business of facilitating voice communication, rather it is in the business of facilitating all forms of communication, including pictures and video. Location awareness is another example. Along the same lines, in a few years, every mobile device will include a social communication toolset.

It makes perfect sense. The device manufacturers are the intermediaries that create the tools that consumers use to communicate, and an audience of hundreds of millions of consumers is something to pander to. What makes a consumer pick a certain handset off the shelf instead of the hundreds of others is that thing that enables them to communicate in the way they want to communicate. So if social communication is a replacement for one-to-one communication, then device manufacturers must embrace this evolution lest they create a market opportunity for some other company to fill the need.

And they are embracing the evolution in a big way. Every major OEM that we work with is integrating social communication tools into their devices, and you will start to see these devices roll out this year. Your address book will ingest your friends on MySpace or Bebo. Your camera will automatically background send to your Photobucket or Flickr account. The social communication experience is going to be brought closer to the surface for mobile consumers, and it is going to have ramifications because this is communication replacement technology: The things you use your mobile phone for today are not going to go away, but the percentage of your experience using traditional features versus these social tools will decline. Take the camera as an example. Just two years ago, nearly 100% of pictures sent from a mobile phone were sent via MMS to another mobile subscriber. Now, as much as 20% of pictures sent are going to a non-human recipient like Flickr or Piczo, and they are generally bypassing the MMSC and being sent via IP or email. This has a ripple effect for a long chain downstream, but the most important is the carriers themselves.

Which brings me to the third dimension I am observing as social communication replaces today’s communication standards.

3) Macro Level: The underlying enabling technology of mobile communication is changing, which is focusing efforts on superserving the existing mobile consumer base. I was in Barcelona last week, and it was amazing how many carriers I talked to that have abdicated their positions already and are totally happy with the notion of being “dumb pipes.” Also amazing was the much larger number of carrier representatives that had the exact opposite “over my dead body” attitude about it.

Of the former category, the general message was that competing air interfaces will force their hand anyway, so better to get ahead of the curve. Fair enough. Of the latter category, the spirit of competitiveness is very strong, and rightly so – I wouldn’t throw my hands up if I had 50 million paying subs. But I can say as a vendor serving almost every carrier in North America that there is an active drive toward consolidation of services and vendors. For so many years, carriers have been expanding the offerings on their decks (which has generally been good) that now there is literally too much on the deck to be useful for consumers. While I still think ultimate choice is the best policy and so do most carriers we work with, we are seeing a focus on core value drivers, and those are the services being meaningfully integrated into the native mobile experience. This makes perfect sense to me.

EVERY carrier is upgrading their camera and photo sharing experience.
EVERY carrier is upgrading their address book experience.
EVERY carrier is upgrading their data messaging experience.

And, (speaking from a position of certain insight) EVERY carrier is actively working to integrate social communication into their native communication experience. There is demonstrated high value in enabling consumers to communicate with their social networks seamlessly and frictionlessly. Some of the solutions are pretty amazing. We are fortunate to be involved directly in the plans of carriers and OEMs to see how this area is evolving.

The replacement strategy at this level is interesting because the carriers and OEMs are not looking at social networking as “an application that goes on the deck.” Rather, they view it as an obvious replacement for their core communication bread and butter (voice, SMS, email, IM, etc.) and are keen to integrate it meaningfully to capitalize on the massive opportunity it represents. While WAP is an important part of any service provider’s mobile strategy, any company focusing only on WAP will find the high ground is already occupied by the integrated few chosen to drive the greatest amount of value.

In summary, consumers’ changing personal communication habits are intersecting an industry that is very motivated to evolve to meet their changing desires and the result, while perhaps incremental compared to some of the advances we have seen in the mobile space in the past five years, is still a major shift in how we communicate. What is truly amazing is the number of moving parts required to be part of the same machine, and the fact that it is actually happening is great to see. I am very excited about 2008 and the changes that it will bring in this space.

A month ago we started getting emails: “Are you guys gonna be at CES? We’d like to get together there.” So anyway, now we’re going for some legitimate reasons.

