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Making money in mobile media is like mining for gold
To put it simply, the winning business model of the gold rush was not mining for gold. The phrases commonly used during the gold rush were “I struck gold!” or “I struck it rich!” or “Eureka!” When one found gold, one did not say, “We effectively executed on our carefully crafted business plan and exceeded even our own expectations of our well-defined methodology.” No, these people were all surprised when they found gold.

This is what I call a hit-driven business, and I see similarities in the mobile media space. Content is the gold in this case, and a good many companies are betting that they will make money in this way. Of course, when it pans out, (har har) only around 20% of the prospectors will make anything in this way, and over time they will represent 80% of the value exploited.

When James Marshall first discovered gold on January 24th in 1848 while employed by John Sutter, the gold was just lying around. It literally sparkled in the water of the American River. There was so much of it and so few people able to pick it up that even when word got out that there was gold around what is now known as Sacramento, the first prospectors to make it to the area in late 1848-1849 (“the ‘49ers”) got rich just by wading into the water and picking the stuff up.

1849 was an interesting year. San Francisco’s population grew from about 800 in 1848 to over 50,000 in 1849. That’s what I call hockey stick growth of a market. Still, growth has its casualties: According to Steve Wiegard of the Sacramento Bee, “one in every five miners who came to California in 1849 was dead within six months.” This is further evidence that the hit-driven part of the gold rush offered little guarantee of success. (Similarly, hundreds of mobile application developers have tried and failed already.) But still they came, which further grew the market in California. This meant opportunity for the people who made money around the content, whether the prospectors were striking gold or not.

This is what is most interesting to me about the gold rush: Think about all the streets in San Francisco that are named after people from that era. Fremont, Sutter, Marshall, Ghirardelli Square. None of them made money from Gold. Sutter was already rich, and really just wanted to build a vast agricultural empire. His participation in the gold rush was purely accidental.

Domenico Ghirardelli tried and failed at mining and instead made a small fortune (and a lasting legacy) in chocolate, one of the standout luxury goods at the time for a market that was not only growing but also growing in wealth. It was the size of the market of consumers that made him successful.

In 1852, Henry Wells and William Fargo recognized the need for a trusted banking and logistics operation to support the creation of wealth and cart it around the country (by stagecoach.) As transactions increased, so did the need for a trusted source to act as a clearinghouse, and so did their value. It was the size of the market of consumers that made them successful. Chase and Sterling at QPass are the Henry and William of the mobile media gold rush. They provide a crucial billing service that benefits both buyers and sellers, and they are not making their fortune by mining for gold.

Jacob Davis and Levi Strauss didn’t apply for their patent for their famous garments until 1873, which was well after the first wave of prospectors in California, but they still made a fortune on a maturing market for gold mining. Whether they struck gold or not, miners needed sturdy pants to wear, with lots of pockets in which to put their various prospecting implements. One could easily argue that Levi Strauss was the biggest winner of the gold rush, without ever touching a shovel to soil.

My favorite characters from the gold rush
Sam Brannan was my number one hero from the gold rush. Since there was no defensibly repeatable model for mining for gold that would yield results every time, (which, by definition, would require knowing exactly where to mine for gold) the business model of the gold rush was not mining for gold. The earliest business model of the gold rush was selling picks and shovels. No matter where they were digging or whether they struck gold or not, the miners had to use picks and shovels, and selling such implements represented a defensibly repeatable business model that didn’t require any favorable treatment from the gods in order to make money. Sam Brannan understood this better than anyone.

Upon hearing about Marshall’s discovery of gold, Sam Brannan literally ran through the streets of San Francisco shouting that gold had been discovered near Sutter’s Mill. He did this while waving a bottle of gold dust in people’s faces as proof. History refers to this stunt by Sam Brannan as the spark that ignited the explosion of gold fever that started the gold rush. Everyone that was convinced by Sam to go prospecting for gold first had to buy a pick, a shovel and maybe a pan. Brannan understood well the laws of supply and demand. By evangelizing the gold rush, he created tremendous demand for the tools to get at the gold, and a few days earlier he had purchased every pick axe, shovel and pan in the region. A metal pan that sold for twenty cents a few days earlier now had to be bought from Brannan for fifteen dollars. In just nine weeks he made thirty-six thousand dollars.

