October 27, 2006
Mobile Social Networking Exploding
According to Communities Dominate Brands and posted by moconews.net referencing a study and press release by Informa, Mobile Social Networking is worth $3.45 billion now and $13.1 billion by 2011.
From Informa:
"The meteoric rise of such sites as MySpace, Bebo and YouTube shows significant consumer demand for social interaction in the digital space," said Daniel Winterbottom, senior analyst at Informa and author of the report. "Adding mobility to these services represents a huge opportunity for mobile operators, who will benefit from a reduction in churn levels, as well as significant increases in data traffic," he added. To add further weight to the importance of this rapidly emerging industry, O2, the UK mobile phone giant, recently announced that it was examining options for getting Bebo onto its handsets, potentially emulating the US deal between Helio and MySpace.
Tomi T. Ahonen at Communities Dominate Brands says that mobile social networking is the killer app for 3G, and it is happening now. (BTW, the book looks like an interesting read. This is the first I've heard of them, so thanks to moconews.)
I like the title of the post: "told_you_so_soc.html." I guess I needn't throw my "told you so" log onto the fire, particularly since it is a bit early, and more importantly the "social networking" we are seeing is an evolution of SMS. The party really starts when existing (and newly created) social networking communities offer a feature-rich robust experience to mobile users. It is exceedingly hard to do, but next year is the year it starts to happen.
Incidentally, we have a plan for how to do so. Also, we have a new product I will be sharing in the next couple of weeks.
Have a good weekend...
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 11:58 AM
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August 29, 2006
10 People I need to meet at CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment 2006
Media networking is all around us. Did you get this email? It takes you here: https://wirelessit2006.bdmetrics.com/portal/EventLogin.aspx
As part of the registration process for CTIA in LA, there were three questions with a long list of check boxes. They were:
1) Your Primary Job Function
I put “corporate management”
2) Your Company’s Primary Business Focus
I put “Applications or Software Developer”
3) Your Product Interests
I put “Wireless Data, Other”
Based on this information, here are the 10 People I need to meet at CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment 2006:
Company: Azos AI, LLC.
Job Title: Co-founder
State / Province: Virginia
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan
Company: Azos AI, LLC.
Job Title: Partner
State / Province: Virginia
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan
Company: AirG Wireless Inc.
Job Title: VP Corporate Development
State / Province: British Columbia
Country: Canada
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan
Company: Drop In Media, LLC
Job Title: Co-Founder
State / Province: California
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan
Company: Xtract Ltd
Job Title: President & Chairman
State / Province:
Country: Finland
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan
Company: THQ
Job Title:
State / Province: California
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan
Company: Ontela, Inc
Job Title: CEO
State / Province: Washington
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan
Company: Transclick
Job Title: CEO
State / Province: New York
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan
Company: Lower Mars, LLC.
Job Title: CEO
State / Province: California
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan
Company: Google
Job Title: Strategic Partnerships - Mobile
State / Province: California
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan
Really? Are those the 10 people I NEED to meet? I mean, I MAY like to meet these nine companies, (why is Azos listed twice?) but if you asked me to create my own list of 10 People I need to meet at CTIA Wireless I.T. & Entertainment 2006, it would not include these companies.
Not to impugn the fine product that BD Metrics the company powering the “You-Based” tradeshow experience for CTIA, but I am having a hard time increasing relevance with this tool.
I clicked on the “Improve your matches” button and it took me to the “3 questions” screen again. I clicked a few more boxes:
For Company business focus, I put:
• Applications or Software Developer
• ASP - Applications Service Provider
• Content Provider or Aggregator
…and for product interests, I put:
• Mobile Entertainment
• Wireless Content
• Wireless Data, Other
• Wireless Email / Internet
• Wireless Services
Here is the new list of 10 people I need to meet:
Company: digitalVanity Software
Job Title: MD
State / Province:
Country: Germany
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan
Company: AirG Wireless Inc.
Job Title: VP Corporate Development
State / Province: British Columbia
Country: Canada
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan
Company: Waat Media Wireless Entertainment
Job Title: Managing Director
State / Province: California
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan
Company: Feedtext Inc.
Job Title: CEO
State / Province: California
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan
Company: iambic, Inc.
Job Title: COO
State / Province: California
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan
Company: Sony PIctures Digital Entertainment
Job Title: Vice President, Production
State / Province: California
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan
Company: Breakpoint
Job Title: CEO
State / Province:
Country: Poland
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan
Company: Digital Ignite
Job Title:
State / Province: Virginia
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan
Company: Sony Pictures Digital Entertainment
Job Title:
State / Province: California
Country: United States
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan
Company: rocket science
Job Title: chief scientist
State / Province:
Country: United Kingdom
Action: View Details, Add to My Event Plan
I still do not think I need to meet any of these people, though, if you are on either of these lists and feel otherwise, I would be happy to meet. And maybe that is the value of the system – these are companies that I really do need to meet but just don’t know it yet. That would be great, but given the manner in which the recommendations are derived, I have a hard time believing that. This tool does not capture basic necessary information to be useful such as whether I am buying or selling, specificity of intent, descriptive information, or any other qualifying details.
It does have a fairly useful search facility, though, that in concept would enable you to reach out to people without knowing their email address. I searched for “Verizon” and got a list of 63 people, most of which are Verizon Wireless employees. The tool lists title and company. I sent a message to “President and CEO from Verizon Wireless” suggesting we grab a beer and chat, but have not heard back yet. I wonder why that is. Dennis - let's grab a beer and chat. I am free on Wednesday afternoon.
Is the President and CEO of Verizon Wireless likely to use such a tool to plan his schedule at CTIA? This brings me to the real problem here that, if solved, will unlock untold value to the tradeshow industry: How do you effectively filter the introductions so that Dennis Strigl trusts the tool as a value-added must-have and not just a spam generator?
The competition is always among sellers. There are always more people who want to sell than there are who want to buy. This means that Verizon Wireless gets inundated by too many requests to meet by companies that are not qualified in any way. They are drinking from a fire hose and need a way to decrease the flow by effectively filtering out the companies that are just noise to them so that the companies with real value get the attention they deserve. On the other side of this equation are companies looking to be "pre-qualified" so that they can get noticed.
My point is that the concept is awesome: Adding efficiency to the primary purpose of tradeshows. If BD Metrics can evolve their offering to truly deliver on that vision, they should easily be worth a billion dollars. Everybody goes to trade shows to meet other people in the industry, but it is in fact a very inefficient process for meeting people unless you already know them, in which case the only real value of a tradeshow is that it reduces the friction of meeting in person since everyone is already in the same physical location.
BD Metrics should do a deal with LinkedIn. Take the familiar LinkedIn concept, then assign a temporary attribute to yourself driven by registration called “at CTIA” and specify the dates. Then add desired objectives and visibility into companies by type and name.
Or failing that, make the tool more usable.
Ask me:
- The name of and category or type of company I work at
- What I am selling or buying by category and freeform description, which gets indexed
- What 10 companies I would like to meet and for what purpose, which leads to derivative intelligence: “if you want to meet Company A, you will really want to meet Company B, too”
Then derive intelligence from what you already know about every company and inform the matches, but also let me specify companies I know I want to meet. Then learn from it. Watch the patterns, make it smarter over time.
Set up an invitation-based introduction system to allow me to filter meeting requests, like Evite.
Then allow me to publish a calendar showing time availability. Maybe I reserved a room and people can meet me there. Let me specify that.
Given the specific location-based nature of a tradeshow, I would be in favor of a more fluid mobile application, too. It would show availability in real time with a simple messaging component to facilitate communication.
This is a great example of a verticalized LMNO that would be a hugely useful business tool.
Come to think of it, our platform could easily enable this. Come to think of it, one company that should be on my top 10 list is BD Metrics. How come they didn’t show up?
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 12:02 PM
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August 29, 2006
Chumby
I am sitting in a hotel room right now, having just awakened to the pleasant wake up song I put on my Nokia N90 phone. But as you know, one of the basic tenets of the LMNO construct is that mobile phones are not really mobile phones anymore – they are connected media networking devices. Or more to the point, media networking is the new communication construct, and the “device formerly known as the mobile phone” is a device that is enabling this new communication construct. There is a long chain of value being built now to deliver the full value of this evolved communication, and one link is the device. We will see converged devices, like my N90, that is a phone, but also a text messaging device, camcorder, calendar and, given it’s 1.0 weight and size, doorstop or, in a pinch, bludgeoning weapon. We will also see verticalized devices like Danger’s HipTop (SideKick) which is so optimized for instant messaging that few people use it for much more.
Then there is Chumby, which falls well outside of the realm of devices that I had been considering likely to enable the LMNO communication revolution.
Let me step back for a moment and ask you about consumer electronic devices. There are certain categories that have not been refreshed for decades:
- the blender
- the calculator
- the digital clock
Ok, the blender is not exactly a consumer electronic, but I mention it to illustrate that the basic design is nearly perfect: It needn’t do anything more than blend. How do you improve it? The only way is industrial design, capacity and maybe the size of the motor. Other than that, when it does what it is supposed to do, the consumer is satisfied. Adding wifi to it doesn’t improve it.
Basic calculators are practically free now. Yes, you can buy graphing calculator to help with your calculus and trig, but I mean the basic adding machine that AP clerks everywhere still use. It adds, it subtracts, it multiplies and divides. Adding wifi to it doesn’t improve it.
