Archive for July, 2007

Intercasting Corp named AlwaysOn Top 100 Private Company

Friday, July 20th, 2007

This week we were selected as one of the hottest private companies by AlwaysOn. Read the overview and see the rest of the list here.

On the list this year are a bunch of companies for which we have a ton of respect, so we are happy to be in good company. I personally really like Bebo, Gaia, Loopt, Topix, 4INFO and Digit Wireless. (The latter has an alphanumeric keypad that really is better than a standard numeric keypad - very innovative.) Previous AO100 companies include Skype, YouTube, Facebook, DivX, TellMe, LinkedIn, BitTorrent and Glu Mobile.

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Sprint is using ANTHEM to power its social networking category

Tuesday, July 17th, 2007

This week we launch the first of a growing list of wireless carriers that have chosen ANTHEM as the core of their social networking offerings. On Sprint, it is called “social zone,” but on others it may be called “social networking” or whatever. ANTHEM is not a consumer brand – it is a platform to manage the social networking category that puts carriers and Social Networking Service (SNS) providers (and their brands) first.

We are deeply integrated into the Sprint network and meaningfully integrated with their devices. Sprint had to do this technical integration with us only once, and now they can deploy any number of social networking sites through our platform. All they do from now on is call us and tell us to plug in whatever social networking sites they want to launch in the future.

Integration to the ANTHEM platform for SNS providers takes a few days. (Compared to a few months to build a standalone application, for instance.) So if you are a social networking site and want a turn-key mobile strategy, send us an email and we’ll get you set up. Sprint will soon be launching more than twice as many SNS providers as they chose for day one, and we are integrating additional SNS providers on an ongoing basis.

The Sprint deployment is a good example of the flexibility of ANTHEM. In this case, Sprint has chosen to offer each SNS individually. This allows them to cross promote applications on different areas on their deck. Other carriers will be launching ANTHEM with a single monolithic application that in fact looks to the end user like the category itself. This one application then rebrands itself according to the SNS the user has selected. This makes more sense for when ANTHEM is preloaded on handsets because there is never anything new for the user to download, and with one thick client on the handset, the footprint requirement is relatively low. Come to think of it, for most carriers, this is the ONLY way they will be able to bring the entire social networking category to their subscribers in a preloaded or OS-integrated fashion, but more on that some other time.

There are some notable differences between ANTHEM and other social networking providers that are currently available:
- Camera integration: ANTHEM gives users the ability to take a pic right from within any SNS offered through the platform. This may seem like an obvious requirement, but no carrier that I know of has allowed any other social networking site to access the camera API. This makes the content creation user experience through ANTHEM comparatively outstanding. Really – you have to try it next to an social networking site that does not have this functionality to fully get how much better it is for users.

- PIM integration: To make it as easy as possible to share content, ANTHEM enables users to access their phone’s address book from within their chosen social networking provider. The address book on the phone is typically a silo, but when combined seamlessly with any social networking site, it feels like the bridge that was missing between “social networking” and mobile.

- Registration: You can sign up for, say, Xanga right from your phone. Does this seem like another obvious requirement? We think it is, but you will find other social networking sites outside of our platform that do not allow you to create a new account from your phone. For someone who already has an account, this is perfectly reasonable, but we always remind ourselves that there are TWICE AS MANY MOBILE PHONES IN THE WORLD AS THERE ARE PCs, which means that however many people are using your social networking site on the web, you can double that number if you have a well-defined mobile strategy.

Check it out for yourself at the newly-created Social Zone category from your Sprint mobile phone. Today you will find many of the top-tier social networking sites, and over the next several weeks you will find many more. Notably missing is MySpace. What can I say? They are far and away the category leader on the web, and as such they exert a commensurate amount of influence in the mobile space. I personally think that while it is great as it is, their service would be even better through our platform, but it really doesn’t matter what I think. ;-) We work for the carriers, and whoever they tell us to integrate with is who we integrate with, and our goal is to provide the absolute best user experience to their mobile subscribers. We think by making that our guiding light and by serving equally the needs of wireless carriers and social networking providers, we will eventually represent the absolute best solution for the mobile social networking vertical.

Lastly, the deployment you see today is our “1.0.” I met with someone yesterday who works in this space and we were talking about how the vertical has to evolve. I was saying that we are keen to get to our version “3.11,” which was the first version of Microsoft Windows that was truly more useful than DOS. Between now and then, we will listen to our customers (and our customers’ customers) to bring the category-leading platform to mobile subscribers. So if you love something about it, I want to know, and if you hate something about it, I really want to know. As we evolve the platform over time, I’ll offer updates on key functionality, etc.