My second favorite character from the gold rush was George W. Hearst. He represented the opposite approach to Brannan’s. He believed in getting as close as possible to creating perfect information in a hit-driven business in order to ensure success. A mine that had produced some gold might produce more. It’s hard to tell what the future holds when mining for gold, which makes it a risky endeavor. One way to stack the deck is to buy as much land as possible that has already proven to have some gold in it, and then keep digging until you find more. He bought the claims of various individuals and consolidated them all to form a large mining organization with superior economies of scale. Hearst eventually owned interests in the most important claims in the U.S., including the Comstock in Nevada, the Homestake in South Dakota, the Anaconda copper mine in Montana and the Ontario silver mine in Utah.

In a hit-driven business, increasing your chances of having a greater share of the hits by creating more inventory is a good way to win, as Hearst clearly demonstrated.

So step back for a minute and compare the gold rush to the mobile media industry. Think of the gold as content, the picks and shovels as distribution, and the massive number of people energized around a common topic (gold) as the market of consumers all energized around a common platform (mobile phones.)

What does the opportunity in mobile media look like now? Who’s winning? Who’s moving in the right direction? Where does it end up?

The current state of mobile media
When I was at Moviso, we had the discussion about picks and shovels often. I wanted to be the leading supplier of picks and shovels in the mobile media space. I had no idea what was going to be the best-selling ringtone, graphic or game, and I didn’t care. Content popularity is very fashion-driven, often confounding the best laid plans of highly-paid marketing executives. The market of consumers ultimately decides what is cool or not, so just let them decide. Is that crazy frog shit going to last any longer than our fascination with the macarena did? No. If Jamba announces a “Super Crazy Frog 2″ I will know to short VRSN.

So at Moviso we built a platform and tried to establish deep integration with carriers to be the storefront where the content got purchased. This is a much more capital-efficient model in my mind than trying to be a branded destination or a producer of content, and it worked. Our two most important clients were Cingular and T-Mobile, and these are the relationships that continue to be the most important clients to InfoSpace today.

We were focused on providing white-label services to carrier-branded portals so while I really would have liked to, there was no way we could also provide branded media services to consumers because we would be competing with our own white-label business.

In essence, I got our business model wrong. We weren’t selling picks and shovels to the carriers. If that were true, they wouldn’t have minded if we used the picks and shovels ourselves to find a little gold on the side. Rather, we were hired hands mining on the land that they owned and keeping a percentage of the gold we found because we had provided the labor and the picks and shovels. This is a hybrid model, and it is important to point out because it hints at the future of mobile media.

The opportunity in mobile media right now is not unlike the gold rush. There is a rapidly expanding market. The people who showed up early and found the gold just lying around have long since taken their profits and gone. Now the next wave belongs to those who are willing to spend the money to dig the mines deep into the ground to get at the rich veins of gold that are there, and they are doing it now. How they do it from this moment will determine who wins in the end.

You have probably never heard of Sam Brannan. You have also probably never heard of George Hearst. (Though you have heard of his son, William Randolph Hearst.) What does that mean? Well, usually, history is told by the winners. I have personally invested in Homestake Mining in the past, but I cannot think of any company having to do with Sam Brannan that I ever could have invested in. I think this is significant with respect to the mobile media space, and I can speculate on where the presumed players are moving and who I think the winners are in the future.

InfoSpace, Openwave and Comverse: Picks and Shovels
I received several emails regarding the InfoSpace/Cingular MEdia Net announcement asking how I viewed it. I view it favorably. It is the kind of picks and shovels business that I love to see because it is media agnostic and grows transactionally without having to guess at what is going to sell well.

That said, take a look at who owns what among big media companies today.

Click around and you’ll see that the big media companies own many links on the value chain, most importantly including content production, content distribution and content promotion. I would like to own the movie studio, the movie distribution company, the billboards on which to promote my movies, the television stations on which to advertise my movies, the movie theaters in which to show my movies and the web sites on which to virally promote my movies. Then I would provision my movies in a series of release windows starting with film, then moving to DVD, then to Pay-per-view, then to cable, then to broadcast TV. I’d even find a way to distribute right into the pockets of consumers on their mobile phones. In short, I’d own the whole value chain if I could. If you look around you’ll see how many media “megacorps” are called megacorps because they own that many links on the value chain.

Now look at the mobile media companies of any size. They haven’t gotten there yet. I want to see InfoSpace and Openwave, clear leaders in the picks and shovels business, place a few bets in the mining for gold business. I am talking about moving downstream to branded B2C products that may produce some hits. That is all. These companies have great businesses poised for growth as the market grows, but if they are going to reinvest their profits, it should be on some higher-risk consumer-branded gold mining expeditions because they have such leverage to do so.

