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I am comfortably certain that somewhere in a cornfield in Peaksville, Ohio, now lies 2008.

The New Year’s Eve ritual this year was more about sweeping 2008 under the rug and forgetting about it than it was about celebrating it. I cannot remember when the “celebration” part of the holidays was more about looking forward to the following year. As far as the world in general is concerned, I am very much looking forward to 2009, if only out of morbid curiosity.

Regarding Intercasting Corp, I am flat-out excited about 2009. The confluence of trends that we have been predicting for so long are now coalescing, and this year we will see a general redefinition of mobile data services and the way consumers interact with them. We are working with many developers, carriers and OEMs to leverage our ANTHEM platform to evolve the mobile communication experience, and the result is going to be awesome.

We are sharing some details of our new platform release in Q1 at various events, so if you will be at one of the following and would like to see the evolution of ANTHEM, please send us an email and we’ll set up a time to meet…

CES – We will be in Las Vegas from January 7th through the 11th. Qualcomm generously gave us space in their booth, so you can also stop by there.

Social Networking Conference – I will be co-presenting with Jen Byrne from Verizon Wireless at the social networking conference in Miami on January 22 and 23. It will be the warmest place in the country. Do stop by.

Mobile World Congress – Have you justified going to Barcelona on February 16-19? We have. Come see our new technology. In fact, I will personally be in Europe for two weeks visiting various countries, so if you have always wanted to meet in person but couldn’t get to sunny San Diego, I might just be in your country. (If your country is Spain, Germany, Belgium, France, Czech Republic or the U.K.)

Happy new year and success to all in 2009.

What is the meaning of “social” technology today and into the future? The word in general is about interdependent relationships, cooperation and society. The word as it relates to the internet has typically referred to sites which enable people to define linkages between friends.

Social technology is evolving. I suppose bulletin boards were an early prototype of technology-mediated social interactions, though without the persistent linkages seen today in sites like Facebook. But the “social” trend really got going with sixdegrees.com, which was based on the concept that we are all connected by no more than six degrees of separation. (You may remember the play, the movie, and the apparently very real science of connecting everyone in Hollywood to Kevin Bacon.) If you could model those degrees of separation, you could find out through whom you know the president, for instance. Maybe even call him, since you have a friend in common.

Friendster continued the trend and was similar in concept to Sixdegrees. At that point, the notion of a “friend” was well-understood to mean someone you actually knew. Then MySpace launched with the idea that the problem with Friendster was in fact the trusted relationships and what people really wanted was self-promotion. They were right, and now Tom has over a hundred million “friends.”

With MySpace’s success, the dam broke, and now it seems every site is a “social” site of some sort. The understanding of technology-enabled community and interaction has been distilled over the past several years and is being applied as a sort of “wrapper” around existing businesses, and in some cases with great success.

We now have social gaming communities, social t-shirt design and commerce sites, social restaurant reviews, social music discovery, social job search and of course social pornography. All roads lead to Rome. While social networking sites place at the center of their value proposition the very thing that drives them, (that is personal connections) “Social” has also become a feature that can enhance the user experience of other products and services. While it may be enough to buy any old stuffed animal for your kid, why not buy them a Webkinz instead so they can go online and watch it come to life and interact with other Webkinz? That’s added value.

While I could write another thousand words either praising or damning this trend, the point would be moot because the trend is embedded in the collective consciousness of society and, more importantly, the products and services we use.

Let me instead opine on its significance in the mobile space. Here are the trends we see:

Mobile social application development increases – I know this is hardly testing my mettle as a seer, but an increasing percentage of mobile applications (just like the increasing percentage of web services) are “social” in some respect. On one hand, this is good, because carriers can justify their investment in infrastructure to support always-connected communication services. On the other hand, China and India, with their gigantic potential user bases but woefully slow networks, will have to wait. The biggest implication for carriers is content rating. As long as there is no useful mobile content rating system, carriers (which are heavily regulated by governments) will continue to take a conservative approach to user-generated content, which will hinder adoption of high-value services. In the meantime, mobile social communication service providers will continue to quietly build a user base that circumvents and ultimately disintermediates the carriers unless some action is taken.