What about the digital clock? I am looking at the one next to the bed right now. I didn’t even bother trying to set its alarm for this morning, and I never bother to use its big innovation, the radio. This one is a Sony, it has red numbers. This is the most tired of all consumer electronic categories. It is useful, but only to confirm information that I already have on my watch and my cell phone, both of which are more fault-tolerant than an electric clock if the power goes out. This particular application, the hotel room clock, annoys me the most, because there is information that I actually need while traveling, and can’t someone replace that clock with a device that provides that information? Rather than 6:18am, shouldn’t it tell me the weather and the traffic conditions on the route to my important meeting? How about showing my news alerts for the company I am going to meet so that when I get there I can intelligently discuss their big announcement today or the fact that they are being probed for irregular stock option grant practices?
My point is that this is a category of consumer electronics that could be massively improved and updated. Let’s add wifi to the digital clock. Then let’s make it display cool and useful information. And let’s make it open and easy to build widgets for, empowering millions of Flash developers to publish applets. Let’s even make it hackable, like a vanilla platform, the many purposes of which we have not yet contemplated.
When Steve Tomlin, an investor in Intercasting Corp, described Chumby to me six months ago and asked me how I would describe it, I immediately thought of the digital clock. “This is like a digital clock on steroids,” I said, because it is as simple to use as a clock, but built for today’s technological environment.
It is also “anti-tech” in that the industrial design is more like a beanie baby than a digital clock or a small computer. I like that even the skin is customizable.
It is sort of a soft-sided teletubby with an LCD screen and a wifi radio inside to which you can push information RSS-style. If RSS is a transport mechanism, Chumby is a termination point. Someone built a widget that syncs to a time server, so there’s your digital clock. It can also show local weather or traffic conditions. Add news alerts if you want. We are building a little Rabble widget just because. Why not stream audio and video, too? And why not put one in the kitchen as your recipe server rather than spilling soup on your laptop again? (Yes, I did.)
Now the fun part: Why not build a network of Chumbys that are all location-aware based on their IP addresses? Hack an upstream temperature transmitter into them that does nothing more than transmit micro-weather in locations not covered by major weather stations and then make the aggregate information available to whomever wants it. The weather report said it is raining in Chicago, but what about specifically in Bucktown, right now?
Anyway, check it out. This is the kind of special-purpose device that just makes perfect sense in the media networked world.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 08:19 AM
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August 14, 2006
Building Blocks 2006 this week
I just wanted to give a quick plug for Digital Hollywood's Building Blocks at the San Jose Marriott this week. From the site:
"Building Blocks 2006 is the Premier Event for Transforming Entertainment, Communication Technologies & the Global Communications Network: TV, Cable, Telco, Consumer Electronics, Mobile, Broadband, Search & Email, VoIP, RSS, Blogs and Websites."
I mention it here in the LMNO category because there is a pretty big focus on user-generated content and mobility.
Some interesting panels:
- User Generated Content: An Internet, Communications and Advertising Transformation
- Web 2.0 - The Next Iteration: How Next Generation Personalized Media is Rewiring the Web
- Social Networking in Mobile: Content, Communications and Monetizing (I am on this panel)
- Strategies in Wireless Devices and Services - from Audio & Video to Downloads: How Innovation Drives Avenues for Subscriber and Revenue Expansion
- Alternative Media & Advertising: Personalized Consumer Broadband, RSS Feeds, Blogging and Podcasting
- The Craigslist Effect: Transforming a Web-based Communications Relationship into a Commercial Personalized Information, Publishing and Advertising Enterprise
That last one looks really good.
Anyway, if you are in Silicon Valley, maybe take a look at the agenda and see if it might be worth a day. There are some interesting companies giving product demos too. Victor Harwood always puts on a targeted and useful show, and this one looks like it is going to be great.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 11:10 AM
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July 31, 2006
"Social Networking" is a Construct (part 2 of 2)
So if social networking is a communication construct in general, then what does it mean for the mobile space? Well, I think it becomes the context for everything that you do with your mobile phone. If “social networking” is the term that we apply to “communication evolved to include multimedia, presence and time shifting,” and your mobile device is a communication tool that now is multimedia and presence capable, then it makes sense that your mobile device is essentially becoming a “social networking” tool. It’s just that the interface hasn’t fully caught up yet.
But this is changing. T-Mobile’s 5 service (currently market testing here in San Diego and in Portland) is a great example of the next step in the evolution of the fully integrated communication device. With a graphical interface depicting your five most-called friends on what used to be your somewhat useless native handset main screen, T-Mobile’s 5 makes “social networking” your primary communication jumping off point by putting the address book front and center (instead of a clock, or…nothing.) 5 as currently presented only lets you define five people that you can call on any number on any network, unlimited. But the more they integrate it with other valuable network services, the more it will simply be the communication construct for T-Mobile subscribers.
Then it will evolve from there. Once the device is fully integrated and the network services are fully integrated, the mobile device will deliver your communication experience contextualized in the vertical flavor of your choosing. Messaging, voice, pictures, video, location, search, shopping, local directory and even gaming will be presented to the user within the construct of “social networking” because all that really means is “evolved communication” and it fits into a definable box which enables carriers and partners to deploy functionally differentiated services while maintaining a consistent user experience overall. Carriers can integrate with service providers of all sorts and add value to them by layering their 5-like interface on top of it.
Does this seem esoteric? It shouldn’t. This needn’t be complicated to the user at all. IM was an offshoot of chat, and it wasn’t surprising at all to me when Moviefone launched a bot on AIM. Now I never go to their website – I can get movie times through AIM, a communication construct that started as a way to chat with friends and evolved into the tool I use to access all information. (Or, as much as I can.)
Active UI is converging with multimedia communication which is converging with the convenience of the mobile user experience. You can call it what you want, but the defined construct of “social networking,” when applied properly in the mobile space, is going to unlock a category of evolved communication applications. Exciting stuff. More to come.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 06:35 PM
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July 27, 2006
“Social Networking” is a Construct (part 1 of 2)
Technological evolution is inevitable because innovation leads to innovation – not discreetly, but often by building upon or incorporating prior innovation. Some of those chunks of innovation can easily be described as building blocks.
We happen to employ a musicologist, and I was talking to him about how “Social Networking” is now officially a well-understood communication concept. The discussion led to a good analogy: It’s like music. Music existed before it was formally described, and when it was, it turned out that only 7 notes are required to express it. This was a surprisingly modern innovation. A composer friend of mine told me that Guido d’Arezzo, an Italian monk, invented what evolved into the current form of musical notation. He died in 1050. Before that, the concept of a “composer” was impossible. Of course, the innovation in music is self-evident, and most people can identify archetypical innovation, which is often subjective. Think about that for a second as it relates to mobile social networking.
I asked our musicologist to name some archetypical innovations in music. Off the top of his head he said:
- Percussion
- Wind instruments
- The Horn
- The electric guitar
- The Sampler
Take the horn. The horn could not exist before it was possible to process metals. Before that, wind instruments were made of wood, like the clarinet. The innovation in metal happened independently and most certainly not because of music. But it happened, and that innovation in metal was a building block that was built upon in the realm of music in the form of the horn, which was in turn a building block in music from which several different types of horns evolved.
The horn is now a construct of musical instruments in that you can compare all horns side by side and recognize obvious similarities. They are all conical coiled chunks of metal with a mouthpiece on one end, a flared bell at the other, and usually some valves in between. (Valves are an innovation: The Bugle has no valves, but by comparison to modern instruments, it is less functional in that it is limited to notes within its harmonic range.) Because of the established construct, to a complete layman, a trumpet really just looks like a small tuba.
MySpace is a tuba. Tagged is a trumpet. Tagworld is a flugelhorn. Facebook is a euphonium. Xanga is a trombone. Friendster is a french horn. Just as all of these instruments look the same, so do the social networking sites.
Compare every social networking site side by side (like I have) and you will find 99% feature parity.
Like brass instruments, they are all almost identical, but very different in their intended purpose and functionality.
Still, they all do the same thing. Here is the required list of things a social networking site must have to fit the construct:
- Profile
- Messaging and/or other contact options
- Gallery (publicly accessible collection of media)
- Friend list
- “Pull-based” subscription
- Self-publishing
- Public comments
- Groups or other common-interest nuclei
- Media or other specified coin of the realm and a way to share it
- Stats/Fame indicator
- Search
- Personalization
These 12 items are the building blocks that define the social networking construct. Other major building blocks that often exist but are not required to fit the construct include 3rd-party content, Presence, Rating, Community policing tools, Instant Messaging, Widget inclusion and “side-loading” of other (usually verticalized) personal content or communication tools. On top of that, there are dozens of other functional differentiators that we have identified, none of which sufficiently differentiates a site or service to break them out of the core construct.
(We have been calling all of these sites "media networking operators" or MNOs, since we started our company, but call it what you want. It's a construct.)
Email is a construct. No matter what client you use, there is an inbox, outbox, sent items, trash, composer, attachments and folders.
IM is a construct. No matter what client you use, there is a buddy list, presence indicator, composer, categories, emoticons and group chat.
So. Social Networking is just an evolved form of communication, but importantly, it is a repeatable undifferentiated construct with a low barrier to entry. This means we can expect increased competition, market segmentation and the effect of a fickle consumer base very willing to switch over to whatever site is new and interesting simply because it is so easy to do so. Even so, branding and community matter, and we see the network effect of these sites in full effect. Tagged skews very young, while Friendster skews much older – the post-college set.
Like Email and IM, consumers do not pick one social networking provider, and most consumers use more than one provider for different purposes.
