Archive for March, 2006

metroPCS in the Hizzouse

Friday, March 24th, 2006

Today we officially announced that Rabble is expanding its on-deck reach to metroPCS subscribers. Cool that their promo link features the Ying Yang Twins channel. Yes, those Ying Yang Twins. As we continue to deepen our relationships with independent labels and bands, Rabble is proving to be a very media-rich mobile blogging community. Want to send D-Roc and Kaine a message to their mobile phones? They probably won’t let you have their phone number, but you can do the next best thing and send them a message through Rabble to their mobile phones – they’ve got a channel. (Ok, maybe that’s a bad example. I am sure they are busy enough to have an intern responding to their messages. But you never know.)

I just want to reiterate my respect for metroPCS. If they were in the San Diego market, this would be my carrier of choice and would replace my landline phone. They offer a value proposition that is hard for most consumers to resist: Low cost, unlimited usage. They don’t skimp on handsets, either, unlike some other carriers going after the low-cost quadrant. metroPCS has some very robust devices. They are expanding to new markets and now offer service in Dallas and Detroit. I am very happy they are providing Rabble to their subscribers. They may be a comparatively smaller carrier, but something about their business model or demographic appears to be driving Rabble subcriptions at a slightly greater rate. I’ll bet their subscribers likely consume more data as a whole than the national average.

Anyway. Thank you again metroPCS for bringing Rabble to your subscribers and helping us to continue expanding our footprint as the premier mobile blogging and social networking community.

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I am at Dow Jones VentureWire in SF

Thursday, March 23rd, 2006

I am speaking today on a panel called “Where is the mobile phone really headed?” As someone who views the future a little differently, Dow Jones was nice enough to invite me as an industry expert, so I am representing the views of Intercasting Corp. My assertion will be that the opportunities most people see today must be leapfrogged, and the real money is not in content downloads but rather in enhanced forms of communication. Given the comments I am about to make about “2.0″ hype, I am going to try to resist the temptation of calling this opportunity “Mobile 2.0.” (But between you and me, I think that is exactly what I am going to say.)

Yesterday I attended the afternoon keynote by Genevieve Bell, Anthropologist, People and Practices Research at Intel.

She gave a fascinating presentation on how people use technology around the world.

In India, electricity is scarce. What kind of decisions would you make if the only form of electricity you had was a truck battery? What percentage of your energy would you spend on using your PC to access the internet?

PC-Bangs are fast-growing internet cafes in Korea. Not because people don’t have connectivity at home but because they want certain of their computing experiences to be social, and certain of them to not happen at home.

Rural literacy rates in India are under 50%, and 70% of India’s population lives in rural areas. Infrastructural issues constrain connectivity.

In Indonesia, the concern about universal access across an island archipelago led them to launch an “e-mosque” program because there was greater mosque density than tele-density. Mosques are central to daily life and provide a cultural context for computing.

In Malaysia, Maxis (Malaysia telecom) offers built-in Islamic applications that help users find Mecca. Your phone will ring you five times a day to tell you when it is time to pray. 1.7 billion Muslims worldwide are served by new technologies.

In Africa, there is a 7:1 ratio between mobile connections and land lines. Africa is the fastest growing region for mobile phone adoption. A study found that in certain regions, 95% of calls were not being completed: Users were calling each other for free to indicate certain meaning. If you call someone once and hang up, that means “call me.” If you call twice, it means you’ll be late. Three times might mean there’s an emergency, etc.

It was a reminder that whatever bias you might develop from your experience in your own market should be ignored wholly when you enter another. Similarly, something that is hot in one market may not translate to another. In Japan they eat squid pizza. That isn’t coming to America anytime soon.

Jumping the 2.0 shark
There are a lot of “web 2.0” companies presenting. It’s sort of a cattle call approach: These companies get 10 minutes to give their company presentation to the audience of VCs. It is interesting to me how many companies are NOT looking for funding. So why are they presenting?

Most refer to themselves as a “web 2.0″ company. All of the hype is making me wonder: How much more mileage can we really get out of the notion of a “Web 2.0”? As a concept, I admit that I like it. Calling something “2.0” is a simple way to denote that something has evolved to the point that it needs to be looked at as totally different from its predecessor.