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The Sony CDP-101 and my new iPhone

Sunday, July 8th, 2007

I got my new iPhone last Saturday. I was in Denver for the weekend and I happened to walk by a store downtown. There was no line. They had 47 left when I bought mine. After a week, I must say I love it, though it is funny how quickly your expectations can rise. For instance, some other people in the office got iPhones last weekend, too, and on Monday we were all standing around talking about it. We commented that we felt like an iPhone should do something in the presence of another iPhone, like we were in some secret club and the devices would sense each other nearby and do something special like speak Furbish to one another. They do not.

The set up was annoying. As someone who does not care to build my digital life around Apple, I resented the requirement to download iTunes. I resented the fact that it snarfed my music and then shared it with everyone with an email (which it also snarfed) that also resides on their server. This is before I even set up my phone, btw - so I had to learn how to turn off all the invasion-of-privacy-ware before I even got to the activation part. Once that was done, set up was relatively simple, though I had to call customer support several times anyway because the rate plans available through iTunes did not include the advertised unlimited messaging plan.

Here is my quick micro-review of the iPhone: Compared to the iPhone, every other mobile phone on the market today seems like the last best cassette player in 1982. That’s when Sony shipped the first CD player. At first, compared to the CD, rewinding a cassette seemed kind of quaint, didn’t it? Then it seemed woefully outmoded. Now it is sort of embarrassing that we ever put up with linear magnetic media in the first place. Now your kid just looks at you with his or her head cocked to one side, puzzling as you try to explain the medieval technology of your youth.

This experience raised a few questions in my mind. How “mobile” is a mobile device that is more or less tethered to a PC from birth? And what does that mean for the growing divide between the technology ‘have’s and ‘havenot’s? Nobody wants to have this conversation with me for some reason. We know from experience that a large percentage of data sales come from people who do not own or have regular access to a PC. There are twice as many mobile phones in the world as their are PCs. The best argument I get on this conversation is that “those people” aren’t buying $600 mobile phones. To this, I say that “those people” are buying $140 sneakers, $350 iPods and $175 jeans, so why not $600 mobile phones? Not having a PC doesn’t necessarily mean not having disposable income. It could simply correlate to lack of a broadband connection.

Whatever. Even if you don’t buy the “have not” argument, it still seems wrong to walk into a wireless store and walk out without an activated device. The same is true of mobile applications that require you to go to a website to register. A mobile phone is not another access point to the internet that exists in a PC-connected world. Rather, it is increasingly the primary access point to a communication network that happens to include the internet, a term that is rapidly devolving to mean a subset of the overall connected communication experience, particularly in the mobile space.

Yes, I love my iPhone, but this experience got me thinking about where I place my affinity, which I realized is tied closely to responsibility. The highest value I am receiving in a communication system that includes a device and a network connection is from the network connection. In an emergency, when I MUST make a call, they network is vastly more important than the device from which I place that call.

So I have higher affinity for the network provider. When something happens to my service, I will call AT&T. When something happens to my device, I will still call AT&T, because I know that they know that if they want to keep me as a paying customer, they will bend over backward to make me happy. The last person who received my dollars accepts the responsibility for making me happy, and six months from now when my July Visa bill is long forgotten, I will still have paid another monthly $100 to AT&T.

So how do you become more important than the network service provider? Make my personal data portable and accessible from any network.

This brings up an important point: I view AT&T as my communication service provider. As great as the iPhone is, I do not view Apple as my communication service provider - Apple is my device provider. I will be happy to receive software updates from them for my iPhone. But the thing about iTunes that I mentioned I hated is actually very cool and really useful. Transparent relationship management and externalized PIM and media makes a lot of sense, and I have to admit that I actually want that - FROM MY COMMUNICATION SERVICE PROVIDER. It feels excessive and mismatched to me that the company that sold me a device, and not a subsidized device that might entitle them to something extra from me, wants to own my data. But AT&T storing that data for me so that when I drop my device in the toilet (again) so that they can provide me excellent customer service by just restoring it to my new device? Awesome. AT&T allowing me to turn on certain features like automatic PIM snarfing that make my communication service more useful? Great. Apple automatically defaulting the same service to “ON”? Not cool.

The company that I allow to manage my data owns the relationship with me. This should be the company to which I am paying a monthly service fee. If it is not, then my monthly service provider just got disintermediated because my affinity will shift to the highest value provider.

It’s funny that the iPhone is the current perfect device, and the more I use it, the more I realize that its great contribution is simply user interface. Even without the touchscreen, if the iPhone software were available on any other device, its simplicity and usefulness would still represent a major leap forward. But I also realize that that is just the tip of the iceberg, and the real revolution will come when AT&T (or Apple, if AT&T is myopic enough to let them) starts offering personal data management services that truly enhance my communication experience.

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