Mobile application deployment misses the boat – Mobile application deployment today is a deplorably high-friction process, characterized by fractious, high-cost and high-involvement development and processes that retard innovation and restrain choice for the mobile consumer. The iPhone application deployment model made a light go on in several heads of people in the mobile space. The answer? “Make our application deployment work more like the iPhone App Store.” And so 2009 will be the year of “app store mania” with the RIM app store, the Nokia app store, the Windows Mobile Skymarket, Samsung’s Smartphoneshow, the Google Android Marketplace, plus a continued effort from Palm, more navel-staring from Adobe with Flash Lite (not sure what the problem is there - they should have won by now) and of course J2ME and BREW are not going anywhere anytime soon. The result of all of this simplification of the application deployment process will be fractious, high-cost and high-involvement development and processes that retard innovation and restrain choice for the mobile consumer. There is obviously a better way than this further balkanization for mobile developers, and it involves fixing the deployment approach, but standardizing the development approach by not promoting proprietary SDKs. In any case, as cool as any of these deployment technologies or approaches may be, they all fall short for social application deployment, and social applications are the future. Application deployment technologies must 1) integrate with the device (which I realize some do) and 2) integrate with a sharable base of active users. (Which all don’t.)

Devices integrate tightly with 3rd-party communication service providers – Nokia recently bought Oz so that hundreds of millions of Series 40 phones wouldn’t go out the door without consumer e-mail and IM. Such services undoubtedly have vast user bases, and so enabling them in the mobile space makes sense. But forget about the existing user bases of Gmail and AIM, which are principally web-based. The real opportunity for growth here is for the 3rd-party service providers. Compared to the relatively paltry potential customer base of around 500 million web users, the 3 billion mobile users may, in great numbers, find consumer email, IM, chat, social networking and other social applications very valuable. That means large social networking sites are going to have to change their web-based mindsets if they are going to reap the reward of device integration; They will all have to offer mobile-based registration or watch their competitors add users in the billions. It also means that OEMs are now in an arms race to provide ever-richer device-integrated functionality, which is good for consumers. Lastly, the OEMs, by moving in this direction have their choice of business model: In markets where they have control, they have a differentiated offering plus a service revenue stream, and in markets where the carriers have control, they can offer a value-added revenue stream to the carriers that is built into the value of their devices when the carrier buys them.

Core device functionality becomes social – Even without 3rd-party integration to social communication services, the mobile device is going social in a big way. EVERY carrier and OEM has defined a project called “social address book.” It means different things to different companies, but all of them recognize that the address book has to evolve to function more like a “friend list” on a social networking site. The same is true of the camera and gallery. A camera with a persistent wireless connection should not feel as offline as it does today, and it will evolve to a “participatory panopticon” function which will enable concepts like citizen journalism, lifecasting and surveillance. The “gallery” on mobile devices is also very offline and will evolve to act more like a shared photo album. Remember that no Flickr is required to do this – all the photos in all the mobile phones all over the world can be made sharable solely through some technology development by OEMs. Even the native state is going to evolve: Look for “friend feed” style updates pushed right to your device’s active home state, and integration of instant communication functionality including other aspects of the device like location, status and availability. The lines are blurring between hardware and software, and it is an exciting time to be an OEM if you don’t have your head stuck in the sand.

A middle layer of active agent technology evolves – “Online” is a web-based term that has useful meaning when using stateful communication services such as social applications because it denotes instant availability. That means you can ping someone via IM, see their presence on Facebook or click into a game of Texas Hold ‘em poker. While versions of such services make sense in the mobile space, the notion of “online” does not because unlike your PC, you do not actively sit in front of your mobile phone for 10 hours a day. That doesn’t mean you don’t want to receive a message notification or play poker with someone, though it may mean that there are times when you want to receive relevant RSS feeds but not other types of messages. Furthermore, many social applications are profile- and rule-driven, such that, even when you are not “actively” engaged, your profile may be engaged on your behalf, acting as an agent of sorts. We see examples of this in social gaming today: On Zynga Pirates right now, I am accumulating $50,000 in gold an hour, even though I haven’t played in a week. A higher-level technology layer that can act as a shared resource for multiple types of communication service providers such that it is a “feature” of those applications would go a long way to making mobile devices “socially enabled.” In essence, your mobile device will be a sort of communication assistant rather than a terminal.

Here we go. This week the “mobile social networking gateway/platform/aggregator/whatever” category officially exploded in perceived size/value/opportunity.

This was a great week for Intercasting Corp as Verizon Wireless and AT&T announced at CTIA that they launched their social networking categories around our ANTHEM platform! Awesome, very happy. We are proud to be serving the largest carriers in North America.