“The Web 1.0” was a wild and organic thing built on top of something that existed before. It was essentially the consumer-grade version of the (D)ARPANET and was built upon the basic construct of distributed computing. That and no small amount of irrational exuberance led to “1.0” web businesses built around the efficiency and cost structure of the web.

We soon learned that the only business model the Web 1.0 understood was “broker.” Disintermediation of information-based businesses was the play that ultimately won that game. Stock brokers, real estate brokers, travel agents and many others all got disintermediated to the great benefit to consumers. Even dating sites to some degree disintermediate the local singles bar or your yenta grandmother who wants to introduce you to a nice girl.

And now we are knee-deep in “the two-way web.” If the killer app of the internet is email, then the killer app of the Web 2.0 is communication. Sharing pictures, video, calendars, blogs, profiles, preferences, friends, enemies, events, location or any other piece of multimedia content is the word of the day, and hundreds of companies are cropping up and getting real amounts of VC funding.

I just wonder if the froth is starting to look like the froth we saw during the Web 1.0 gold rush before the business models got fully ironed out. Companies like bbq.com and balls.com (that’s right, they sold balls) were getting funded even after dog food service providers had burned through millions of dollars in funding.

There are some scary similarities today. Read this opinion article from March of 2000, written almost exactly six years ago.

Here is a funny excerpt:

“Obviously, for a dot com, their most important asset is their domain name. So what do these morons do? They create artificial, nonsense words! Instead of something simple like cars.com, they get vehix.com. They come up with weird things like onvia.com. These names are hard to remember and impossible to spell!”

Now check this out:
Web 2.0 or Star Wars Character?

I got a 42. Kinda sad for me.

Here is another excerpt from the March 2000 article:

“I’m sick of the hype of ‘net companies. Granted, there are many useful things about the Internet, and I firmly believe it will change society in ways we can’t begin to comprehend now, but it hasn’t happened yet. I predict that eighty percent of the ‘net business that exist today won’t exist in ten years: the Internet will be completely different by then.”

What a seer this guy Marc Zeedar was. I think it is fair to assume that eighty percent of the 2.0 businesses that exist today won’t exist in ten years either. But twenty percent or fewer probably will, and they may be the Google of their age. Let’s wish them luck, but let’s also try not to jump the shark by over-hyping the concept. If you must, post your 2.0 company to the directory of Web 2.0 companies, but decide whether doing so marks your company as one of the eighty percent or one of the twenty percent.

Posted in Intercasting | No Comments »

Trainblogging: LBS Rabble and Podcasting

Monday, March 20th, 2006

I am on the Amtrak Surfliner heading to LA from San Diego and I am using my Verizon Wireless EVDO card to stay connected. I LOVE this service. I thought I would dump my T-Mobile Starbucks-fi service because of it, but I haven’t yet. I have an affinity to T-Mobile for some reason. I think on some level I feel like I should reward them for seeing the WiFi opportunity so early or something. Practically speaking, I spend a lot of time in various Starbucks and a lot of time at airports, and T-Mobile is in every Admirals Club. So even though the Verizon service is sufficient so far, I am happy to have more connectivity options.

I am also testing the LBS version of Rabble. We put it on a Boost phone because of their A-GPS network and handsets. It’s pretty cool. The train is going about 80 mph and every few minutes the location updates and shows me different things around me. We just passed Anaheim stadium and I found and sent a message to a Rabbler in Cypress. I immediately got a response. That part still surprises me – that when put into the right context, strangers act more like friends than even some of my friends do. This girl is a “cast member” at Disneyland. Would that be a good job? I hear The Mouse rules with an iron fist.

Anyway, LBS Rabble is pretty cool. It is the same as Rabble but instead of declaring location, there is no effort required by the user. In this mode, it feels like sort of a Vindigo for people that includes interactivity. Location really is a different experience from a web-based social networking site, where location is more or less irrelevant. Location and proximity sort of add a Z-axis, and the automatic location ID is neat.