JAMDAT: Mining for gold
These guys are the inverse of InfoSpace. JAMDAT’s revenue is hit-driven: Branded apps like Tetris, Bowling, Bejewelled and others represent a large percentage of revenue. Mitch and Scott are great guys, btw. I remember one call we had a while back right before Verizon Wireless was putting out a press release naming the top ten applications on their Get It Now service and JAMDAT had eight of the top ten spots. We all had a chuckle at their obvious domination. The details are hazy, but I think the top spot went to Carolynn’s ModTones. Our ringtone application, Ringster, came in around 8th, I think, and the rest of the list was comprised of various JAMDAT games. Great for them, but this was a time when there were virtually zero mobile gaming application providers who mattered.

When you are the only guy mining for gold, it all belongs to you. The next miner has the potential to cut your revenue in half or even more. From there, it’s all out war to defend your position. So, while I would like to see InfoSpace and Openwave swim downstream to consumer-branded applications, the opposite is true for JAMDAT - I want to see them move upstream to become more of a picks and shovels player in their space. So why not develop and patent the mobile-media 3D engine that they license to every game developer? Or how about the massively multiplayer mobile gaming platform that they give to carriers to give them a single, controllable point of contact to consolidate all of the gaming publishers that want to provision their applications? In short, isn’t networked multi-player league-based JAMDAT Bowling complete with integrated wagering the wave of the future in mobile gaming? How many other verticals could you think of that make similar sense? So why not build the platform that enables every similar application and operate the marketplace for all league-based sports games with a unified UI, empowering not only your own branded applications but also inviting players of others applications to compete with your players via your platform? Is the future of gaming really about shelf space and trying to predict stand-alone hits or is it more about being the conduit through which all games are transformed to be most relevant in the mobile space? And, btw, looking at gaming as just another form of communication is a good place to start.

When the value is shifting across various links on the value chain, isn’t it best to own as much of the value chain as possible? I want to see the companies selling picks and shovels make some bets on some gold mines, and I want to see the guys mining for gold recognize that with the money they already made they could buy some land and make a percentage off of the guys who want to mine for gold on their land.

The earliest and largest players in the mobile media space have the potential to stay on top if they recognize where to reinvest in complementary business models.

The mobile media future
In this post, I have been applying the traditional media model of content production and distribution. But in the mobile media space, the most likely winners are those who realize that the future of media looks more like communication than content. Analogs to MySpace, Cyworld and NeoPets are more likely to generate usage and massive profits than console games crammed onto mobile phones or 2-minute mobisodes of the hit TV show 24 (the UK mobile version of which was recently cancelled due to low subscribership.)

What do you think? Is the LMNO more or less viable in the future of a location-based communication-centric world? Will mobile dating, citizen journalism, mobile blogging, mobile social networking and mobile participative media make more or less money than ringtones, games and mobisodic versions of whatever the reality show du jour is in the near future? Are we on the verge of a 2.0 revolution in the mobile media space, sending the lucky early prospectors home with small fortunes but reserving the big payoff for the Hearsts of our industry? Is JAMDAT the company most like the original stake holders that sold their claims to some larger, better-financed player in it for the long haul? Contrary to the speculation, I think they have the potential to be the Homestake Mining of the mobile media space.

What Sam Brannan should have done
Rather than sell the picks and shovels and pans, Brannan should have given them away and in return accepted a small percentage of the gold that the miners found using his tools. Wild West legal issues aside, he would have made a lot more money.
This is the value of user-generated content in the mobile space (or content as communication) because it is the best hybrid of both gold rush business models. You provide the picks and shovels for users and take a percentage. The difference is that your tools don’t just enable people to find gold – it enables them to make it, too. Those are some special tools, and it requires rethinking what a pick or shovel looks like. The gold is just as valuable, too, when you consider how much more valuable communication is than content on its own.

Anyway, I am clearly biased on this last point, so feel free to ignore. But if I am right about how these business models are converging, there really is a sweet spot that grows both sides of the value chain from the middle and not either end. We shall see. One thing is for sure: The word is out, the market is huge, and prospectors are coming to mine for gold.

Today was one of those days where all my meetings went right. I moved the ball forward and on top of it, the universe sent a subtle sign of its intention to align various planets in some form or another in the media future.

I was at a Westin hotel somewhere in the middle of the country and I opened my door to see the USA Today. It’s always there, and I always step on it on my way out unless I see the cleaning people in the hallway – then I feel bad for some reason like I am shunning this little gift from the hotel and I pick it up and throw it into my room on the way out hoping it lands on the bed. Today, though, I looked down and on the front page above the fold was the headline: Future of TV on pause? Companies find better picture, more channels a hard sell.