What is more interesting about the social networking than email and IM is that it facilitates community-based communication rather than individual communication. Once the market figures out the core construct, it can then be replicated in context. For instance, Pepsi can launch a social networking site for a specific purpose. The coin of the realm may be free promotional MP3 (or some DRM-encrusted crap) files or PepsiPoints, redeemable for valuable Pepsi products, but the overall purpose would be to build a community around the brand.
This is in fact happening. Wal-Mart just launched their social networking offering called The Hub.
No not that The Hub.
This is a totally new and exciting The Hub, complete with “down wit it, yo” teenspeak designed to attract that “hip” young demographic. “Dig” this “fresh” copy on the home page: “Surf around for a while and check out what other people have got goin’ down on their pages.” I wager $100 that someone who wears a tie to work wrote that.
In fairness, it’s not really a social networking site because it does not have enough of the required elements to fit the construct. Messaging, the glue of community, is missing, which means this site will fail even if it attracts a lot of initial attention. It is intended as a contest site which is tied to their back-to-school “School Your Way” campaign. Create your page, people vote, you win something. Part of the MRD seems to have been “make it look like myfacebookyoutubespace.” They get mentioned here because someone at Wal-Mart intuited that there is a social networking construct, but they just didn’t know how to define it.
Another site that clearly understands the social networking construct is VictorME.
Victory Records is the #1 independent music label in the U.S. Do you like Hawthorne Heights? Atreyu? Silverstein? Waterdown? VooDoo Glow Skulls? So do I, and they are all on Victory Records.
I don’t know for sure, but I’ll bet VictorME started like this:
“Our bands on MySpace get a lot of hits. This is a great way to build community around our bands. Wait a minute, are people finding Hawthorne Heights on MySpace or are they going to MySpace to find Hawthorne Heights? I think it’s the latter. Why should we help Fox build their brand on the backs of our artists? Let’s build our own.”
Now, MySpace is undeniably a useful marketplace, but it’s A Place for Friends, not A Place for Music. VictorME applies all of the required elements of the social networking construct, plus it has a very specific vertical purpose – to galvanize the fan community of all bands on Victory Records. It will never compete with MySpace, but it is not trying to. It will, however, compete with the part of MySpace that has anything to do with bands on Victory Records. If one day Victory Records convinced their bands to take down their pages on MySpace, all of that traffic would go right to VictorME. Similarly, if VictorME offered exclusive content that was sufficiently differentiated, it would convince the hardcore fan that it is the best source of information and community about bands on Victory Records.
Every other record label can do the exact same thing, and it is rumored that many of them currently are working on it. Any brand wanting to build a community can apply the construct and have a chance of success – not of building a broad-based social networking contender – but of building a verticalized community around a particular nucleus of value.
What does this mean for the mobile social networking space? There are a bunch of implications, but I am out of time today and will have to expound next week. I’ll make the title of this post “1 of 2” which will hopefully create some urgency in my mind to finish my thoughts.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 11:44 AM
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April 04, 2006
Flattering Imitation from uLocate
I just got a funny email from a reader:
uLocate bankrupt of ideas
"WHERE enables a new kind of self-expression that informs, entertains and connects people through the media they create," said Walt Doyle, President and CEO of uLocate Communications.
http://ulocate.com/3-21-06.php
When did he say that? When he was reading the Rabble web site?
He is speaking today at a CTIA pre-show why don't you catch up with him
I have never heard of this company, but it looks like they have been in business for a little while doing some kind of location-based mapping something or other, and they are apparently now trying another business model.
Compare Walt Doyle's description of his new service (which is a website you send pictures to and looks sort of like what our friends at Buzznet have already built) to the Intercasting Corp website description of Rabble:
Walt Doyle said on 3/21/06:
"WHERE enables a new kind of self-expression that informs, entertains and connects people through the media they create."
The Intercasting website said on 5/7/04:
"Rabble enables a new kind of self-expression that informs, entertains and connects people through the media they create."
I am guessing Walt's PR guy is going to have to explain why his CEO's quote is an exact ripoff of our copyrighted product description. Jon, look for our cease and desist in the mail. ;-)
Before you label uLocate an also-ran, consider this: I think they are simply realizing that the way we describe Rabble is in fact the simplest way to describe the opportunity that they are just now recognizing.
I think this is positive for the LMNO space because I believe all ships rise with the tide. uLocate may turn out to be an also-ran, or they may end up winning the race. It is impossible to tell at this point, but I welcome the addition of a company out in the industry evangelizing the opportunity, and I have to say I wish them luck.
When we started Intercasting Corp, we did so from scratch focused on the mobile social networking space. We didn't have a piece of technology that we were trying to leverage, we didn't evolve from some other kind of business and we didn't have the ambition of being all things to all people in the mobile space. Our vision was as it remains today: Laser-focused on the opportunity that lies at the intersection of mobility, media and communication.
But that opportunity is not captured in phrases like "social networking" or "social media" or "MoSoSo" because they don't adequately define the essence of the user experience, namely that the glue that binds people together is the media they create, and that in the mobile environment that media has a location component to it that makes it potentially more useful.
So we came up with an acronym to express that opportunity: LMNO. We think the mobile media opportunity belongs to Location-aware Media Networking Operators, or LMNOs. An LMNO in our view "enables a new kind of self-expression that informs, entertains and connects people through the media they create."
In 2004, before the well-deserved MySpace hype, and certainly before they had any ambitions in the mobile space, trying to describe what we do and how big the opportunity is was a difficult task, but we knew they would eventually come. I don't think throwing another acronym into the mix helped much either, but we stayed the course because of our conviction that this was the right area in which to build a solid platform that could be leveraged by the myriad companies that would eventually find themselves profiting at the intersection of mobility, media and communication. Now that we are having success, I think it is easier to see the value of the opportunity, and I am glad that we started as early as we did to build a solid platform to enable partners in this area.
So come on now Walt - in for a penny in for a pound. If you are going to rip off our copyrighted material, all I ask is that you start also calling your company an LMNO if that's what you want to be. I didn't coin the term for it to be proprietary to our company in any way. I did it because the space needed definition. The LMNO opportunity is so huge there is no way one company can own it all. Just today, Intercasting Corp was mentioned in a Wall Street Journal article about mobile social networking along with Facebook and MySpace. (And also Air-G, a company we have a ton of respect for that I would call an LMNO.) My point is that a host of players, some large, some small, some brands, some platforms, some products, some services - are all swirling around the same massive opportunity and I think some real value is about to be unlocked in a serious way for consumers, carriers, brands and a bunch of companies that make it to the table in time to enable the opportunity.
UPDATE: On 4/4/06, Jon, their PR guy, called me to apologize. That was pretty upstanding of him. He set up a call next week with Walt, their CEO, so I will see what they are about.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 10:16 AM
January 27, 2006
Phone Call 2.0 (2.0)
What’s your SRQ?
It is a sign of the times that any hack like me with a blog eventually ends up quoting themselves. Have you noticed this? As more people have a way to express themselves on any given topic, more people also quote themselves these days. As if to increase one’s appearance of possessing insight or intellectual capital, we say things like, “I blogged about that over a year ago” or “Have you read my blog about that?” Like as if there is any likelihood that someone actually reads your blog. I used to laugh at people who did it, but I have to admit that I actually did it myself yesterday, and I will continue to be guilt of doing it on this blog.
Let me say now that although you feel smart when you reference yourself, you actually seem lame to whomever you are quoting yourself, particularly when you are quoting your blog. Think about what you are doing when you refer to a blog post you made last month: You are asserting that you could find no more worthy source to quote than yourself, which makes you appear either dubiously confident or too eager to establish your position as a valuable source.
In this sense, it is sort of like an inverse substitute for IQ to whomever is in the company of the self-absorbed self referencer. The more true it is that you are smart, the less you have to remind people that you are, so why the self referencing?
But blogging isn’t about knowledge or expertise. The blogosphere is extremely self-referential because it is driven by one of the primary motivators baked into human nature: Fame. So powerful is this motivator that for most people it is sufficient to be famous just to themselves. Having a collection of posts about random shit and then looking at it from time to time is a source of great joy to most bloggers. There is a pride of ownership that incents people to create more content. From now on, I will refer to the blogger tendency to self reference as the Self Reference Quotient, or SRQ. “Wow. Shawn sure has a high SRQ. I wonder if it is directly inverse to his IQ?”
Anyway, this post is about something else...
I had breakfast this morning with my friend Fabrice and we were talking about this and I realized that there is a huge benefit to this self-referential construct beyond the simple fame aspect, and it is going to be one of the cornerstones of the mobile media future.
Sorry to do it, but before I explain, first allow me to reference myself: (from Phone Call 2.0) “My children will not understand the concept of Phone Call 1.0 – they will live in a world where the media they create will represent them and act as an active proxy. Their friends will not understand the concept of a “phone number,” the artifact of an analog world long gone, and instead will have their own channel – a two-way location-aware media presence through which they will communicate with the world around them.”
I thought about this concept again after the small ballyhoo last week about the companies that promise they can get not only any phone number for any person, but the phone records for any person. This seems like it should be private information, doesn’t it?
Maybe. If the availability of the information were limited such that access required a subpoena, like to assist in the investigation of a crime, would it change your attitude about it?
In any case, people tend to think that their cell phone number is a very important piece of information that must be protected at all costs. Heaven forbid someone should get a hold of it and it got sold to every telemarketer on the planet. So what? I’ve got caller ID and I can just not answer the phone if I don’t recognize the number.
