Like ’70s disco or roller skates, the wireless portal is now retro cool. Dude.
In the heyday of the late 1990s, the wireless industry was awash with the wireless Internet and the possibilities therein. Wireless players from carriers on down to startups imagined opening Yahoo!-style portals to attract the eyes and wallets of wireless users, offering a single access point for all types of information and applications.
Alas, it was not to be.
Wireless surfers were treated to a black-and-white, text-based menus, with seconds of lag time between each screen. And any usable information typically was buried behind dozens of screens. Wireless Internet hype fought reality and failed, and industry felt the sting. Portals such as Vizzavi, the $1.6 billion venture between European carrier Vodafone Group plc and media company Vivendi Universal, quietly faded from the limelight.
Until recently.
Vodafone has resurrected elements of Vizzavi for its new Live! wireless data portal. The carrier has repackaged some of the old Vizzavi technology along with newer services such as downloadable Java games, color screens and camera phones. Indeed, Vodafone is not alone, as other European operators like T-Mobile and MmO2 recently have re-launched their own data efforts through new wireless portals. Even NTT DoCoMo has gotten into the mix by licensing its i-mode wireless data portal to smaller European carriers like Bouygues Telecom in France and Spain’s Telefonica Moviles.
In the United States, AT&T Wireless Services Inc. last year launched an i-mode variation with its mMode wireless data portal, a nod to DoCoMo’s $9.8 billion investment in the carrier. T-Mobile USA Inc. has loosely followed its German parent’s T-zone portal effort. And Verizon Wireless has been consolidating its data efforts under the Get It Now tagline-a move that goes against the efforts of Verizon parent Vodafone to create a unified worldwide data portal.
“At the base is our old friend WAP,” said Dario Betti, a senior wireless multimedia analyst with research and consulting firm Ovum.
WAP is the much-maligned wireless Internet technology that formed the basis for the first round of portal efforts in the late 1990s. And like bellbottoms and hip-hugger jeans, WAP has re-emerged to form the basis for all of the new portal launches, from Vodafone’s Live! to AT&T Wireless’ mMode.
“It’s less of a technology shakeup; it’s more of a marketing and repackaging,” Betti said.
Vodafone’s repackaging involves some significant effort. The carrier launched Live! in October and is rumored to have put $250 million behind the endeavor. Live! combines a variety of old and new wireless technologies and advances, including WAP, downloadable Java applications, ring tones, graphics, multimedia messaging services, location-based services and integrated camera phones.
“Vodafone thought to put it all together,” Betti said. “It’s a bit more sexy and appealing.”
And it seems to be a relative success. In March Vodafone said it counted more than 1 million active Live! subscribers across 10 countries. The numbers compare favorably to the 60,000 active users MmO2 claims for its O2 Active portal, and predictions from Jupiter Research that the total number of European i-mode subscribers will hit 1.5 million by the end of this year.
Vodafone’s Live! launch served to bolster its data efforts, Ovum’s Betti said, but it also helped to temper the launch of rival’s third-generation networks. Vodafone managed to “take a bit of the thunder away” from carriers like Hutchison and its new 3 wireless service.
“It was a bit of a defensive move,” Betti said of Vodafone’s Live! launch.
Interestingly, the newfound interest in data portals has again spurred some startup activity. Wireless technology company Mobilista announced it signed a deal with Internet portal company Lycos to offer an independent wireless Lycos portal in the United Kingdom. Under the service, Lycos will offer a Java-based application for free on its Internet site, allowing surfers to download the application onto their phones. Mobilista said the Java-based portal is more appealing than the likes of Vodafone’s WAP-based portal.
“It gives us a greater degree of control over the user experience,” said David Kaye, Mobilista’s managing director. “It allows us to add extra functionality.”
Further, Mobilista’s effort is in direct competition with carrier-branded data portals like Live!, but at the same time generates transmission revenues for carriers. Lycos is able to bypass wireless carriers by offering the application on its own Web site. Instead of adding a link to a Lycos WAP link to Vodafone’s Live! portal, Lycos can get closer to its users through the Java application.
“Rather than have them rely on some buried link on some list on Vodafone Live! … they can create their own piece of media space,” Mobilista’s Kaye said.
Kaye said Mobilista is in talks with other European media companies looking to offer portals separate from a carrier’s branded portal. Kaye said the company is in the initial stages of moving into the U.S. market and is in discussions with adult entertainment companies in Europe.
Kaye said there is a significant market for wireless data portals, as the wireless industry continues to evolve.
“It’s not just a communications tool,” he said. “It’s a media channel.”
“This new mobile trend, which Vodafone Live! started in October 2002, can only be good for the current market, where everybody needs to work to promote the take-up of data services,” wrote research firm IDC in its mobile portal report. The firm predicts that in 2007 portals will count 42 million users in Western Europe and will generate more than $1 billion.