A slew of other companies also announced that they have a mobile social networking gateway/platform/aggregator/whatever, including Newbay, Verisign, Visto and Yahoo!. Wow - we’re in good company.

On one hand, the arrival of would-be competition from such respectable companies to the mobile social networking space clearly validates our model and approach, and so I welcome it. On the other hand, the language of press releases and spin creates some confusion at a time when clarity would be preferred by large companies needing to make decisions. Naturally, everyone is claiming that their solution is the best. And, of course, every solution is different from every other one. I am friends with the CEOs of some of those companies, so I wish them all luck and good fortune, but at the same time I realize that while we are the top company in this space, they will sometimes be taking shots at us to paint themselves in a more positive light. We will never do that, preferring instead for our technology and approach to stand on their own.

While I would never presume to speak intelligently about another company’s specific approach, I do know enough about this space to provide some thoughtful insight. Yes, I have an enlightened self interest in doing so, but I promise you my primary objective is to cut through the bullshit so you can, too.

“Push” vs. “Integrated”
Most web-based social networking providers have APIs that enable third parties to create applications. This strategy positions companies like MySpace and Facebook as “platforms” on which other companies can create useful tools and applets. It is frankly a brilliant strategy, and creates a lot of value for the ecosystem around them. To be clear, the goal is to build value around them, not outside of them, and the bulk of the publicly available APIs are designed in such a way that the user is in fact sent back to the website at some point. As a simple example, you may be able to receive alerts such as friend requests or messages via an API that a mobile “aggregator” may be able to display in an application, but to respond or reply, the user has to go to the website because there is no “reply” API available. A truly “integrated” solution like the ANTHEM platform differs in that the social networking providers have enabled full and complete two-way integration to the core functionality of the social networking service that enables a mobile representation of the experience.

Commercial license
Take a look at the terms of use of publicly available APIs. As an example, if a platform company does not have an explicit agreement with Facebook to represent Facebook functionality in the mobile space, they are in violation of the Facebook platform policy, and the service, while potentially technologically viable, may not be commercially viable. Simply put, if you are a carrier or OEM looking for a commercial-grade solution for which you will not be sued later, demand to see a signed copy of all explicit agreements that an “aggregator” has with the social networking providers, and be sure that your lawyers deem that they survive the test of commercial viability as the service is represented.

Here is an excerpt from the Facebook Terms of Service section B, Presentation and Distribution:
5) You may not sell, resell, lease, redistribute, license, sublicense or transfer all or any portion of the Facebook Properties, or use or store any Facebook Properties for any purpose other than as specifically authorized herein.
6) Your Facebook Platform Applications may not be designed or implemented a way that might mislead a user into believing he or she is interacting directly with the Facebook Site when interacting with any of your Facebook Platform Applications, or that any of your Facebook Platform Applications were created by or are endorsed by Facebook, as determined by Facebook in its sole discretion.

Now, one might ask why a company would make APIs available if they did not expect some creativity to be employed in their use and deployment, if, after all, the value ultimately accretes to the social networking provider anyway. This is a thin-ice argument that does not pass our test of a legally viable commercial product. Simply put, we would never place our valuable partners in the position of even having to have the conversation about whether our platform and the way that it enables the social networking ecosystem is completely legal and respectful of the rights of everyone involved, both in spirit and to the letter of the law.

Our adherence to this basic principle is the reason why Facebook is currently conspicuously missing from our list of ANTHEM partners. While we could use their available APIs to build a somewhat lighter “read only” version of Facebook, it would not faithfully recreate their experience to a mobile-only user, would not be in compliance with their stated terms of service and would not pass the legal hurdles at the carriers and OEMs. We only work with social networking providers with which we have a direct and future-proof development agreement.

Ultimately it seems logical that Facebook would want to reach every consumer and not just every web consumer, so they will probably at some point provide the level of integration required to provide their carrier partners with a mobile-centric experience, and when they do, I suspect they will make it available to everyone as democratically as they have always conducted themselves. In the meantime, any “aggregator” claiming to have the ability to provide a mobile version of Facebook should be examined with scrutiny.

Here is what I can say about Intercasting Corp and our ANTHEM platform: We have been subject to the scrutiny of the largest carriers in the world and have passed with flying colors.