A friend of mine called last week: “Hey are you gonna be at CES?” I replied, “I have never had a productive meeting at CES. There is a lot of activity, but not a lot of productivity.” I think this may be true of all tradeshows. While I have definitely had important meetings at CES, CTIA, etc., they are always over breakfast, lunch or dinner, and in the case of CTIA, at the MTV party over rap music, gin ‘n juice and hot women who may be working, but clearly not in our industry. Productivity only happens when you have focused time and attention to really do some actual work. For that, you have to fly to Overland Park or Basking Ridge or Little Rock or whatever fine part of our great nation your business takes you to.

Since that conversation with my friend, I have been thinking a lot about activity vs. productivity as it relates to our business of mobile social networking. Mobile applications in general either:
A) Save time (this is productivity, like email) or
B) Waste time (this is activity, as in games and moporn)

Much of the mobile communication experience is about filling holes in your schedule with activity or productivity. When you are next on some form of public transportation, look around at the people either thumbing away on their blackberries or scrolling through their music lists.

The best mobile applications both save time AND waste time. As a result, they evolve the personal communication experience itself. Social networking is the biggest opportunity in the mobile space because it is as much about productivity as it is about activity. From an adult using Linked-In to a college kid using MySpace and at every point in between, social networking can be made more available and more immediate in the mobile space. It is already an important trend and we have not even seen the tip of the iceberg yet.

I assume the detractors who are banning social networks from school campuses see the activity part of the equation clearly, but perhaps not the productivity part. Would it be at all useful to engage political science students by using the MySpace/MTV presidential debates as a teaching tool? I think so.

I further assume these are the same people who propose banning mobile phones from school campuses. While it is true that mobile phones and social networking sites can be used together to waste a great deal of time, (which is not a bad thing, depending) it is equally true that they can be used together to greatly enhance productivity.

Email is a massively productive tool, but it also facilitates an even greater volume of spam. Does that make it any less of a tool? No. In fact, it makes it more of a tool, because it feels more like a communication platform than a rigidly verticalized application. We are simply seeing an evolution of personal communication. In three years, mobile phones will have built-in social communication capabilities as ubiquitously as they have cameras today.

This is going to be a big year for Intercasting Corp. We will be building on our momentum, which last year focused on distribution, to evolve the native personal communication experience. We have some exciting projects currently under development that will present the next layer of value of the ANTHEM platform. As those happen, I will discuss them here. Also, we have several more high-profile SNS partners integrating now, a new UI, and a long list of carrier deployments, all of which we will be announcing over the next several months.

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.

Do you think the term “open” is being used with some recklessness of late? Or perhaps if not recklessness, with a certain degree of definitional liberty?

In case I haven’t mentioned it before, our award-winning ANTHEM™ platform is open. That means that any company, carrier, content provider, ad network, media company or OEM that wants to use our platform is free to do so. OF COURSE they are free to do so, because we are in business to make money, and the more people who use our platform, the better. But that isn’t what “open” means.

Our open platform works seamlessly with every other open platform because it is open. It interfaces to Google’s Android open platform that is going to run on Verizon’s open network, (as soon as someone creates an open device) and using our open APIs, any developer can build a widget for our widget that any user can put on their Facebook page that enables them to access any social networking site in the OpenSocial alliance right from their mobile phone.

The added value, of course, is that our open platform, due to the fact that it was architected with a superset of openness from the start, automatically interfaces to every other open platform on the planet.

And we wrote it in Erlang. So it is also massive.

So yeah.

I am wondering about two things:
1.) What is the definition of “open”?
2.) Is it really better to be “open”?

1.) What does “open” mean? It’s recent banality invites scrutiny.

Now, I know there is a definition of Open Source. The distribution terms of open-source software must meet 10 criteria to be considered truly open source. But that is pretty specific and is not necessarily what companies mean when they talk about their “open platform.”

How about an open standard?
From this wikipedia link:
“The terms "open" and "standard" have a wide range of meanings associated with their usage. The term "open" is usually restricted to royalty-free technologies while the term "standard" is sometimes restricted to technologies approved by formalized committees that are open to participation by all interested parties and operate on a consensus basis.”