Now this caught my eye, because that’s a theme I often parrot myself. What good are 500 channels if nothing is on? So I picked up the paper to read on the plane later.

On the front page of the Money section of USA Today are these three headlines:
Cable’s final frontier: People who want less
Tailored, ad-free TV gains ground
File-sharing Grokster plans to go legit

USA Today tapped three veins that lead to the heart of the future of media.

1) People don’t want higher quality or more channels at a higher price. I have a 60-inch plasma TV. It does not look better than the Trinitron I had before. But even when it’s off it looks cool, and I like the flat panel display. HD on my plasma draws attention to my TV’s lack of resolution, and doesn’t improve the experience of watching TV. Nor does the availability of the 10th Cinemax channel make me want to part with an additional $10/month to get it.

TiVo improves the TV experience. User-generated programming is truly useful. I happily pay for that. In the article, Gene Kimmelman from Consumers Union says, “Companies are pushing bigger packages, promoting digital, and not offering what consumers want most: fewer channels at a lower price.” Then, among other salient points, it talks about how the soon-to-launch U.S. Digital Television is betting on giving consumers fewer channels for less. They are backed by Fox, Hearst-Argyle and McGraw-Hill. Smart.

Allow me to further observe that when it comes to mass media, “more and of higher quality” isn’t driving the market. What’s the big media story of the last two years? Blogs. Simple verticalized text-based unvetted thoughts from largely non-professional writers that capture a smaller but highly targeted audience. A medium with a better cost-to-reach ratio there is not. Lower-quality does not mean uninteresting to the masses. There are more people sending an SMS at this moment than there are watching digital cable television.

2) People will pay for, and media companies will support, user-generated programming. Check the first sentence of the second headline: “CBS and NBC delivered another hammer blow to the traditional TV economic model on Monday by agreeing to let some Comcast and DirecTV customers pay 99 cents to watch certain hit shows on demand and ad-free.”

That’s right. It’s not that I have 500 channels and nothing is on, rather, I have 500 channels and nothing is on when I want to watch it. I will pay for control. This is why people still actually go to Blockbuster to get what they want when they want it.

This is an important development to the future of media. I wonder how that TiVo/EchoStar lawsuit is going to play out. Seems more important now.

And, it’s 99 cents for a whole hour-long show to your TV. How does that jive with the “3 bucks for a 2-minute mobisode to your cell phone” pitch?

Well, that’s a matter of distribution cost, right? This sounds like an expensive proposition to me: “We’ll use satellites that orbit the earth to beam TV to people who will buy satellite dishes.” I love when the audacity of capitalism proves out. Does the satellite thing sound more expensive than “We’ll put up a bunch of radio transceivers on telephone poles so people can talk to each other”? The latter lacks a certain je ne sais quoi in terms of its appeal as a business, as do most companies that have in their business plan the word “radio.” It sounds so turn-of-the-century. (The one before this one.) It’s just not sexy like “satellite.” Radios are in New Hampshire. Satellites are in space.

99 cents for an hour of on-demand television, yet today people regularly pay 50 cents to send a still picture to one other person with their cell phone. Does this in any way hint at the massive value of the mobile space? I think it is due to its origins as a communication medium and not an entertainment medium. I think people on the whole are more interested in communicating their thoughts and ideas than they are in simply receiving a story. The exciting part is that those two worlds are colliding. The lines are blurring between content produced by Hollywood and content produced by ordinary people like you and me. In theatrical terms, what we are seeing is a shift from viewing the narrative (TV) to helping with the set design (TiVo) to participating in the narrative (Blogging) to virally sharing in the creation and dissemination of the content itself. (Social networking) Which brings me to…

3) Media companies will devote massive resources to the pursuit of killing the illegal distribution of their content, which may be a good thing
Grokster gives up, and is planning to become a legal download site. Now, nevermind for a moment that it is generally understood that this “win” by the RIAA will not stomp out file swapping on the internet. To play devil’s advocate, if you could distribute content on the net the same way as Grokster, and some would be free and promotional or whatever and the only way you could get some other content was to pay 99 cents for a full-length redbook song that didn’t come with any experience-killing inane DRM crap wrapped around it and all you had to do was click a button and it debited some account that you only see later, would you be cool with that? I would. If it were simple and didn’t make me feel like a criminal, yeah, sure. iTunes is not that, btw.

