NEW YORK-AirMedia has embarked on a common carrier strategy for Internet content provision with the late January introduction of its new “Wireless Hub.”
“This will be a worldwide automated marketplace, with a back end and front end to enable mobile content and services,” David S. Rose, founder and chairman, said at the recent “Wireless Wealth” meeting, hosted by TECHmarketing, Scarsdale, N.Y.
“We will be a common carrier, like cash exchanges for ATMs (automated teller machines). We are the glue that holds together the dozen or so players, (including) publishers, formatters and transport providers.”
Participants will not pay upfront costs to deliver content to or procure it from the in the AirMedia Wireless Hub.
“Our marketer affiliates will stock their wireless portals with content from the hub for resale to their customers,” Rose said.
“We’ll make money if they do, in small increments, but done as a laboratory to let people try things on a worldwide basis. They can plug in ads for ad-sponsored content, provide retail subscriptions or subsidized content that is free to end users.”
The Wireless Hub will deliver content to handheld devices, including the Palm and Pocket PC. It can transmit it to WAP-enabled wireless phones, via short message service, through electronic mail, over the World Wide Web or by voice communications.
“Today, we can communicate with 98 percent of the carriers in the United States and the United Kingdom. We will expand into France and Germany shortly and into Asia later this year,” Rose said.
New York-based AirMedia, founded in 1988, is best known for the messaging infrastructure it built for operators that include, Sprint PCS, Southwestern Bell, Pacific Bell and AirTouch, he said.
Rose shared a panel discussion with executives of three other companies headquartered in New York: ThinAirApps, 2Roam and Quixi.
“ThinAirApps is a best-of-breed solution for enabling the mobile work force. 2Roam specializes in making your Web site available to your customers. Quixi is a market leader in adding a live person to support your mobile work force by cellular phone,” Rose said.
Andrew Breen, head of business development for ThinAirApps, brought back observations about wireless data and the wireless Internet from Europe, where he spent all of December at work.
“Europe, especially northern Europe, has high device penetration, but people don’t use their phones as much as Americans because they’re more polite about using them and there is no flat-rate pricing. I met with several carriers there, and they are reluctant to offer flat-rate pricing,” Breen said.
“Europe is at least six-to-nine months behind the United States in (data use) of mobile phones. WAP is hyped, but it’s not used. SMS is popular, but not by enterprises or their mobile workers.”
Breen said he could not realistically estimate when 2.5 and especially third-generation wireless will be deployed in the United States and Europe at widespread and commercially viable levels.
“The technology is here. Lucent showed me a nice European UMTS rollout about a month ago, but the devices are lagging in their ability to handle it. … Someone did an analysis of 3G licenses in the U.K. and Germany and concluded it will take carriers until 2050 to realize a return on investment,” he said.
“I will be gray and a lot older when 3G comes. As to multimedia, remember, we had streaming video to a wireless device about 15 years ago. It’s called a Sony Watchman.”
In the United States, the sweet spot in wireless data remains its role as an enabler of mobility for mobile workers, Breen said. However, this is a tricky and risky area to pursue for two primary reasons.
“A lot of wireless ASPs (application service providers) with outsourced hosting business models are coming back to us, saying their customers want them to help deploy it behind the firewalls,” Breen said.
“There are a lot of hands in the wireless cookie jar-device makers, carriers, gateway providers, corporate intranets. There is a reason to partner and to fear each company in each level because each, if it does one thing well, will look for land grab opportunities. You’ve got to show partners it’s worth their while to expand within their space and leverage your strengths.”
Within the wireless enablement of enterprises sector, sales-force automation occupies the niche most active today, said Evan Marwell, co-founder of Quixi.
“Sales-force automation is a $3 (billion to) $5 billion market today. Companies are investing at a pace not seen in other enterprise applications,” he said.
“But 70 percent of these installations are failing because sales reps aren’t using them. They don’t want to spend time entering the data.”
Quixi’s service allows field sales-force representatives to contact by cell phone a call center, where personnel take dictated information and log it into the corporate database, Marwell said.
“We believe the technology will evolve, but it’s not ready for what consumers expect to experience, so we put a person in the middle to deliver information,” he said.
“Voice-recognition faces tremendous challenges, especially interference from background noise, and it can’t move at the pace people are used to. … Over the next few years, until there is more bandwidth and improved interfaces, voice (calling) must be the focus, and it must be fast.”