You might find this interesting: We have noticed that users of Rabble 1.0 don’t so much care about specific location. General location and proximity matter, but not specific location. Rabble enables a user to specify their location at different levels down to the Place level, so you could say “I am in San Diego” or “I am in La Jolla” or “I am at Harry’s Bar and Grill.” Then you can also define your proximity, which works like a physical search radius. Most Rabblers define their location at the city or neighborhood level. We thought there would be a user case where people would want to create Places and then blog about them, sort of like a user-generated city guide, but this has not happened. People don’t do it because there is really no reason to. Places simply aren’t strong enough nuclei around which to create any kind of community, conversation or even interest, as it would appear. Rabblers are very interested, however, to know who is around them, and we see a sort of proximity browsing a lot.

It will be interesting to see how this evolves, but even the few specific-location applications we have seen don’t seem to get used much. I have seen a lot of business plans for Bluetooth social networking schemes that promise to hook you up with the hot girl who happens to be in the same bar as you at that very moment. Like many “lubricant technologies,” this has a big empty room problem in that the closer you define “proximity” the less likely that someone else is using the same technology as you.

Also…

I do not know Eric Rice personally, but I know his name in the new media industry. Someone sent me a link to a post he made about Rabble and I was really happy to see that someone as forward-thinking as Eric (he co-founded Audioblog.com) thought Rabble was so cool:

excerpt:

“Rabble. Is. Kick. Ass.

Forget what their site says. People who have a job to do, write like they have a job to do. I don’t have a job to do, so I can say this: Rabble is like a blend of things you know, but with better functionality and more usefulness. It’s an app for your phone that has the structure of Myspace, the awareness of your friends like Dodgeball, yet it doesn’t get in your face unless you want it to. It’s also bi-directional to the web so the blog posts on your site are replicated on your Rabble and vice versa. I can learn about the people, places, and things around me; see the pics, and a whole lot more.”

I like when people like what we are doing.

This reminded me that we have a demo of a future release of Rabble that has podcasting capability. (Yes, I realize to say “podcasting” is merely to be buzzword compliant. It can upload and download audio and video.) It isn’t really that hard to do from a technical standpoint, so it isn’t a big strategic push for us or anything, but we think user-generated media should and will evolve into various modes and our job is to help it along. The real issue is network impact and whether carriers even really want such a feature. So far, some do if it is marketed to pull subscribers into data plans.

I mention this because if you are going to be at CTIA and would like to see a demo of Rabble with integrated podcasting and LBS, please send me a note.

Posted in Rabble | 1 Comment »

InfoSpace readers: you should develop this product

Sunday, March 19th, 2006

This is a product I would like to develop but do not have the time, so someone please beat me to it. I think some media-focused mobile content company like InfoSpace should create the following product:

Personalized keypad tones.

Witness this old skool mobility: When Gordon Gekko punched in Bud Fox’s number on his Motorola DynaTac 8000x all he heard was DTMF tones. That picture of Gekko rolls me. It seemed so hi-tech at the time, didn’t it?

What is the value of DTMF to a user’s ear? Zero. Yet many handsets still make DTMF tones when the keys are pressed. I don’t mean in the earphone, but in the external speaker. Seriously – why the hell do I have to hear that?

Do you remember playing Baa Baa Blacksheep or Mary Had a Little Lamb on your phone by pressing the keys? How sad does that seem now? What a comparatively pathetic form of entertainment that was. Here is a nifty site I found if you want to play some songs on your handset, as lame as that is.

I think this is an interesting personalization opportunity. It would take a celebrity 5 minutes to record their voice saying, “One” then “Two” etc. and maybe for other keys like the Go button, it could vary by celebrity. It would be enough for most people just to say, “Go” but other stronger personalities like Snoop Dogg (he is the Doggfather after all) could say something like “Yeahhh” or “Go maf*cka.” This could be a standalone product or a feature of a phone personalization product that includes a ringtone, wallpaper, ringback, etc. And now that I think about it, the personalization wouldn’t even have to be mapped to the keypad numbers themselves (like “one, two, three” etc.) because that wouldn’t even really add value. It would just have to be entertaining.

