While Tier 1 carriers scramble to deploy sexy applications like full-track downloads and on-demand mobile movies, smaller operators are looking in their own backyards to find more practical services for their consumers.
In an effort to set themselves apart from their big brothers, regional operators are hoping to keep their subscriber bases intact with targeted, community-sensitive information like high-school sports scores, school closings and local news headlines.
“The (regional) carrier is expressing a strong interest in local information in general, and specifically the kind of information that just isn’t available (from bigger operators), said George Woodward, chief executive officer of GetLisa Services LLC, a Colorado-based content and messaging provider. “The idea of high-school sports information pushed automatically out to subscribers has been something we’ve gotten interest in through virtually every region of the country.”
The idea, said Woodward, is to enable schools, athletic teams and even social clubs to publish content through the operator. Schools could submit daily updates, or Little League coaches could send messages to the team when practice is rained out. Users who’ve signed onto specific subscription lists from their handsets or computers can tailor what type of alerts they’d like to receive and when, and can get the information via a push WAP message or by logging on with a Web-enabled handset.
GetLisa is working with its carrier partners to offer such services as part of an all-encompassing wireless package, including voice, text and multimedia messaging as well as Web browsing. Some services could be included-particularly community-service offerings like school closings and weather alerts-while others could be available at a premium.
Florida-based InterOp Technologies is in the process of rolling out similar offerings with two undisclosed regional carriers. Services are expected to be in place by the end of the year. One of the operators hopes to use the technology to tap a prime demographic for wireless data usage: students from a nearby college.
“The university wants (the unnamed operator) to allow the students to access class schedules and register for class over their handsets,” said John Bickford, InterOp’s director of consumer content solutions. “It’s really playing out in terms of carriers having relationships with their local market and capitalizing on those relationships.”
Media outlets in some bigger markets are offering similar wireless services to their users. Some television stations, for instance, encourage viewers to build a profile and receive relevant text message alerts about community happenings on their phones. But those messages are created by the media outlet, effectively eliminating the possibility of a single user remotely publishing a message.
“In the case of local publishing, a school could authorize a bus driver to publish delays in that particular bus driver’s schedule with just a few strokes,” Woodward said. “And a subscriber has the ability to request alerts specifically for their child’s bus route.”
What’s more, schools and institutions that send out regular RSS feeds could expand their messages to the wireless platform, updating information on a WAP site. And GetLisa is adding a voice option, allowing users to “publish” voice messages that will be sent to subscribers of each particular channel.
A Denver-based software developer is combining local information with high-tech mobile TV by allowing users to watch their local news broadcasts on the go. U-Turn, originally formed in the Czech Republic, markets a platform for content providers to move their wares to wireless. The company is marketing its wares to TV stations looking to bring their content to wireless users.
“We think that news, information, weather, traffic and sports are going to be the real driver,” said Izzy Abbass, U-Turn’s president of North America. “Here in the U.S., we’re targeting local markets, which has not been done with carrier solutions. We think that’s a real underserved market.”
GetLisa has deployed the offering through a handful of regional operators throughout the nation, and Woodward said more operators will bring the application to market. Both carriers looking to deploy InterOp’s services hope to bring local newspapers into the fold with regional carriers, extending the paper’s reach as they extend the carrier’s data and information offerings.
“The regional carriers are working on a number of things they want to use to differentiate themselves from the larger carriers,” said Bickford. “The big guys just don’t have time for those relationships, but the smaller carriers do.”