So you might say that your voicemail box would fill up then. So what? I stopped using my mobile voicemail last year after the “upgrade” that actually made it more difficult to use and less functional overall. (It used to be 1 = play/rewind, 2 = save and 3 = delete. Now it is a complex menu of things that makes the top few things harder to do. So I stopped using it. My outgoing message says, “Don’t bother leaving a message because I don’t check my voicemail. Send me an SMS instead and I’ll get back to you.” This system now works much better for me, because at a glance I can see all the people who have contacted me rather than wading through the time-consuming process of listening to voicemails.)
So you might say protecting your phone number is important because getting spam SMS would be the worst thing that could happen because for most phones there is no filtering and no way to delete without first opening the SMS. A 100% open rate is a spam marketer’s dream. On this point, I would agree. Furthermore, it is already happening in other parts of the world, and I predict that it will soon happen in the U.S., even if aggressive legislation makes it an undesirable practice.
When this happens, you will simply route around the problem, and the fame-driven blogosphere is the first step toward doing away with phone numbers altogether.
The importance of yourspace
MySpace is undeniably fun, but more importantly, it is undeniably useful. It provides me with a place where I can put all my stuff. That stuff defines me, and enables me to network with other people. If you are a stranger and come across my space, you get a sense of who I am based on my interests, media collection, blog, friends, etc. If you are a friend of mine, you might use my space to get my opinion on something or to see what kind of music I am listening to lately because you like my taste. Then you might contact me because my space is also a messaging hub where you can reach me via email or IM. I think a “click-to-call” feature on MySpace would be cool and insanely useful. Maybe an integration deal with Skype would accomplish that. You already see people posting their skype name on their spaces.
Media + Communication = Phone Call 2.0. If a picture is worth a thousand words, rather than call you to describe the beautiful sunset, I would prefer to just send you a picture, and now I can. Add a bunch of other stuff like my location, places that I have been and anonymous relay to whatever live communication channel I have open at the moment, whether it is my cell phone or mobile IM or whatever, and you achieve user-controllable presence where the hub of value is not the phone number. This is basically how Rabble works, and it works a little better than a web-based solution from a communication standpoint because it is always with you.
In fact, the phone number is the least important part of a personal media communication ecosystem that simply represents a termination point, or the last mile, of your ad-hoc communication network. If you click on “ShawnConahan” on Skype and it forwards to my phone number, which is masked to you, then you never have to know my phone number. In fact, why not just dynamically assign phone numbers for the purpose of completing a call that originates from some other interface or protocol?
Why the fame motivator matters
Because you are incented to put all of your stuff in one public space because it makes you famous to yourself, (and maybe to someone else) the unintended consequence of doing so is that you develop a fairly robust profile of yourself which makes you easier to find and generally more useful to other people. Then when you attach your communications hub to your space, you basically have an outward-facing filter that stages your relationships before they ever reach you. You want to contact me? First you need to be my friend. To be my friend you have to send me a friend request. Then I check out your space. If I think you are friend-worthy, I’ll allow you into the inner circle where people are able to communicate with me. Spam me once and you are banished forever. It is the media networking equivalent to caller ID, call waiting and call barring all rolled into one robust but amazingly simple concept.
Aside from direct communication with you, it may be sufficient to some people simply to see your collection of media or even just an opinion. To find restaurants in NY, I sometimes use menupages.com, and I always read dozens of opinions of total strangers. Those opinions are useful. More useful are the opinions of people you know or people you know are like you. I personally experienced this on my trip to New York this week. Rather than call Derrick directly for the name of that steak house that’s near the hotel, I went to his Rabble channel and there it was: He had put Ben Benson’s on the map and gave a little mini review of it.
Your desire to be famous is important in other ways. The more fans you collect, the greater your fame, and the more complete you want your space to be so that you can collect more fans. This incents you to actively solicit connections and the cycle is neverending. The benefit is that connections create value. The requirement is that you are always in control to a certain degree so that you can make sure your space is representative of the kind of fame you want. Many people complain about Blogger because it does not let you moderate trackbacks. You can turn them on or off, but that is all. When your personal space is polluted by a trackback to “Cheap V1AGRA! Online Pha r[macy L0raz!pam! Lowest pr!ces!” you are immediately disincented to create more compelling content and a more robust profile because you are attracting the wrong kind of fame.
In summary, the more media you create and the more you can consolidate your media and your communication in one place, the more connections you are likely to make and the more useful your various communication tools will be to you. Those tools will also be more flexible in general because they are really just termination points hanging off of your main personal media net that catches inbound communication requests and routes them accordingly (and when there is a newer, better tool, just plug it in and use it and discard the old one) and also acts as an outbound proxy for your live presence when it is not required.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 08:29 PM
December 21, 2005
Surviving Openness
Get any size group of mobile media or application providers together and within minutes the conversation usually turns into a bitch session about carriers. Among the many complaints about carriers, this one comes up 100% of the time:
“Walled gardens are bullshit. Carriers should provide open access to their deck/billing/users.”
It appears to me that the number one complaint people who work at non-carriers have about the carriers with which they are trying to work is that they have to work with them.
But consider for a moment, dear mobile content provider, why our industry works the way it does. And consider the implications of your desire to change it, which could be very very bad for you.
Never mind that the wireless carriers have spent billions of dollars to deploy their networks so that they can serve their subscribers. Serving their subscribers means focusing on a certain QOS level for primary services. Voice is a primary service, and still represents the lion’s share of revenue. Spectrum is a scarce resource. By carefully metering the content that gets provisioned on their networks, wireless carriers are doing consumers a great service. We have seen the result of unchecked access on the internet. The result is spam. It would be bad enough to get unsolicited emails to my handset about porn, mortgage refinancing and Russian pharmaceutical providers. But network utilization is a bigger concern for me. There may be a time when I need to dial 911 from my mobile phone. When I do, I want that call to go through. I don’t want a busy signal because the network is overtaxed by kids downloading music to their fabled iPod phones or streaming mobisodes of the hit TV show 24.
Fortunately, I won’t really have to worry about that. DVB-H (or MediaFlo for us true believers) is a separate transport mechanism. But still, let’s consider the true implications of open access to wireless subscribers.
First, a working definition of Open: The ability to provision content of any size directly to subscribers from any source with no restrictions on the part of the provider or consumer as to how the content is accessed. The first thing we would see is Apple enabling people to download songs to their handsets. But handsets would be open, right? Openness means Verizon Wireless won’t cripple the bluetooth functionality in their handsets to limit it to working with the bluetooth headset. This means subscribers could transfer MP3 files from their PCs to their handsets, and it is their fair use right to do so without being encumbered by any DRM bullshit. So the second thing we would see is subscribers transferring songs to other subscribers via bluetooth. That’s when the RIAA and MPAA will get their panties in a bunch again. But it gets worse.
Here is my brief blueprint for a file sharing system on mobile devices in four easy steps:
1) Subscribe to cable television.
2) Download the (yet to be developed) mobile version of LocationFree or Slingbox to your mobile device.
3) Capture a stream of your favorite movie or music on your mobile device.
4) Bluetooth it to your friend or attach it to an email and send it.
The concept of watching your own TV signal remotely is protected by fair use. The problem with my simple blueprint is that there is currently no record button. But if walled gardens go away and anyone can create any application for mobile devices and users can readily download them, then how long will it take someone to build a Slingbox competitor in J2ME? Then how long will it take another programmer to add a record button?
BTW, I am all about the functionality I propose because there are very compelling non-infringing uses of such a system. Maybe I want to timeshift my favorite TV show and watch it later on my mobile device on the plane. This would require a record button. Then the issue would be locking down the device, as Sony did to my PSP. Right now I am streaming television to my PSP. Even if I could record it to watch later, the PSP is fairly well locked down so I would not be able to send it to another person’s device. But that’s what I call a walled garden. What we want is openness, right?
If you are in the business of selling content that has a discreet beginning and a discreet end, openness will punk your business. Most of the non-messaging mobile media revenue today is from discreet media: Games, ringtones, wallpaper and songs all result in a download. This means that open networks and open devices will provide a way around the most important aspect of the walled garden system, which is that content is forced through a carrier-controlled billing mechanism. The business models of all current mobile content providers rely on an environment that artificially suppresses the economically competitive force of freely available goods. This makes perfect sense. When you go to the music store, you expect to pay for music. This makes the music store a good place for music companies to sell their music. It is essentially a closed system – the only way to get the music is to buy it, and there would be no incentive for the music store to put aside some square footage for the music company that wants to give their product away. Now, when you want to steal music, you do it online. This makes the internet a bad place to sell your music. As an open system, the competitive force of “free” overwhelms the legitimate “for sale” business model because as currently deployed, the “free” music option is actually easier for consumers than trying to pay for it online.
So handsets are changing from black boxes with simple mechanisms like forward lock, so people cannot send ringtones to their friends, into white boxes with operating systems that enable users far greater flexibility in how they manage media with their devices. Networks are also opening. Dual-mode handsets are shipping. When your handset sniffs an open WiFi or WiMAX network nearby and automatically switches over to that network, what competitive pressure will this put on wireless carriers? You can buy a piece of content through the Cingular storefront, or you can simply download it from the internet for free or get it from your friend's device. Which would you choose?
Make no mistake: This is going to happen. The existing business models of many mobile media companies that rely on a closed network environment are seriously threatened. It is already happening in other ways, too. I was at the fall CTIA show last year in SF and some crazy drunk girl whom I had never met before accosted me in the lobby of the W hotel saying I was traitorous and was going to ruin the ringtone business. Through her slurring nonsense I finally figured out that she was referring to my angel investment in Xingtone, a company that enables users to record a clip of a song and make it their ringtone. She was misinformed, and apparently just generally stupid on top of it, but she made a good point: When consumers have another way to get content, they will use it if it is easier/cheaper/better. (I would argue that Xingtone is cheaper and better, but not necessarily easier at this point, though it is the only tool I use for ringtones now.)