I would personally never tire of my phone if everytime I punched in a number I heard a bunch of funny shit from Samuel L. Jackson. Click around on the Samuel L. Jackson Soundboard and picture it replacing the keypad tones on your phone instead.

I also don’t think it would get annoying because most of the calls I make I place from my address book and don’t really use the keypad that much. The rare times that I would have to actually use my keypad would make the presently cumbersome act of dialing a number more fun.

So what would have to happen? Well, we know the handset makers can make the keypad tones sound like whatever they want – it doesn’t have to be DTMF. Some just make standard beeps. At a minimum, a handset maker would have to expose access to whatever very small piece of code controls the keypad tones. This would probably be trivial, but I don’t know. Then someone just has to create a package that contains the media and a bit of instruction that tells the control function on the handset how they map to the keypad. This gets sent to the phone like a ringtone or wallpaper and the user saves it and executes it the same way they personalize other parts of their handset.

What’s wrong with this? Seems like a pretty cool product. I wonder if someone has already hacked a handset to change their keypad tones. Maybe it’s not as interesting as ringtones, but then again ringtones weren’t as interesting as ringtones at one point, either.

This would be a good way for a handset manufacturer to differentiate itself, as well. LG or Kyocera or whatever could partner with InfoSpace to roll out the product, leveraging their content licensing expertise.

Anyway - just a thought. I think there are still interesting opportunities for device personalization and this one seems fairly simple to implement.

Posted in Mobile Media | No Comments »

Moviso an upcoming D2C brand?

Sunday, March 12th, 2006

Please forget what I said before about Moviso being a lame direct to consumer brand:

I will know they have not shaken their infrastructure DNA and adopted a consumer marketing mindset if they announce a consumer strategy under the InfoSpace brand, or worse, the Moviso brand (which was created by one of our QA guys at the time as the result of a $50 contest to name the company, the only requirement for which was that the domain name was available.) But doesn’t “Moviso” sound like a good name for a hispanic MVNO? If InfoSpace is planning to launch a hispanic MVNO, they should use Moviso.

It is, in fact, a wonderful D2C brand. I like it very much. I clearly wasn’t thinking when I wrote that last bit. Ignore.

I say this because concerned reader Jeff just sent me an email about the word mark for Moviso filed on February 28th 2006 by InfoSpace, the owner of the Moviso brand.

“…I was curious if you had thoughts on the INSP filing of the ‘new’ Moviso ‘word mark’ (attached below). It looks like your old baby will ultimately be the brand of INSP’s D2C. I particularly liked the three areas listed, “Telecommunications services, Entertainment services, Management of subscription services” (below). Interested in your thoughts.”

Check out the logo.

Let us take a moment to give kudos to Pablo, the guy who thought it up way back in the day, for having such far-reaching vision. He combined the first two letters of Mobile, Vision and Sound to create it. Little did he know that it might last so long. He deserves $100, not $50.

Here’s the detail:

IC 009. US 021 023 026 036 038. G & S: Downloadable ringtones, musical, voice and other audio recordings, graphics, images, wallpaper, video content, messages, and interactive computer game software, all for the internet and wired and wireless devices
IC 038. US 100 101 104. G & S: Telecommunications services, namely, transmission of text, graphics, images, video content, audio content, and other data communications via the internet, wired computer networks and wireless computer networks; providing multiple user access to a global information network for the transfer and dissemination of a wide range of information; broadcasting programs via the internet, via wireless networks, and via hand held devices; video broadcasting services, video on-demand transmission services, and video downloading services
IC 041. US 100 101 107. G & S: Entertainment services, namely, conducting interactive games via the internet and mobile devices, and providing ringtones and audio and video entertainment files for wireless communication devices; providing information in the field of television, motion picture film and video entertainment via the internet; online journals, namely, blogs; providing storage of personal digital content; providing content forwarding services for wireless devices
IC 042. US 100 101. G & S: Management of subscription services for ringtones, graphics and games; management of distribution of mobile messaging and mobile web browsing; providing access to content image editing software

So, basically, every mobile consumer service ever conceived of. (And clearly NOT a Hispanic MVNO.) I am thinking mobile portal. You?