Do you have any idea how rigorous the review and vetting process is at our great partner Verizon Wireless? Do you know how long it takes to get from first sales pitch to final deployment? Can you imagine how strenuous the legal process is at Verizon Wireless, especially when it comes to this category? Trust me: It. Is. Thorough.

That some of the largest carriers in the world have selected the ANTHEM platform is at least an indication of the depth of our approach and our ability to satisfy the needs of the industry in this category. While I do not expect to win every deal in the world, I do know that the number of deals we have makes us the leader in this space, and that status is a testament to the quality of our technology and the viability of our platform. The confusion created this week is unfortunate, but with some rigor you can cut through the nonsense. Oh, and contact me for more information – I would be happy to help.

Ah, the fall CTIA show. Smaller than the spring conference, it is more intimate and focused.

Spring is in Vegas. The parties are big. The dinners are lavish. The expense reports are ridiculous.
Fall is in San Francisco. The parties are really get-togethers. You drink wine, not gin. There are no strippers.

This is a time for conversations, not sales pitches. Spend the week maintaining relationships, not crassly trying to build new ones. Remember there is a CTIA Party List to dial you in.

Enjoy.

We will be there. I am speaking at Mobile Web Strategies.
9:45 – 10:30 SuperSession Discussion: Mobile Social Networks

Come heckle me.

Also, there will be some good news (for us) next week, so I am excited about that. More on that later.

We won’t have a booth, (I don’t think I have ever gone to the actual show floor, come to think of it) but if you are interested in meeting, send me an email and we’ll get together.

I just wanted to post a quick note that I am speaking on a panel next week at the AlwaysOn Stanford Summit:

Mobilizing Your Social Network
Are social networks merely features of existing applications and services, or are they a more fundamental element of the mobile ecosystem architecture?

Moderator: Adam Zawel, Chief Collaboration Officer, INmobile.org
John Faith, GM & VP for Mobile, MySpace
Mauro del Rio, Chairman, Buongiorno
Babur Ozden, CEO, ZipClip
Kamar Shah, Head of Industry Marketing, Services & Software, Nokia
Shawn Conahan, CEO, Intercasting Corp

Adam Zawel is of course the face of INmobile, (the community for mobile professionals) and a very insightful guy. I think the discussion will be interesting, given the following:

You cannot talk about mobile social networking without decoupling the brands from the functionality and then asking who will ultimately win. Is it what we currently think of as the leaders, like MySpace or Facebook? It certainly looks like it is theirs to lose. But what about Nokia, with its software and services strategy? Could they roll social networking functionality into their devices, integrating the social networking sites, and accrete all value to themselves?

Here is a post I made a few days ago on INmobile responding to Adam’s question about who will win in mobile social networking:

In my opinion, you cannot speculate about the future of mobile social networking without first examining what barriers or facilitators exist in the mobile space, as these will ultimately determine whether anyone even ::gets:: to win.

Secondly, you cannot handicap the winners without defining what “winning” is. I know opinions differ, but let me offer a perspective: Since social networking is an evolution of personal communication, and “facilitating the world’s personal communication” is about as big a vision as one might offer, then “winning” in this space would to be the first link on the personal communication value chain. In the same way that the first stop you make when searching for something on the web is Google, the ambition of every social networking site should be to be the first stop you make whenever you want to communicate with someone. Everything else is secondary - with the pace of technology innovation, a SN site can hardly expect to compete on functionality when parity among all competitors is achieved within months if not weeks.

So how do you become the first link on the personal communication value chain, and how does mobile figure in all this?

Here are some dimensions that I consider important when thinking about social networking in the mobile space:

- Social networking should not be treated as an “app on the deck” but should be viewed as a native functional opportunity as big as SMS or MMS

- Social networking is an evolution of personal communication, not a fad

- The most personal communication device in history is the mobile phone

- Social networks are the distribution channel for new media, and in particular user-generated content

- Social networks compete with wireless carriers because they are in the same business, which is providing personal communication services

- The best way for carriers and OEMs to address this competitive threat is to integrate social networking functionality into the device

- The first link on the personal communication value chain is the address book

- Whoever owns the address book owns the customer relationship and becomes the first place where everyone goes to execute their personal communication

- If the address book is on a server and not on a device, you better DAMN WELL BE SURE THAT IT IS YOUR SERVER

Notice I do not direct that last point at a particular audience. My impartiality forbids it. The simple fact is that anyone on the value chain could own the address book and it would still be somewhere between better to great for consumers in general. Owning the address book is the MOST IMPORTANT THING for everyone involved:

Carriers: Vodafone bought Zyb so they could sync to and own the master address book on THEIR server. A friend of mine at Vodafone asked me last week whether I thought they overpaid for Zyb, to which I answered they got a tremendous bargain, given the strategic value of a company that enables them to own the address book of all of their subscribers.