There is apparently no concensus on the definition of “open standard” but there are no fewer than nine specific definitions, which is at least a valiant attempt to help. Ironically, if France’s definition differs from Spain’s definition, (and it does) that actually creates a more fractious environment and greater friction in the market.

To me, the best example of an open standard working for the greater good is the W3C. Here is their stated mission:
“The mission of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is to lead the World Wide Web to its full potential by developing common protocols that promote its evolution and ensure its interoperability.”

Can you imagine having half of the internet using a competing standard to HTTP? Not good. So, yay the W3C, open = good.

But that is not the spirit of the current enthusiasm for openness. This is about accreting value using “openness” as a strategem. The best example from history I could think of is the .pdf format, which is an “open format.” It was developed by Adobe as a proprietary format and later provided on a royalty-free basis, though Adobe holds the patents.

Here is the history of PDF openness from an Adobe Technical Standards Evangelist:
http://www.acrobatusers.com/blogs/leonardr/history-of-pdf-openness/

More interesting is this interview from Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen from September 2003.

This quote sums it up:
“We realized that if we could provide more applications around the PDF as the file format and Acrobat Reader as the rendering platform, not only could we make many customers much more efficient and productive, but it could be a valuable revenue opportunity.”

The recent push by for-profit enterprises for opening everything is based on the desire to become a de facto standard around which an ecosystem of value can be built. The beauty of calling your system/network/platform/software/hardware/whatever open is that you push the cost of building that ecosystem of value to an army of enthusiastic developers, which has the added benefit of percolating the most innovation to the top. Or so the theory goes. But that brings me to my second question:

2.) Is it really better to be “open”?
Inside every entrepreneur is a monopolist. The more value he or she can consolidate, the better. As an entrepreneur, the ultimate accomplishment is for your product or service to become the de facto standard, which is a form of, and next best thing to, a legal monopoly.

How would you like to reap the value from the British East India Company, which you may remember was set up as a legal trading monopoly? How would you like to have built Standard Oil? Or pre-1980 AT&T? DeBeers? TicketMaster? TCI? Microsoft? Even the beloved Apple, so admired by so many Appleheads everywhere, was accused of creating a vertical monopoly with their closed music delivery value chain. (Which many devotees love.)

Let me answer for you: “Yes, I would like to own DeBeers.” (Owning all da beers in the world would rock. I kid.)

Like I mentioned about the W3C, there are plenty of examples where creating an open standard – say, XML – which did not financially benefit a single owner of the standard nonetheless benefited an entire industry of single owners as part of the ecosystem. In this way, the standard is the glue that binds the various parts of the ecosystem.

But if you are one of the parts of the ecosystem, can you effectively promote your standard as the glue just by calling it open? Or is your value naturally locked inside your four walls?

I just read an interesting post from Giles Bowkett that argues that “…social networking web sites aren’t platforms – they’re nightclubs… if you're building a Facebook app, you're building a sound system you can never take out of the club. Spending money on something which won't work anywhere else only makes sense if the payoff is immediate. It's not really an investment, because assuming any given social network will persist for any given amount of time defies history.”

Read the whole thing - it's good:
http://gilesbowkett.blogspot.com/2007/11/facebook-apps-facebook-trap.html

Facebook’s very non-secret strategy clearly runs counter to that notion – they appear to believe they will persist. They want to “own the social graph.” That is far reaching. It means they want to be the first link on the communication value chain, as in “the first place you always go to execute your personal communication.” If creating the Facebook “platform” and calling it “more open than your open platform” accelerates that end goal, then it is a reasonable ploy.

It’s like Google saying “we want to own search.” And, given their market share, they fairly do. Does that make Google a monopoly or a de-facto standard? Does it matter?

Not to me. I would just point out that where all this “openness” leads is ultimately to one company winning what they see as a zero-sum game because there is, after all, a finite number of consumers, and the goal of any for-profit enterprise is to maximize value by accreting more value to themselves.