Future-proof Mobile Media
Are you convinced yet that the last mobile media business you want to start or invest in at this point is one that pushes media to consumers? Let me try to illustrate further. I even made a picture.
Start with Mobile TV. Is network-scheduled TV on my handset compelling? Let’s say for the sake of argument that it is. Ok, so would you rather pay your wireless carrier an additional subscription fee for it or get it for free via the soon-to-be-developed mobile Slingbox competitor? Slingmedia could kill the entire Mobile TV opportunity with a mobile client if they can get it to work correctly on the WAN the way it does over WiFi. Mobile TV, in its current incarnation, is simply capitalizing on a device trend that makes mobile phones another distribution channel for repackaged content. Without a walled garden, this business cannot be sustainably monetized. The same is true of all content businesses that push content to consumers.
To avoid this pitfall, shift gears and look at what people are spending money on that isn’t pushed content and try to make it better. SMS. People happily spend money to send messages to each other. Great, so how can you make it better and so much more valuable that people will pay you more than a nickel? Pictures. I am willing to pay up to a dollar to send a picture. Well, if I will pay that much to send a picture to another person, then being able to post it to my blog for the same amount of money makes it even more valuable to me, because the whole world can see it, right? Yes, sort of. I think the opportunity for moblogging and messaging-based mobile communities is far greater than network-scheduled pushed mobile TV. But context becomes a problem. The SMS communities I have used have too much noise and not enough signal. Most of the moblogging solutions I have seen enable users to post content to a web-based environment, which basically divides the user base in half – web users who consume data and mobile users who produce it, since the mobile user cannot consume it on their handsets. This opportunity is great because it capitalizes on both a device trend (mobile phones turning into Personal Media Devices or PMDs) and the convenience factor of having it with you all the time, so when time and place matters, consumers are properly enabled. The trouble with this in the long run is that the real value is convenience. Posting content from my phone to a website is not particularly mobile relevant because there isn’t an aspect of it that returns value to me at the margin. There is no connection made through my mobile device.
The LMNO is different. It’s focus is on interactivity between users and adds the Z-axis that is location and proximity. Match.com is a good example of an LMNO that does very well in the most open network environment, the internet. Match.com connects people via proximity in a geographically relevant environment through the media that users create. This makes them an LMNO. All internet dating sites are marketplaces where user-generated content (in the form of pictures, profiles and messages) is transacted to connect people. Match.com’s hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue are due to the fact that the value is in the network of people, not the content itself per se. It is the content’s role in the connection process that requires its presence, and it is very important in this regard, but it is the marketplace itself that makes people want to pay to join it. It is that interactivity that separates the LMNO, even though it is essentially media that passes through the system. It's just that the media is created by users.
Match.com Mobile is doing very well, but that is just one application. There are hundreds of LMNO verticals that make sense in the mobile space, and they all have one thing in common: They are valuable in either a closed or open network environment because they do not rely on artificial barriers to support their business models.
You may or may not be convinced. (I may or may not be correct.) I just wanted to illustrate the incredibly valuable position the wireless carriers have in the mobile media space which is not only to their great benefit, but to the current benefit of the ecosystem that has been built around it. I also see that as an industry we are marching inexorably toward an open environment and wanted to argue that when that happens, the traditional media distribution value chain will be compromised. It is time to evolve. If you are one of the many smart entrepreneurs or investors looking at the mobile space, just consider what I have said before you decide jump in. We don’t need another ringtone provider. The gaming thing is covered. If you think I may be making some sense, please build an LMNO. In any case, look past today and think a little differently to build the mobile media companies that are going to be truly valuable tomorrow.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 05:05 PM
October 09, 2005
The Mobile Media Era (With exciting InfoGraphic below!)
I have a Nokia N90 I am using to test an upcoming version of our platform. This is the device I have been waiting for to mark the beginning of the revolution in media devices. I put a similar bookmark in the history of media after the London subway bombings when the first and most compelling content came from survivor Adam Stacey, who filmed, from his mobile phone, himself and several others escaping from the subway following the explosion. That was the moment that officially began the shift in media in general to the future paradigm of media: The LMNO. But I have been waiting for the device to increase in quality to the point where “broadcast quality” and “amateur footage” are indistinguishable. The N90, while not amazing, achieves that by being good enough.
My generation’s children will ask their parents some funny questions:
“Daddy, why did you use linear optical storage media?”
“Well, honey, we didn’t yet know how to insert magnetized particles inside a globule of ferritin protein and assemble them in arrays.”
“Daddy, why did you rely on the finite fossilized remains of dinosaurs to power inefficiently distributed power plants to produce electricity at the cost of the planet’s environment and my potential future?”
“Heh heh, well sweetheart, we didn’t yet know how to make solar cells inexpensively enough and efficiently enough to create clean energy to distribute power locally, or make it portable.”
“Daddy, why did you rely on a non-free-market oligopsony of media distributors to provide network-scheduled formulaic, homogenous content in release windows over which you had no control with no personalization or participation and with no active market-determined value of said content?”
“Well pumpkin, we just didn’t know how to distribute personal media via a series of overlapping personal networks, empower people as producers, enable them on a location-aware grid and redefine media from something that is produced and pushed to consumers in a series of monetization windows to something that is discovered, added to, borrowed from, shared, redistributed and discovered again all to the benefit of millions of people with mobile-connected Personal Media Devices in their pockets.”
“And your mobile phones were just for voice communication?”
“Pretty much.”
“Yours was a dark era.”
“Yes it was, darling. Yes it was.”
Kids say the darndest things.
My Nokia N90 takes high-quality pictures and video. When connected wirelessly wherever I am to a platform that acts as a media marketplace, I become a distributed on-location media production node. Add in my PIM and I also become a media distribution node. Consider that there are other producers and distributors in the marketplace, and I become a media consumer, too. All from the same device. In two years, every digital camera will have a DO or UMTS chip in it - they are all going to have to connect to a platform that provides a marketplace for storing, sharing and more widely distributing content.
The links on the value chain required to build a fully distributed edge-of-network media paradigm that have been missing are now materializing. The device was a big step, connectedness is being solved before our eyes, and distribution paradigms are being built now by several companies that see the whole chain clearly. What this means is that we are entering an entirely new media era.
I made a table for you to explain what I mean. I call it “Shawn Conahan’s Media Eras Infographic.” Our company is about sharing media so feel free to use it in your powerpoint, change it if you think its incomplete, etc., but really take a critical look at it.
I broke the media eras down into TV, CABLE, INTERNET and MOBILE. Before TV there was Radio and Print. I also left out Town Criers, Papyrus and Smoke Signals, but I hope the Shawn Conahan's Media Eras Infographic is illustrative enough. My basic approach was to look at various dimensions of media and the business of media production, delivery and participation and illustrate how they differ from era to era. I pointed out the key differences between eras by highlighting them. As paradigms shift, they are the pivot points that are most responsible for unlocking the value of each era.
TV
The golden age of radio from 1935 to 1950 gave way to a new medium, TV. The big innovation with TV when it killed the radio star was that you could actually Watch it. At the time that was a big deal. Compared to radio, the value proposition to consumers was higher because TV offered content of comparatively higher production value.
CABLE
The post-war golden age of television eventually gave way to the Golden Age of Cable, sparked on October 1st, 1975 when HBO aired the Thrilla In Manilla. With Cable, the production value wasn’t necessarily higher than television, but the cost structure was such that it ushered in the era of Vertical Programming, and the most successful brands of that era (CNN, MTV, ESPN, TCM, even the Weather Channel) were built upon the simple notion of “all [whatever] all the time.” That plus an increased number of channels unlocked a huge amount of value. Still, the business model didn’t change from “Pushing” media, firehose-style this time, to consumers.
INTERNET
The internet changed that. The only business model the internet understands is “Broker.” All of a sudden, disintermediation became the basis of the new economy and the value to the consumer was a bookstore that carried every book and was open 24 hours a day. The simple notion of the hyperlink changed consumer participation from “Watch” to “Surf,” and the Pushed media model simply didn’t work. The cost structure of distributed media obviated the need to produce and distribute content from the center of the network because there was no economy of scale required. Notably, it blurred the lines separating “media” from “interactivity,” and competition for peoples’ attention came not just from other pushed media sources. For this reason, I would argue that the Golden Age of the Internet started when Napster (the first, cool Napster) launched and is now coming to an end in a flurry of lawsuits and regulation. Napster showed what the internet can be - a massive P2P media collective. Business models and other issues aside, Napster showed us there is huge demand for combining communication and media.
MOBILE
And now we are entering the Mobile Media Era. The business model is changing again, this time with an emphasis on people and communication, not just commerce and entertainment. “Broker” takes a backseat to the more personal “Connect” as the main value driver for consumers. Notably, it is the first time in the history of media that people have been walking around with both media consumption and production devices, making them active participants in the creation and distribution of media. No longer Watching or Surfing, people are co-creating, mashing, blogging and networking together a media fabric that threatens the status quo in a significant way. Media is being more widely distributed farther away from the center of the network, this time right to the furthest edge – the pocket of ever man, woman and child with a mobile-connected Personal Media Device. I find it most interesting that low production value MMS is often more compelling than slick, high-production quality television because it is personalized and serves a purpose very different from TV. I would like to state clearly that, while it is an important link on the value chain, the definition of “Mobile Media” is not “TV on your mobile phone.”