OEMs: Nokia bought Intellisync so they could backup the address books of all their devices to THEIR server.

Any social networking site would do well to provide its users a mobile address book centered around their service. After all, if a person is a die-hard Bebo or MySpace user, then they would likely appreciate having all of their friends, regardless of communication mode, in one place and built around the tool they use most often to communication with. The value to the social networking provider is obvious: When a user puts all of their contacts in one place on your server, that will definitely keep them coming back every time they want to initiate communication.

But the opportunity goes far beyond that. Assume for a moment that in the future you will be able to make your identity (or identities) portable beyond the confines of a certain social networking site. You could add your Facebook friend to your friend list on MySpace, for instance. Additionally, your mom, who uses no social networking site, could add your MySpace profile to her mobile phone address book, which will not only have your mobile number, but also a link off to your profile.

The social networking site that achieves this in the biggest way the soonest will not only be locking its users to itself for a long, long time, but will also be the single starting point for all personal communication, regardless of channel. It’s like being the master switchboard for all communication. THAT is a valuable thing to be. Or will it be a social networking site per se? What about a sort of “meta layer” or facilitator of social networking functionality instead?

For instance, what about the carriers? If there is not someone at every carrier at the SVP level or higher who is completely and vehemently fearful of the implications of losing control of the address book, then they run the risk of fucking themselves by misunderstanding the nature of the mobile social networking opportunity and incorrectly embracing the seemingly innocuous functionality that will ultimately result in their downfall. It would be akin to Xerox PARC giving away the GUI that made Apple and Microsoft what they are today.

Perhaps that was a bit strongly worded. I am provocative because I know that most carrier execs fully understand that they are competing with every form of personal communication, from email and IM to Skype to smoke signals. Yet the default stance is to “put a link on the deck” and treat social networking sites like applications or WAP sites. They may understand that social networking is an opportunity of some sort, but most do not fully get the size of the threat. And the best way to neutralize a threat is to make them part of your army.

Anyway, the silver lining in that the carriers shouldn’t even own this whole opportunity because there is a problem for the carriers in guarding the address book, which is that they are all more valuable when they integrate the top 100 social networking sites around the world into the address book. So if they give it up entirely, they lose. If they lock out the SN sites, they lose. If they partner, they win, but if they partner with the wrong company, they lose. The only logical move is to partner with everyone, accrete value to the mobile consumer by doing so, and monetize the hell out of it.

My conclusion: By building an ecosystem of interoperability and providing social communication functions via native device functionality, the social networking sites will enjoy more usage and happier users, the carriers will additionally monetize their base while reducing friction and at the same time checking a potentially competitive threat, the OEMs cross over to service model by facilitating device integration, and ultimately consumers get a better user experience. If executed properly, all ships will rise with the tide.

Yesterday T-Mobile UK officially announced that Intercasting Corp is their social networking category manager with Bebo and Piczo headlining its impressive group of popular social networking providers. (We have been “soft launched” for a few weeks, but now it is official.)

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.

Here is a link to the full version of the presentation I gave this morning at Qualcomm’s BREW conference, entitled User Generated Content and the Future of Mobile Media. If your conscience allows, feel free to plagiarize the parts of this presentation that are obviously mine. For content that is obviously someone else’s, maybe you shouldn’t. (You shouldn’t anyway, but since I don’t personally care, I give you permission. In any case, proper attribution will get you good karma.)

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

AOL is buying Bebo. That’s further proof that social networking at least factors in the future of the traditional media company model. This week I received validation that mobile is not far behind.

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.

I love the Consumer Electronics Show, but not because I ever get any real work done there. I love it because I personally love consumer electronics. I love seeing high technology applied to such frivolity as portable music and theater-sized television. Sometimes I speak on a panel or something to give me an excuse to go, but really I would go for a day anyway just for fun.

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.

Just FYI, Derrick and I are speaking at some events in case you are going to be there and want to meet us, see some demos, etc.

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