My last thought on this, then, is that value accretes to utility, not to openness. Think about, for instance, how difficult it is to deal with wireless carriers as a vendor. If Verizon Wireless presents developers with an “open” network that isn’t really truly open, but it is “more open” than all other wireless carriers and thus comparatively reduces friction between developers and the Verizon consumers they want to reach, then they will have achieved their goal of accreting more value to their network. But even attracting developers doesn't get 'er done - ultimately what makes or breaks a company, open or not, is their ability to engage consumers, and consumers have proven time and again (I bought a very-closed iPhone) that they don't care what you call it as long as it works.

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.

Monday, Oct 22 5:00pm
Mobile Entertainment Live
Social Networking
Moscone Room 301

Tuesday, Oct 23 4:00pm
CTIA SF
Lifestyle on the Run: Taking Social Networking Mobile
Moscone Room 250

Mobile Monday Los Angeles 6:30pm 29th
Whatever - not sure. Derrick will be there though.

Tuesday, Oct 30 10:45am
Digital Hollywood
Personalized Mobile Experience – Social Networking: Breakthroughs in Messaging, Music, Video Capabilities & Advertising

Saturday, Nov 10 11:30am
Monaco Media Forum
Into Thin Air: Mobile Clicks

Friday, Nov 16 12:20pm
Mobile Broadband Americas
Strategies for capitalizing on the latest trends in user generated content

Let me just be up front and say it: The mobile industry is a fucked up place to try to make a buck. Are you people masochists or what?

I know it must look like things come very easily for me, but that’s just because I am operating on a much higher plane of creativity than you. To put it simply, "I think different." (We ended up dropping the “I” from that campaign, but it still worked.) You think stealing the UI from Xerox PARC and building the Macintosh around it and then taking credit for being a genius was easy?

Well, actually that was pretty easy, but what about the iPod? YOU try making a white MP3 player and then convincing everyone that you created the category. That was hard, man.

My point is that being the custodian of perfect consumer electronics design and setting the standard for how everyone should interact with their electronics and on top of that making everything white – I am personally responsible for a worldwide shortage of white paint – is hard work. But I endure, because the world needs me.

But this mobile thing? This is harder than anything I have ever done. My plan, as usual, was perfect: First, I had to create the most beautiful mobile device ever. That part was easy, because I am me. Then I had to go sell a whole bunch of them, so I did a deal with AT&T, which worked out fine and life was good. I fired up the hype machine and we were off to the races.

Then the shit started to hit the fan. First, some people complained about the network connection being slow, as if this was my beautiful iPhone’s fault. Can I help it if nobody told me about this G3 thing or whatever you call it? It works fine in my hermetically sealed sterile underground bomb shelter office environment, every cubic inch of which is awash with glorious wifi. Who doesn’t have wifi everywhere they go these days anyway? Hell, these naysayers are lucky I even allowed it to work on a wireless carrier at all. Anyway, that wasn’t so bad – I am used to dumb people not “getting” my genius.

But then we got sued. Twice! First it was because we were conspiring to be a monopoly with our “locked” device approach. First of all, we’ve only sold a million of these damn things, and with 250 million mobile subscribers in the U.S. alone, you tell me how having less than a quarter of one percent of the market makes me a monopolist. Maybe I have a monopoly on the cool and beautiful mobile subscribers who appreciate having their cool and beautiful iPhone, but c’mon. Secondly, how easy do I have to make it to unlock the damn thing? Are you dumbshits so lazy that you cannot employ circa 1975 hacking techniques? My weimaraner could unlock this thing. Do I have to put a goddamn iUnlock Magic Wand in the package or what?

So while I am dealing with that nonsense, I get all these financial analysts blogging about how we’re not going to sell enough iPhones and that is going to hurt our stock price. To be honest, I planned all along to drop the price eventually anyway. I just wanted to see how many people would spend twice as much as it was worth. So then I drop the price in a gesture of magnanimity so that more of the world could enjoy the perfection that is the iPhone and what I do I get? Two things: 1) A bunch of whining customers, and 2) Another lawsuit!