The TV is being replaced by the Personal Media Device. The set top box is being replaced by the SIM chip. The MSO is being replaced by the wireless carrier. I wonder if John Malone sees the similarities.
The last row in the table is “Messaging Hub.” I find it interesting that during the TV era, the state-of-the-art messaging control center for most people was an answering machine connected to one phone line. It was a totally separate island that did little more than act as net to catch the result of a failed attempt to communicate. During the Cable era, we mostly switched to voicemail, which provided some flexibility, but personal communication was still a totally separate environment from media consumption. During the Internet era, Email took over as the primary messaging hub for most people, and it was more closely integrated with the media people consume. Interestingly, it still retained the basic functionality of a voice answering system, (to leave a message to be returned later) but this time the timeshifting was intentional. This led to presence: The overt availability to communicate is displayed in your AIM buddy list.
Now we are seeing convergence create a two-way web that integrates our media such that you have a channel on which you create, consume and share your media. “Find me on Xanga” or “Did you see my post about that?” are illustrations of how our very own “channels” are increasingly the hub of our media and social lives. The Personal Media Device elegantly converges those functions and puts them in your pocket. Put very simply, this is "Channel You." The mobile applications that enable people to do that more are the winners in this new media era.
At its simplest level, Channel You acts as your value-added messaging hub. "Get my favorite song off my channel," or "check out my TravelPod from my trip" are present-day examples. As more content is added to Channel You, it will become more valuable. Think of how many times your friends call you to ask for a restaurant recommendation. That will be on your channel. So will your availability to communicate and the automatic routing to your preferred mode of communication.
Now consider that there are millions of other people with their own create/consume channels, too. Plug them into a location-aware grid and enable them to transact their content in real time. Whether you are there when a tidal wave crashes through your resort or you simply snap a pic at the World Series or your kid's little league game, when plugged into a marketplace of other creator/consumers, you become an active part of the media conversation. Upstream Media is the key.
So which kind of media company is going to win the future? Will it be an incumbent media company that sticks to the media conventions a past media era, pushing repackaged broadcast content to passive consumers on their mobile phones? Or will it be one that fully engages the distributed mass of consumers as participants, enabling them to transact their own content and adding value to the individual and the whole by providing produced content as well?
More simply put, do you believe democratization of media at the edge of the network wins in the long run? do you believe Flickr is a better, disruptive and potentially larger user-generated version of Corbis? Do you believe Craigslist is a better approach to classifieds that will end up supplanting the very notion of the local newspaper? Do you believe a million people around the world with mobile-connected camcorders and a place to transact their content is a threat to Reuters?
Imagine a reporter at the New York Times looking at a map of the world on her computer with little dots representing media being generated by ordinary people like you and me. Then all of a sudden a bunch of red dots show up, all clustered around Banda Aceh. Click and zoom to a list of pictures uploaded instantly by people on the scene of a massive tidal wave. One second later, that content is inserted into the editorial process and they are first to the story. Or that same image might be on your mobile device and you get to cut out the middle man entirely, or better yet - write your own story about it and syndicate it.
All this to me means we are entering a new media era. It also means massive upside in the mobile media space for those companies that are focused on accelerating this new era. Now go capitalize on this paradigm shift.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 11:10 AM
| Comments (5)
August 31, 2005
YAMNO and AOLMNO
I mentioned in my last post that Google is well positioned to be a big LMNO. I subscribe to Business 2.0, but the latest copy has been stuck at the bottom of my pile. Last night I read Om Malik’s Googlenet piece. Read it if you haven’t yet. It’s a great summarized version of what I was trying to say in my last post. (Om is a much more efficient writer than I. ;-) It was so interesting that I wish his editor had given him another page to go into more detail.
Basically, it solidified my conviction that Google can be the interface that enables users to find anything from any source through a network of other users via every communication protocol available. Owning the network makes perfect sense. It also made me think that Google really doesn’t have to buy Skype. It can build a viable competitor itself because they have so many assets that could be rolled into it that Skype lacks. So, disregard the bit about Google buying Skype in my last post. TellMe is the only company they really need to buy in that regard. Love that company.
I mentioned in my last post that as well positioned as Google may be, Yahoo and AOL are better positioned in a lot of ways. I am thinking about how valuable Yahoo’s assets are within the LMNO construct. If communication is evolving to include media that people create, borrow, augment and attach themselves to in order to represent themselves and all that content needs a transactional platform to enable that communication, then Yahoo and AOL have a lead over Google at the moment. The difference is Yahoo Messenger and AIM. AOL, Yahoo and Microsoft have the same opportunity available to them, but I like Yahoo and AOL because although MSN Messenger has more users than Yahoo Messenger, Microsoft is really still more of a software company. Yahoo and AOL are more media companies, so I give them an edge. I personally like Yahoo coming from 3rd place in the IM wars, because they have more to gain.
YAMNO (Yet Another Media Networking Operator)
Here is a simple way to look at Yahoo’s and AOL’s opportunity: Intelligent IM. There are two things needed to build Intelligent IM – a smart host and intelligent routing.
First, all IM clients should have a smart host built in. If you use AIM, create a buddy named SmarterChild and send it a message. It’s a bot that can tell you stuff like weather, movie listings and what time it is in other cities. It’s pretty useful, but if you were to plug in all of the media assets that AOL and Yahoo have, it would be unbelievably cool. Conversagent is a cool company that is sort of the IM equivalent of TellMe, but better in a lot of ways because the interface can offer more information faster.
Second, break the buddy links. Yes, you can search for people on IM, but it is kludgy and doesn’t utilize the primary interface which is the chat window itself. Also, it should be passive. Look at Wondir. Great idea, bad UI. "User-generated questions and answers" just doesn’t make sense as a website. But what if you could distribute those questions automatically to the people who are best qualified and who have opted in to answer them? You would type a question into your IM client, “What’s the best Thai restaurant in San Diego?” and it would be routed to a smart agent that would compare the content of the question and your profile to the profiles and preferences of all other users and send the message to several active users. They would see a message from the smart agent saying “a user wants to know ‘What’s the best Thai restaurant in San Diego?’” One or more (or none) of those people would quickly respond with, “Royal Thai downtown” or “Taste of Thai in Del Mar.” Because the smart agent is tied into the extensive Yahoo media network, it not only understands and indexes the content so that “Royal Thai” is a clickable link, but it also learns over time. You could also choose to make a connection to people: “Do you want UsernameBlah to be added to your buddy list?”
Now plug in all the vertical services that Yahoo has and it would be ULTRA cool. If the agent can answer the question directly, it does. Otherwise, it connects you to the right source. Use it to look for a date, a house, local news or some new music that suits your taste based on your profile and best of all get it from someone who has taste similar to yours.
The result is a true media networking tool. I would like to see the IM giants rev their products in this way instead of baking in VoIP clients, though even that makes sense because it is one more mode of communication. “Click here to dial this restaurant’s number to make a reservation” becomes a cool new feature.
BTW, this is exactly what our platform does and is a cornerstone of the LMNO concept. It is baked into Rabble and affects search results transparently to users, though the next version is when we turn on most of the other really cool functionality. We did this to increase relevance in a small form factor with short session lengths typical of the mobile space, but also because there is a bunch of information being created at the edge of the network that isn’t being captured and optimized. Nobody is really looking at communication this way, but it is clearly the future. We just happen to do it in a mobile environment because we're good at it and we think media networking is more valuable when your device is your remote control to the world around you. That is true of my smartphone, but not my laptop. We are integrating with a lot of companies along these lines. I’ll talk more about that in a future general update post after most of those deals are integrated.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 04:35 PM
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July 19, 2005
News Corp.: MNO
News Corp. is getting a bargain for MySpace
With the acquisition of MySpace, News Corp. will become a Media Networking Operator. (MNO) As I mentioned before, there are plenty of technology and media incumbents realizing that their futures rely on how well they execute their MNO strategies.
I previously made some predictions about what types of companies will be recognizing the value of Media Networking to their existing businesses, and frankly News Corp. never would have made that list because I thought they would have been too slow to recognize the opportunity. I instead focused more on technology-based companies since I think they have the most to gain from the Media Networking paradigm as they are in a better position to disrupt the incumbent media companies’ core offerings. (Incumbent media companies generally look slow and lumbering to me. Fox clearly isn't, and I am very pleased to see that I was wrong.)
It is when these companies add the “L” to their MNO when things get really interesting to me. If you believe the mobile connected device in your pocket is the only media device that you will need or have in the future, then you understand that the next stop for companies that turn themselves into MNOs is to become LMNOs. The L stands for “Location-awareness” which really means mobility, which to me means the Z-axis that adds dimension to media and makes it more personal. I mean the kind of personal that enables media to reach right into your pocket. My personal favorite pick for the first large-scale LMNO remains IAC. Here are my thoughts on that from a previous post.
What News Corp. Should Do With Their New Toy
It would be myopic of News Corp. to assume that MySpace gives them a new distribution channel for their existing library of Fox content. But if they use the Media Networking paradigm that MySpace gives them, they could lead the industry in creating an entirely new category of media almost overnight. The media titans of the future will redefine the business models around media from “something that is created once then mass produced then distributed” to “something that is found, borrowed, added to, redistributed and found again.” That’s a hard concept to implement when you have the kind of organizational inertia that big media companies have. Then again, I would have assumed that News Corp.’s inertia would have blinded them to the MNO opportunity in MySpace. I hope not. I would love to see them fully realize their value as an MNO. They got half way there by buying MySpace, but if they just treat it as a web site that represents inventory on which they can sell ads, they will have missed the real opportunity. If they actually integrate it into their media offering, they will become the current leading MNO and that’s why I say they will be getting a bargain for MySpace.