There are two possibilites that may come from the RIAA suing 12-year-old girls and shutting down piracy sites. On one hand, it is getting annoyingly tiresome and maybe people won’t mind if the party winds down a bit. I feel like there is a giant collective sigh about to be let out: “OKAY, already, you wore us down. We’ll pay a buck for your Clay Aikens art.” On the other hand, it may invigorate millions of lesser-known artists to create and market their music through other channels like MySpace, Xanga and Rabble, effectively diminishing the power of the central media distribution model and mobilizing the masses at the edge of the network who will form their own distribution channels. (That’s what I’m thinking.)

So stand back and look at all of these headlines as a whole and you’ll see the dots connecting to form a sketchy outline of the media future: A trend toward lower production value, increased consumer choice, user-generated programming, mass-market pricing for on-demand media and a move toward monetizing the distribution of content via overlapping personal networks. To me, Newscorp’s acquisition of MySpace is looking shrewder every day.

One of my many mobile service providers is Cingular Wireless. I am extremely loyal to this company - I have had this account the longest, since it was Pacific Bell, in fact. I have always been happy with their coverage, their rate plans are generally fair, and their service is top-notch. I went to the website today to buy a new handset, but I had some questions about accessories and my plan so I thought I would call them up instead. Like every business, they have an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) system. Here is what I got when I called. (The bold items are my selections.)

Thank you for calling Cingular Wireless. Por informacion en espanol, oprima el asterisco.

If you are calling about number ###-###-####, press 1

To pay your bill or get other bill related options, press 1
Check minutes press 2
For help with voicemail press 3
To report a lost or stolen phone press 4
For an item not covered in this menu or to speak with a customer service representative press 0

So we can quickly transfer you to the person who can best help you please listen to the follow menu:
If you are having problems with your existing phone press 1
For sales, accessories or to purchase another line press 2
For text messaging or mobile internet press 3
For information on closing your account press 4

Please hold while your call is being transferred.

To purchase new service press 1
If you purchased in the last 30 days and need help press 2
For assistance with your current account press 3

Please wait while we transfer your call. This call may be monitored for quality assurance.

Thank you for calling Cingular Wireless. Por informacion en espanol, oprima el asterisco.

I was back at the beginning! I actually went through it again before realizing I was stuck in some sort of IVR temporal loop like in episode 118 of Star Trek: The Next Generation. (Star Trek co-stars like Kelsey Grammer so strain suspension of disbelief that such episodes are instant classics.)

1-0-2-3, 1-0-2-3, 1-0-2-3…like in that Star Trek episode, it would have gone on forever had I not changed that last number. 1-0-2-1 gets you to a salesperson, and he was quite helpful. I also let him know about the IVR loop, and he said he’d let someone know to fix it.

It’s an honest mistake. Programming an IVR deeper than even one submenu requires careful planning and a very large whiteboard. I am sure Cingular isn’t the only company with a minor programming error creating déjà vu (nIb’poH to Klingons) for their callers.

But think about the impact. What if 1-0-2-1, their inbound sales channel, instead resulted in the endless loop and they were essentially shunning their lowest-cost, pre-qualified sales leads? Anyway, this experience just reminded me that I’ve been meaning to talk about how Voice has to change and how important I think the changed version of it will be to the future of media.

To the LMNO, voice interfaces are inherently broken
Worse with all IVRs is that they require the caller to employ an inductive logic Criterion of Adequacy at every submenu. (CoA: As evidence accumulates, the degree to which the collection of true evidence statements comes to support a hypothesis, as measured by the logic, should tend to indicate that false hypotheses are probably false and that true hypotheses are probably true.)

In other words, all IVRs are so complex that there is no way for a caller to deduce that he or she is actually going to eventually arrive at what they were seeking in the first place. You only ever really think you’ll probably get there, and a measure of your decreasing confidence is how quickly you press the button that gets you to a live person. Lacking any sort of guaranteed outcome, callers try to guess the right selection at every submenu to at least increase the probability of arriving at what they seek. What they seek is usually a live person, btw, because the most efficient way to answer questions from your customers is not to try to anticipate every single question they could possibly have and present them all of the possible answers. Rather, providing the right interface for the particular exchange of information is the right way to go.