Here I am on the balcony saying, “Let them eat cake for the low price of $299,” and what happens? A fucking blogospheric revolt of customers who were perfectly happy with their elitist touchscreen device they were smugly using just a week before to demonstrate their consumer electronic buying power and hipness. And all of a sudden I'm the asshole? What gives? So then I offered a store credit so these bitches could buy a bluetooth headset or some other sort of white plastic accessory or whatever. That sort of shut them up, but I still had the other lawsuit to deal with. This time, I was named personally along with my company and AT&T for “price discrimination, underselling, discrimination in rebates, deceptive actions, and other wrongdoings” all because I lowered the price because I was trying to be a nice guy. “Other wrongdoings”? Can you really sue someone for that? WTF? “Yeah, so, I am suing Bob for just generally being an asshole. Gretchen in the cube next to him totally agrees, so I think we have a strong case.” Seriously. They might as well add "mischief and buggery" to their list of asinine claims. Welcome to my world.

Oh, and the daily phone calls from AT&T aren’t helping, either. Now they’re like, “Hey Jobso, pure genius of course and we're totally committed, but so maybe this whole alleged monopolistic racketeering allegation is bad for business.” So then I have to bow to pressure again and announce a fully unlocked iPhone in France. I wonder how many days I have to wait for THAT to generate another lawsuit. What’s it gonna be this time? I can just see some dipshit alleging, among other things, “non-monopolistic normal business practices causing unfair competitive advantage,” and "other such atrocities." And perhaps releasing an SDK so people can write applications for the damn thing will result in another lawsuit, too.

Seriously, I am starting to rue the day I said, “Man, my cell phone sucks. I think I will bring my unparalleled genius to the mobile space.” And to think I put off the iPlanet project for this. By now we could have had the entire world painted white and every sign would be in a perfectly kerned tasteful silver font. But no – I had to go and dramatically improve the telecom industry first.

Whatever. Like all of my very important work, history will judge the iPhone with fondness and respect. I just cannot believe anyone is trying to make a buck in this industry of thankless consumers. It is very unApple-like. I’ll be glad to move on after this. In the meantime, go buy an iPhone and show your support.

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.

http://www.ctiapartylist.com/

That's a handy little resource. I thought you would find it useful. It doesn't even list ALL of the parties, either. I got an invitation today that says, "Don't forget to RSVP for the Only Exclusive VIP Mobile Partnership Reception At CTIA." I don't know who is hosting the party or why I was invited. (God knows I am not on any "it" lists.)

A dozen of us are getting together on Monday night for dinner because it was the only night that worked for everyone. That happens to be the same night of the mocomixer, which is a real bummer, plus the Warner Music party, and also the INmobile reception. I wouldn't trade my Monday dinner for the world, but it got me thinking about what all the parties are for in the first place. It's goodwill, right? I invite you to my party, you get free booze, then you talk about how awesome my party was. It's a form of promotion.

Remember the MTV party in Orlando? That was seriously awesome. They should do that every year, and anyone else stupid enough to have a party on the same night cannot say they weren't warned: Everyone would rather go to the MTV party. Those MTV guys are top notch.

See? I am still talking about it.

While I was writing this, the mail came. I got an envelope from Transpera. Inside is a card that says, "Who says there's no such thing as a free ride? Avoid long taxi lines and crowded parking during CTIA. Enjoy a complimentary lift in a luxury Transpera town car." And there is a number to call to reserve a car anytime, anywhere. I just saved like $70 on a cab ride from Oakland airport. Now THAT is impressive promotion. With all of the free booze parties, trying to stand out with yet another free booze party is not a good strategy. But this. This is real value.

Have you seen Transpera's video solution, btw? Slick shit. Go see for yourself.

Intercasting Corp will not be hosting any parties, and we will not be paying for your cab fare. We will, however, be available. Do you want to see the new version of ANTHEM that will first be launching later this year in Europe? It is pretty cool. How about our super cool proxy messaging module or our OEM preload module? How about our localization engine that makes multiple language support a snap? Also, with full device and 3rd-party media service integration, it's like a whole different paradigm for communication and social distribution of media and services. I realize that isn't a very descriptive sentence now that I re-read it. Whatever. If you are interested in mobile social networking and want to see our view of it, please send me an email and we'll get together (for free booze at someone else's party) and I will show it to you.