Admittedly, this would not have been my first choice. I personally really like www.yourmobile.com. But like I said about Mobizzo, it doesn’t really matter what you call it – it matters how much you invest in the brand to make it stand out uniquely in consumers’ minds as a differentiated service from other competing brands about which consumers are not confused in any way.

This is looking like the year of off-deck mobile services, and who better to deliver it than a powerhouse like InfoSpace, with its highly leveragable assets? This is pretty exciting. I wonder when they are planning to launch. Can someone from InfoSpace please shoot me an email and share some details?

Posted in Mobile Industry | No Comments »

Rabble expanding carrier reach

Thursday, March 9th, 2006

We enter the very large house of Cingular.

We have been focusing on establishing our international expansion for Rabble so I haven’t said much lately about our footprint in North America. (We’ll be launching on-deck in Latin America is several markets – more on that some other time.) We like to soft-launch before we announce, so although it has been available for several weeks on certain handsets, Rabble is now officially up on Cingular Wireless. You can find it on your handset in the Media Mall. Here is the link on the Cingular site. You can also get it directly from the Rabble website. Cingular is a big company with a lot of subscribers, most of which can now enjoy the beauty that is the instant gratification of mobile blogging for a scant $2.99/mo. We are happy that they brought us into the fold. Our on-deck reach is now over 100 million.

Remember that Rabble is both a tool and a community: On one hand, it has bi-directional publishing capability with sites like Blogger, LiveJournal, TravelPod, Zoto, Eventful, etc. and we are adding more all the time. In this way, Rabble is a sort of a mobile aggregator of web-based blogging and social networking sites. (We aren’t totally obvious about the integration part, but it is an important part of Rabble’s value to users. Ping me if you want to learn more.) On the other hand, it is also a fully self-contained mobile-centric community that enables people to create and share content right from their mobile phones, so a native mobile user who has never been on LiveJournal can start from their mobile device and have a great experience out of the box.

Anyway, Cingular rules for taking this step forward to offer this in-demand functionality to their subscribers. We like them.

I am happy to say that metroPCS is also currently soft-launched and we will be announcing it fully in a week or so. (So I guess you heard it here first.) Incidentally, metroPCS is a great company and a joy to work with. I really love the value proposition metroPCS offers: Unlimited flat fee prepaid. Talk all you want, same monthly fee. The MOST you can spend is $45 for unlimited local and long distance calling, unlimited text messaging and unlimited picture messaging. For consumers in their markets, how could they choose anything else? I am excited about this relationship. Compared to the national carriers, they may be a bit smaller, but they are giving consumers what they want, which probably means they won’t be smaller for long.

I feel like I owe you an overall update on Rabble, but the problem is that all the stuff I want to share is sort of secret until we launch the next version. I’ll try to share some more about that in the near future as we go into beta.

Posted in Rabble | 2 Comments »

Upcoming conferences

Tuesday, March 7th, 2006

Just fyi, we will be at the following upcoming conferences. If you would like to meet and chat while we are there, please let us know.

SXSW – Derrick will be in Austin speaking on 3/13 about content on the mobile web. He is there through 3/14.

VentureOne Summit, San Francisco 3/22 – 3/23 – Shawn will be speaking about the future of the mobile space.

Digital Hollywood, LA 3/28 - 3/30 – Shawn will be speaking about video, marketing and the next generation of consumer reach.

CTIA, Vegas, Baby. 4/5 – 4/7 – We are not speaking, but we will be waiting in the taxi line outside the convention center for several hours as usual. Have you ever considered scheduling a meeting in the taxi line to make better use of that downtime?

Financial Times Mobile Conference, London 5/8 – 5/9 – Shawn will be speaking about serious content and upstream mobile media. This is an important topic with interesting implications: Do ordinary people eventually disintermediate the stringers and newsmakers?