When I call any business and get an IVR, I am immediately unhappy because I know that it is going to take longer to navigate through their challenge/response system than it would to simply talk to a live person. For the most offensive example of this, try calling Amtrak and dealing with “Julie, Amtrak’s automated agent.” You can reach her at 1-800-USA-RAIL. It took me 4 minutes and 43 seconds to learn what exact time a train is leaving tomorrow around noon from San Diego to Los Angeles, and that is before I even attempted to purchase the ticket. I also counted 15 questions by the system in order to provide the information. (Do you know your departure city? Please say your departure city. There are two stations in San Diego, which one do you want? I thought you said Solana Beach, did I get that right? What is your destination? What day do you want to leave? Around what time do you want to leave? Will you also be needing pricing information? Is this an adult? Etc.) I called back and bypassed Julie and got the same information from a live person in less than 12 seconds:
“Hi there, is there a train leaving around noon tomorrow from Solana Beach to Union Station?”
“Yes, at 12:33. Tickets are $22. Would you like to reserve a seat?”

Another good example is American Airlines: 800-848-4653. Of the four top-level menu items, ticket reservations (the primary revenue driver, btw) is the last one. Compare it to Southwest Airlines: 800-I-FLY-SWA. Two rings and a live person answers. I get right to what I wanted in the first place, and Southwest didn’t make me suffer through a tedious process or push to me the responsibility of figuring out how to best navigate their system.

All I am trying to illustrate is that the old media push model apparently applies to voice applications, resulting in inefficiency and barriers creating transactional friction. IVRs push the responsibility to choose the right path to the consumer rather than enabling them to effectively pull what they need. The shift we are seeing in media in general must also apply to voice, as the lines are blurring between media and personal communication: It must move from a push model from the center of the network to a pull model at the edge of the network.

Voice as a distributed media application
Voice will evolve in the new media future. Think of voice as an additional application that augments some existing core functionality. Southwest Airlines is not in the telephony business, but they know a lot of people have telephones, so they built the most transparent use of that technology to augment their core business. It’s an enabler. I know that’s not a particularly insightful observation, given that for as long as I have been alive, the world economy has been largely driven by the application of technology to existing businesses.

But what about media companies? A good example of a media voice application is MovieFone. It’s a good use of IVR to provide access to movie listings and times. If voice is an enabler and the media business model shifts from a push model to a media networking model, then voice will exist to enable it, right? How important is voice specifically to whether or not they win the battle for media supremacy? That depends on whether I am right about the most likely future media titans being an LMNO.

If the future winners in the media space are the ones who understand that media is a form of communication and that personal media created at the edge of the network will drive more value than media produced at the center of the network, then voice will figure prominently in the future media titan’s offering because it is the most intuitive communication interface we have and will naturally be used to augment the exchange of personal media.

Why did Ebay buy Skype? I have seen many justifications posit that since Ebay has so many small business customers to which they can market additional services, they could become the telephony provider of choice for the web-based small business market, just like buying PayPal made sense as the de facto financial clearinghouse of the same realm. Maybe, and it makes a lot of sense, but I don’t think it is as compelling as a simple bolt-on to their core offering, which is auctions. Giving people a click-and-talk interface would dramatically decrease the already low friction involved in the bidding process and the associated required communication around it, as would a hosted IM solution. Skype provides this, but Ebay didn’t have to buy Skype to achieve it.

Ebay fits my definition of an LMNO: They enable people to post media for the purpose of networking with other people they don’t know in a geographically related environment. Given the time-based aspect of their business, I personally think the last mile for Ebay is a more useful “anytime, anyplace” upstream and downstream mobile app (not just the simple one-way bidding thing they launched over a year ago) to put this functionality in their users’ pockets. But that’s a separate thought.

Ebay as a media company is a bit of a stretch for some people, so how about Yahoo, IAC or Newscorp? All of these media companies will eventually have to deploy voice as part of their media offerings. Newscorp apparently understands well the future of media. With the shrewd acquisition of MySpace, they bought themselves a media networking platform. If Newscorp understands that content in the future has a lower value than the community, communication and connection around the content, then Newscorp will add voice to augment their growing LMNO offering. The interesting thing about it is that they don’t have to pay billions of dollars for Skype if they want to enable their media offerings. They need a tool they can bolt on that adds a button attached to every content channel that says “click here to talk to this…[whatever].” It could be a sports television personality looking for commentary from someone in the stands, a news anchor reporting on a hurricane who wants to broadcast from within someone’s house in the eye of the storm, or it could simply be another person who went to the U2 concert that you want to chat with. It will not be an IVR.

VoIP is making voice as an application possible, and the truly visionary companies understand that it is an integral part of the media networking future. Pay attention to the small voice providers and pay attention to the media companies and tell me if you start to see some patterns emerge where they intersect.