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As co-founder of UPOC back in the day, Greg Clayman is a mobile data O.G. Now successfully heading MTV’s mobile efforts, Greg has been at the forefront of mobile data innovation since 1999. That is about as long as the mobile data space has existed. I like to see people like this express their views about the mobile space. People like Fabrice Grinda, Jason Devitt, Andy Nulman, Anthony Stonefield and Mitch Laskey are all mobile data O.G.s, responsible for capitalizing on the mobile opportunity before most people saw an opportunity. Sadly, not all of them blog, but at least now one more of them does.

I endorse Greg not just because he is a friend of mine, but because he will add value for two reasons: 1) He is in a position to see some really cool and really early stuff and 2) He is an articulate long-form blogger with great insight and opinions. (Plus he takes the time to put little pictures in his posts. I am lazy.)

Check it out:
www.twofones.com

I haven’t posted in a while. I have been really busy. (And I am technically not a blogger.)

For another purpose, I had pulled together a short overview of the mobile space with a view to the future and then realized that with a few added pages it was applicable to InfoSpace given their current situation. (Which is losing the ringtone business from a big unnamed carrier partner that most people think is Cingular.) The problems facing InfoSpace are a good lens to the mobile space in general and the business models that work in an environment where there is an oligopsony of gatekeepers and an increasing number of content providers in various verticals who would like to reach their subscribers.

No sense lamenting the past at this point. All told, today InfoSpace is in much better shape than when Naveen left it in disrepair, so not all is lost. Let’s look to the future and think about where InfoSpace can go from here.

Maybe there were some missed opportunities and strategic decisions that don’t seem so strategic now. Maybe, maybe not. I can confirm this: Your company becomes what your technology can do, and InfoSpace still has the best ringtone slinger in the mobile space, but the problem is just that: It is a ringtone slinger, not a game slinger or a video slinger or whatever. Ringtone intermediation is not a growth business. But what is a growth business in the mobile space?

To frame my thoughts, I put myself in the position of running InfoSpace. What would I do now? By looking at the direction of the mobile data space and the various competitors who are staking claims, I came to some conclusions about where any company, embedded as InfoSpace is, should go when facing entrants who are not currently as entrenched but have termendous strategic competitive advantages in their chosen vertical. So, while I frame the analysis around InfoSpace, I only do so to borrow a brief historical perspective on where the mobile data industry was up until a year ago (ringtones, content intermediaries) and where I think it is going in general and how any company should look differently at the future of the mobile opportunity.

Might be worth a click, and feedback is always welcome:
http://www.intercastingcorp.com/filelib/INSP_Plan.pdf

Dotmobi is available. Yay? The strongest pitch to register so far seems to be: “Better run out and register your current dotcom as a dotmobi to protect yourself from some cybersquatter beating you to it.”

What does this do for me? This is similar to the media industry artificially creating revenue streams by introducing new portable formats to resell their catalog to the same users. “Hey dumb consumer:
- Trade in your records for 8-tracks
- Ok, now trade in your 8-tracks for cassettes
- Ok, now trade in your cassettes for CDs
(oops, that was in an unprotected digital format and we just cut the value of our entire industry in half)
- Um, are you stupid enough to trade in your CDs for Superduper CDs with DRM that treats you like a criminal?”

What is the value of another TLD when TLDs were not implemented in a useful way in the first place? What was the reason for domain extensions in the first place? To differentiate between the whitehouse.gov and the whitehouse.com? (Yes, that is a porn site. No need to click.) Which site gets more hits and why? This was clearly an engineering-derived solution and not a consumer-oriented one.

Adding a .com to anything you put into a web browser is default consumer behavior. Any legitimate company that doesn’t have a .com extension is somehow regarded as lame.

But there are a lot of TLDs to choose from:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Internet_top-level_domains

It’s not like there is some mobile browser that only points to .mobi addresses. It’s not like there is some descriptive language or protocol associated with .mobi that adds value to consumers, businesses, network operators, device manufacturers or anyone else in the mobile space. It’s not like there is widespread industry support for it. It’s not even like it is somehow easier to enter on a mobile phone.

The more TLDs that consumers need to guess at when trying to find something, the worse off all consumers are, but the better off Google is.

You know what the worst part is? I just found out someone here registered rabble.mobi.