Did you see the In-Stat press release about low consumer interest in mobile video?
As it is currently being marketed, I am uninterested in mobile TV. If you have ever watched a sitcom on the internet, then you are a likely customer for TV on your mobile phone. I don’t know anyone who has ever watched a sitcom on the internet. I do not believe repackaging content from one medium for another is a smart idea unless you are changing the context of the media. (For instance, turning music into personalization in the mobile space created the ringtone market.)
I am positive that people will watch video on their phones - it just won't be network-scheduled or repackaged episodes of whatever Paris Hilton's TV show is called. It will be content created in the context of the mobile environment and it will be useful in the mobile environment. 99% of it will be crap to 99% of the people who have access to it. Such is the nature of distributed networks. But 1% of it will be gold to 99% of mobile users at some point in time. Such also is the nature of distributed networks.
I obviously have a bias toward the concept of the LMNO. I really think it is the future of media, and I am encouraged by the steps I am seeing companies take in that direction. We have never seen millions of people walking around with mobile connected camcorders. They are starting to create the haystack of content that is going to represent the new new media of our century. There is a new type of media that makes perfect sense in the mobile space, and if News Corp. added mobility to their offering they could really innovate.
First, they have to not make the mistake of trying to repurpose their existing content catalog on the net.
Then they have to understand how to introduce a completely new type of media that fits the environment.
Lastly, they have to bolt on a mobile extension that gives them the ability to extend the value of the mobile connected media production and consumption devices that millions of people have with them 24/7.
I think they’ll get there sooner or later. If it's not them, someone else will. It seems inevitable that a darkhorse media titan will emerge in this new area of paradigm-shifting media, and it is my ambition to help make it happen.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 02:22 PM
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June 14, 2005
Phone Call 2.0
The first phone call went like this: “Come here Watson. I want you.” When Alexander Graham Bell called his assistant, Thomas Watson, on March 6th, 1876 he set in motion a revolution in communication that many argue has changed the world more than any other invention, making his patent, 174,465 possibly the most valuable in history.
BTW, when looking up the historical facts on the patent, I discovered something I hadn’t known before: On February 14, 1876, Elisha Gray got to the patent office only two hours after Bell to file for a provisional patent for a similar invention. Interestingly, Bell’s device used a liquid transmitter similar to one invented previously by Gray and unlike anything in his patent filing and also used a metal diaphragm receiver similar to the one built and demonstrated publicly by Gray months earlier. In any case, a legal fight ensued. Gray lost and Bell was awarded the patent. “First to market” sometimes means “by two hours.”
Think about how little the concept of the phone call has changed in the last 150 years. The definition of a phone call has always been “person to person voice communication.” The first real innovation around the basic product was voicemail and we didn’t see that until 1979. Even after that, the innovations we saw in telephony were built around the concept of person to person voice communication. Caller ID, Call Waiting, Call Forwarding, Call Return, Caller Blocking, Priority Ringing and Voicemail are all services built around the core product of connecting two people in a person to person voice communication session. Where I live in California, I can subscribe to Three-Way Calling for an additional $3.23 per month. Wow – Three people. That is the best you can do with the basic interface that is the telephone, and it is the first product that extended the reach of an individual wanting to have a conversation with more than one person. Even today, given the prevalence of conference calling, we still only ever talk to maybe a dozen people at a time. That’s not very scalable reach, and it is simply a limitation of the interface.
Communication Urgency vs. Importance
But think about what communication really is. Simply put, communication is the conveyance of ideas through a medium. In Phone Call 1.0, the medium you use is your voice, and the interface limits you to a relatively small audience. It limits you because it is a real-time environment. You have to assemble your audience and deliver your message. There is no way to timeshift your message so that it can be presented to multiple audiences at various times. You place the call, you transact your ideas using your voice and that is the end of it.
When I think about how many times I have called 411 to get the number of the same damn Domino’s pizza up the street, it drives me crazy. Phone Call 1.0 works well in Urgent situations when you need directions, have to educate your salespeople on a new product innovation or want to order a pizza. It is a limitation of the interface that makes me call back multiple times for the number to Domino’s – that information is Important and can be stored near-line as long as I know where to find it and as such lives in the phone book, where there is a color listing with a picture of a pizza, menu, and the phone number, address and directions for Domino’s. In this way, the information is essentially time-shifted. But I don’t carry the phone book around with me everywhere I go and when I am hungry the value of that phone number switches from Important to Urgent and the thing that I do happen to carry around with me everywhere I go is a Phone Call 1.0 interface that I can use to call someone to read me the number from the directory for Domino’s pizza.
Phone Call 1.0 is a very bad interface for Important things like conveying encyclopedic information, communicating complex ideas perhaps requiring pictures or other multimedia or for marketing applications. In the case of the latter, it is downright annoying. Phone Call 1.0 is very good for conveying short bursts of information in real-time sessions.
Telephones are Urgency Devices and they are colliding with Importance applications. The Mobile Phone is the ultimate Urgent Communication Device because it is always with you. People use it in an urgent manner, too; every time I see someone close a business deal at their kid’s soccer event, give some friends last-minute directions to the restaurant while sitting at the table or answering their phone in a movie theater just to satisfy their neurotic compulsion to answer every self-importance-affirming call, I am further convinced of this simple fact.
Well, your mobile phone is not just a mobile phone anymore. It is a mobile connected Personal Media Device, which means three very important things:
1) it can upload multimedia
2) it can download multimedia
3) it is capable of operating in a combined Urgent/Important mode.
So what does this mean? Think about Phone Call 1.0 again for a moment. Have you ever called a friend for a restaurant recommendation or directions? Yes, I think we all have. And they said what? “Try Oceanaire downtown in the Gaslamp Quarter.” And then you had to look up the number yourself because they didn’t have it, right? This happens with surprising frequency. As I was writing this, a coworker just asked me what cab company I use in San Diego.
Today my friend sent me an IM asking for recommendations on good restaurants and bars in San Diego because she is going to be down for the weekend. I immediately listed Bertrand and the beach bar at the W hotel as good bar options and mentioned Oceanaire, Indigo Grill and Parallel 33 for restaurants. Then from my PC I googled these names and found useful links for her on each and sent those over to her via IM. It took me a little more than five minutes, but I was happy to do it for this good friend. Then a funny thing happened. When I went to close the IM window, I hesitated because I felt that I was throwing away valuable information. What if someone else from out of town asks me for a recommendation on bars or restaurants? I will likely give them the same recommendations because they are among my top favorites in San Diego. Then I will have to re-google the information and spend another five minutes.
Phone Call 2.0
Before closing the IM window, I added all of those places to my Rabble Channel. (Channel Shawn, fyi. I know - very creative.) I have essentially “attached” those places to my channel. When I do this, all of those places are immediately available to anyone on Rabble – they do not have to know my Channel. The Places I put on my channel are available to everyone and they can then attach them to their channel. This is distributed populist media production and sharing. But for people who do know my Channel, there is a reason they know it. Most likely they are friends of mine, and now they can go straight to my channel without having to call me for a recommendation.
Last week Derrick and I were in the bay area for business and I was Rabbling around Berkeley to see what was there. I found a channel called CheeseboardPizza. (I possess an unnatural and undiscriminating love of pizza. When I go to New York, I land and take the cab straight to John’s Pizzeria before checking in to my hotel. I like the one on West 44th, not Bleecker. Please feel free to send me recommendations in any city.) People from the bay area know about the CheeseBoard Pizza Cooperative. First of all, it is phenomenal pizza. Secondly, it is sort of a quirky concept that is hard not to love. Imagine the Soup Nazi from Seinfeld sold pizza. You don’t get to specify your toppings. They make one kind of pizza everyday and that is what you get. There is a menu outside that lists the pizza for the day. A Rabbler in Berkeley apparently walks by this menu every morning and takes a picture of the menu and posts it to his channel. Yesterday it was “corn, onions, red bell peppers, feta, mozzarella, garlic, olive oil and cilantro.” Subscribe to Channel CheeseboardPizza and get the menu every day. If it sounds good to you that day, pizza it is. If not, you saved yourself a walk down to 1512 Shattuck Ave. to see the menu yourself. I love this – not only is it a cool use of technology but it fits our ideal of populist media. By viewing Channel CheeseboardPizza, you can download multimedia to your mobile phone to make an informed decision.
I also like this example because it shows how a very unserious piece of media can be both important and urgent, because it is both “What” and “When” information, e.g., “What do I want to eat for lunch today?”
Look Ma, No Voice
Notice that I haven’t even mentioned using voice. I picked this example specifically because it is the type of information that not long ago we all used to retrieve using our voices as the medium and the telephone as the interface.
Now instead of only being able to call someone, you can send text from your mobile phone. But your mobile phone is also a digital camera. If a picture is worth a thousand words, then why settle for 160 characters of text when you can send a picture instead? And if one person might want to see your picture, why not post it to your blog instead so you can share it with the world? Now add a messaging feedback loop so you can interact with other users to create, collect and share information.
Nonvoice multimedia + conversation with the world = evolved communication.
And that is Phone Call 2.0. It is happening without us even knowing it. Almost all of the pieces are in place. What has been missing is a marketplace to effectively transact this information that combines the usefulness of a near-line directory of Important information, the immediacy of “pick up the phone and call” access to Urgent information and most importantly, the context of personal relationships or commonality to filter both kinds of information to make it more useful. By the way, commonality could be as simple as an apparent unholy appreciation for pizza – now that is someone whose opinion I can trust.