BREW 2006, San Diego 5/31 – 6/2 – Right in our backyard! We should really think about hosting a party or something. Of course, there is really no need since BREWfest is always such a great time.

Posted in Intercasting | No Comments »

You say potato, I say potizzle

Friday, March 3rd, 2006

Mobizzo launched, and it is a smart move forward. My phone’s wallpaper now proudly supports Pedro. Lucy Hood is a key driver in this industry. With her pioneering efforts on American Idol and her vision for mobisodes, her track record speaks for itself and Fox has executed in mobile very well. (Think about it - what other major media companies do you associate positively with mobile?) Her vision is extensive, and this next step in their mobile strategy belies a much broader opportunity in the future. There is plenty of coverage on what it is, what it means and whether it is good or bad, etc. For my part, I have said before that Newscorp is one of my top picks to be a leading LMNO, and they are already moving in that direction. But this post isn’t about all that.

It’s just about the name. Mobizzo.

Apparently regarded as someone who is in a position to know such things, I’ve gotten a few emails since Newscorp’s Mobizzo launch asking me how to pronounce it and if I thought it sounded like Moviso, the company I used to work at that is now InfoSpace’s mobile division. I suppose Mobizzo could rhyme with Moviso, but there are many theories as to its origins. I shall examine them and opine.

The first thing to get straight is pronunciation. How exactly do you say Mobizzo?

The beginning “Mo” sound is fairly universally understood, but what of the second syllable? Is it a short “i” sound as in tip, banish or active? If so, and the emphasis is on the second syllable, that would suggest that Mobizzo rhymes with Rizzo, Stockard Channing’s character from Grease.

Now, if the letter i in the second syllable in fact forms a long “E” sound, as in beat, nosebleed and evenly, then Mobizzo would rhyme with Moviso. But if that is true, then why two Zs? Mobizo or Mobiso technically could sound the same as Mobizzo if the second syllable is a long E sound.

One theory is that you are supposed to say it with an Italian accent, as in pizza. Try that: Molto bene Mobizzo!

This seems implausible on its face. Disregard.

The etymology of the word may lend some clues to how to pronounce it. The most obvious etymological origin is Snoop Dogg’s branch of urban American colloquial slang which adds “izz” “izzo” “izzle” and other variants to any word seemingly at random, which has the effect of “urbanizing” the word. (As in “fo shizzle ma nizzle.”)

If Snoop Dee Oh Double Gee wanted to urbanize the word “Mobile,” he would likely pronounce it “Mobizzle” or possibly “Mobizzo.” I don’t know that tha dogg pound is claiming any credit for the branding strategy, but it sure seems possible now, doesn’t it? In any case, that would suggest that the pronunciation is more of a short “i” sound. (Another point for Stockard Channing.)

Maybe that’s what Fox was going for – an urban interpretation of Mobility. That would make it a lifestyle brand. All of a sudden Mobizzo has a lot more street cred, doesn’t it?

Here is an obervation: “Mo” is the new “e-.” During the Roaring ‘99’s, you couldn’t swing a dead cat at an O’Reilly conference without hitting a startup that cleverly started with the letter e. As if the fact that it was an “electronic” dog food service provider on the internet needed to be spelled out for consumers.

In fact, naming your mobile service something that starts with “mo” is a smart thing to do, because it communicates to consumers exactly what kind of content is available there.

Lastly, the only brands that you can get through the PTO unencumbered are the ones that have never existed in any other form ever, which means you have to simply make it up.

Mobizzo has a nice ring to it, cues that it is a mobile brand, sounds youthful, and importantly, can be pronounced in any language without sounding particularly ethnic. That is more than enough for a brand that has the full support of a powerhouse like Newscorp. Also, people talk about it. Just like when Verizon launched and people weren’t sure which syllable to emphasize, so does Mobizzo create conversation, and that’s a good thing.

It may have been accidental or it may have been the result of months of branding strategy. It doesn’t matter because either way, the value Newscorp invests in it will be significant and that is what establishes a brand. Pronounce it any way you like, but by all means, make sure you talk about it often and tell all your friends. ;-)

Posted in Mobile Industry | 1 Comment »