Simply put, our personal communication is evolving to include multimedia. That communication is converging on one device, the mobile phone, which is quickly turning into a Personal Media Device. My children will not understand the concept of Phone Call 1.0 – they will live in a world where the media they create will represent them and act as an active proxy. Their friends will not understand the concept of a “phone number,” the artifact of an analog world long gone, and instead will have their own channel – a two-way location-aware media presence through which they will communicate with the world around them. You already see what your mobile phone has evolved into over just the past few years. What will it look like in another three years? Or ten? Now combine that device with an active media communication infrastructure that connects you with the world around you delivering information, entertainment and personal connectivity seamlessly and intuitively to help you find new content, increase your social capital and generally get through the day. That is the future of communication. Think about how few voice calls you make compared to five years ago and how many text messages you send instead. Think of how much you rely on your mobile phone and the fact that it is turning into a mobile connected camcorder and receiver. Now make the final leap – rather than call the number, surf the net or watch the channel, Be The Channel. (And start now with our 1.0 of Phone Call 2.0, Rabble. ;-)
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 07:47 PM
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May 11, 2005
GOOGLMNO
As previously predicted, Google is becoming an LMNO. I had put them on the user-generated content value chain that we use in our discussions about the evolution of media networking. With Blogspot, (the consumer channel) Blogger (the backend platform) and Google (the search and directory link on the value chain) they were already a Media Networking Operator, or MNO. Today we heard that Google bought Dodgeball.com, a mobile social networking tool, thus adding the location-awareness to their eventual offering and the “L” to their LMNO.
I like this development because it is good for and further legitimizes the LMNO space. (We have been quietly meeting with potential investors who have all been really smart people, but a few of them just didn’t get the potential of an LMNO if executed properly.) It also shows that there are some smart people at Google who are looking at the future of media much differently than apparently are the incumbent media companies who are still trying to make a business selling CDs at retail. Who do you think is next into the LMNO space?
I have some predictions:
First, the most obvious ones: Yahoo, AOL and Microsoft.
Yahoo bought Flickr, which gave them the channel link on the value chain, they already have search and directory, and they recently did their Yahoo360 thing, so they have a platform. MNO. I predict a mobile application with some level of location awareness from Yahoo within the next three months.
AOL has their Journals integrated with AIM, which I think is pretty smart as a sort of fastblogging tool. They’ve got search, channels and platform. MNO. Rumor has it that they also are pushing a mobile blogging application of some sort. It probably won’t be very robust on the location awareness or social networking dimensions, but still, mobility adds an “L” to their MNO.
Microsoft launched their Spaces last December, so they have channels. They have search and they certainly have a platform. MNO. I’ll bet you their offering in the mobile space will ignore location and proximity but will be deeper on the social networking front than AOL and Yahoo. Have you noticed Bill is talking a lot about mobile lately? I think Microsoft sees more clearly an opportunity to turn every consumer into a storefront (which is the basic construct of LMNO) so they are going to pay more attention to media integration and personal selling, or “recommendations.”
Then of course there is Rabble, getting its finishing touches, which should quietly hit the market next week, but it may have to wait until the following Tuesday. I’ll let you know when I know for sure. In any case, it will be the first carrier-grade mobile media networking application ever. If you like Dodgeball, you will love Rabble. While there is a supporting website, unlike the others I mentioned it is a pure mobile offering rather than a bolt-on to a web-based experience. Though technically Rabble does integrate with many popular blogging sites, so it is also a bidirectional blogging tool as well as a mobile media networking community.
Now some not so obvious predictions:
Infinity Broadcasting – The Telecommunications Act of 1996 that deregulated radio generally served to increase consolidation of stations under two very large companies that control almost half of the market: ClearChannel and Viacom. This has decreased the breadth of available content, hurt independent musicians and increased advertising clutter. Consumers have responded by listening less – time spent listening is at a 27-year low. Infinity is experimenting with podcasting stations. I think they get user-generated content. They are the kind of company that could move more quickly than their competitors into the mobile space to build a sort of distributed media broadcasting network that feeds mobile devices instead of radios. Consumers are ready. Build it and they will come.
Reuters – They package and distribute media. When you are a media hub like Reuters and media production is moving to the edge of the network into the hands of people with mobile connected camcorders, it is a good idea to plug in. Think of a sort of realtime user-generated Corbis that also handles the brokering, transaction and clearance of a massively distributed participative media network and that is what Reuters could become if they embraced the mobile space. They’ll catch on sooner or later.
IAC/InterActiveCorp – I’ll mention Barry Diller only briefly here because I have written about his company before as my top LMNO pick, given the nature of his portfolio of companies. There is surprisingly little being offered in the mobile space right now, but I’ll bet that is going to change soon.
Advance Publications – This quietly managed print media powerhouse could keep selling magazines and newspapers, but magazine sales peaked in 2000 and are now at 1994 levels, and newspaper circulation peaked in 1987, and the decline is accelerating. Despite the fact that Hollywood is getting all the hype right now about downstream mobile media (60-second mobisodes of whatever Paris Hilton’s television show is called) the companies that will have long-term success in the mobile space won’t just see mobile devices as a distribution channel, but will recognize how mobility integrates with their business. Among a great many other things, Advance owns a bunch of newspapers, Conde Nast and Fodor’s travel guides. All deal with inherently location-based information, and all could integrate upstream and downstream mobile media into their offerings. It is a company like Advance that Gartner Group would call a Dark Horse Media Titan of the future, and they could very likely become a hugely valuable LMNO. (If they are thinking about the mobile space, which I hope they are.)
Anyway, congratulations to Dennis and Alex on the sale of their company. I will be interested to see how it gets folded into the Googlesphere.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 11:56 PM
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March 29, 2005
LMNO Panel at Digital Hollywood Friday, April 1st 2005
The LMNO space is growing, and people are talking about it.
I am speaking on a panel later this week at Digital Hollywood at the Loews Santa Monica hotel on April 1st called Media at the Edge of the Network: Are Location-based Media Networking Operators the Dark-Horse Media Titans of the Future?
The session will be moderated by Mike McGuire who, with Allen Weiner authors a research series about Darkhorse Media Titans. (Sorry about the secure login thing if you don't have an account.)
Allen and Mike discussed a few of these reports with me and I was impressed by Allen's and Mike’s vision for the future of media overall. I highly recommend you buy them if you are interested in an alternate vision of the media company of the future.
I am joining panelists Caelen King of Newbay, and Dan Melinger of Socialight. Newbay is a mobile blogging company, while Socialight is more of a mobile social networking solution. Both Caelen and Dan are extremely articulate and have interestingly different perspectives on the roles of mobility and social media in the broader media landscape.
The session is about the Location-based Media Networking Operator (LMNO) as the business model for the media company of the future. I personally think user-generated content is an opportunity for the incumbent media companies, but I also thought the MP3 format was an opportunity for the music industry. I think this panel will focus on how user-generated content will disrupt the status quo and what kind of transformation the media industry can expect to see. I am not sure of the specific topics, but Mike McGuire is very insightful – I am sure it will be worth attending, so come on down and see us, won’t you?
Also, we are almost done beta testing Rabble, so I will have a handset with a live copy of the application if you want to see it. Just come talk to me before or after the panel on Friday or send me an email to meet at another time.
Posted by Shawn Conahan at 08:57 AM
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March 28, 2005
Goodnight, Gracie
This story recounts the first time I put Barry Diller on my radar as the Ted Turner of the interactive media world, so I thought it would make an interesting intro. Read the first few paragraphs of this article before continuing: Barry Diller Has No Vision For The Future Of The Internet. I was in the meeting where Barry Diller shut down the entire internet division of Vivendi Universal with the phrase “Goodnight Gracie.” It was June 11th of 2002 and Jean-Marie Messier, (who took to calling himself J2M, so I will too since it is easier to write) then-CEO of then-media (and water and sewage) conglomerate Vivendi Universal (VU) had his quarterly Entertainment Committee meeting in the VU conference room of what had previously been the Seagram’s building in New York. The Entertainment Committee was comprised of the heads of all the various entertainment divisions, who were sitting around the self-congratulatorily large conference table discussing their various businesses. These were big names, all of which you have heard. I remember mentally calculating the total net worth of all of the entertainment executives in the room and it was well into the billions of dollars.
Part of this meeting was dedicated to defending the value of VUnet, the internet division of VU at the time under which J2M had rolled up all of the internet properties including Uproar, Flipside, eMusic and willful copyright infringer MP3.com, the latter acquired by VU for $372mm and also the vehicle I rode into the VU fold. I was then president of Moviso, the then-money losing ringtone company. I reported to the CEO of VUnetUSA, and he reported to the CEO of VUnet in Paris, Agnes Audier. So it was Agnes in the hot seat defending her hodgepodge of internet properties, which in 2001 had generated $168mm in revenue but had posted an EBITDA loss of $192mm.
My boss at the time had asked me to attend the meeting to talk about my ringtone company as a bright spot in the otherwise gloomy story of VUnet. This was 2002 and the ringtone craze hadn’t yet hit its hockey stick growth curve in the U.S. so I was painting a broad vision of ringtones being an important revenue source to the music group in a few years and "mobile media" being a huge opportunity for all media incumbents. (Which went over not very well, though in fairness to them just looking past the Internet for incumbent media companies at the time was a bit of a stretch.)
Agnes started talking about all of the deals the various internet properties were working on and how integral they were to the various other entertainment properties. Frankly, even if the deals had been
