Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reality Check column. We’ve gathered a group of visionaries and veterans in the mobile content industry to give their insights into the marketplace. In the coming weeks look for columns from Laura Marriott of the Mobile Marketing Association and more.
With the clock winding down on my tenure as a “guest” (read: uncompensated) columnist on mobile content for RCR Wireless News, I thought my last column might be a good time – heck, the only time – to throw up a “Hail Mary” for mobile content’s future and see if it connects.
Services, services, services.
While I wish my friends in the music business only the best in their pursuit of mobile as industry savior, I came to wireless when mobile content was called wireless data, and enterprise, not entertainment was what was going to drive mobile data adoption. At that time, 2G networks were only beginning to be rolled out and the preeminent data “device” was a CDPD phone (Cellular Digital Packet Data . a true IP-based network technology) with a screen capable of rendering four lines and 12 characters per line. One of the most compelling services on the phone, enabled by Kendra VanderMeulen and her crew at the old AT&T Wireless, was access to one’s entire Outlook contacts database, which one uploaded into the cloud, on the phone. For a customer like me, who then had thirty-two hundred contacts in Outlook, that was heavy lifting. But it was the kind of service that suggested the inevitability of wireless data’s success.
And then along came RIM’s Blackberry. I traded RIM membership in the Wireless Data Forum for 10 of their original Blackberries, back before there was even a server-side product, when it was desktop re-direct (leave your computer on when you go home at night if you want to get your e-mail). Here was the fulfillment of the wireless data promise, and I have the Blackberry thumbs to prove it.
The point is, for me, services are the most compelling kind of mobile content. More recently, my belief was re-affirmed by the growing array of location-based services. Tooling down the highway following a grueling Sunday afternoon of chasing around golf balls, my partner and I decided BBQ would be the perfect way to top off the day, but hadn’t a clue of any places nearby where we were. From my passenger’s seat, I launched a wireless navigator service that I had only used for driving directions, but had found incredibly well done. I had previously noted a Local Search icon in the service folder, and so clicked on it. From there I picked “Dining” from the drop down menu and then “BBQ” from the list of restaurant types. The returned list was sorted according to shortest distance to where I was, and I selected the top choice. Immediately, the service launched into voice-guided driving directions and we were seated within five minutes of launching the service. Now, that’s mobile content you can use.
For the longest time, I have believed that Barry Dillar’s IAC was sitting on the perfect network of sites to be knitted into the ultimate in wireless data services, a concierge service. Ask, Match, CitySearch, Ticketmaster, Evite and partner sites Expedia and Hotel.com, put them all together in a mobile service similar in efficiency to the local search navigation service I used, without the need to input much info via tapping and you can collect my monthly subscription fee. Now that Dillar is instead spinning off his properties into individual entities, I guess I will have to hold onto my money, but I still think a mobile concierge service will be compelling.
Another service I have been waiting for carriers, content owners and developers to enable is mobile greeting cards, and I am not the only one. My “kids” (all over 19) grew up getting and giving electronic online greeting cards, and ask me each major holiday how come our industry hasn’t made them available. Yes, I know some carriers and content providers have, but if my kids still haven’t found them, they aren’t being marketed very much or successfully, or I would have received them by now.
Clearly there will always be teenagers who will want to personalize their devices with ringtones, ringbacks, wallpapers and the like, and I don’t for a minute dispute the valuable business there. But enable my device to utilize its various and enormously powerful capabilities on my behalf to achieve the many objectives I must reach each day, personally as well as professionally, and we will have unlocked the true value of “mobile content.”
Postscript
I would be remiss if I didn’t abuse my access to this space one last time to note that the wireless data industry will shortly be losing the services of one of its most enduring and defining contributors. One of the great things about this industry is the cast of characters who have built it, many of whom have been around from the beginning, albeit in any number of incarnations. But one among them has been slugging it out in the same trenches where he started, and has done as much to shape the industry as any from our community that launched a string of startups. Jim Straight, a long time VP of wireless data products and services at Verizon Wireless who has been building products across all of Verizon’s platforms for the last year, will be retiring shortly after around 30 years of service. I have had the pleasure of knowing and working with Jim for only the last 10 years, but there is no one in the industry whose candor, straight talk, or judgment I value any more than Jim’s. But more than that, I will remember and cherish the friendship that Jim seemed to offer all of us who had a chance to work with him. I know I am not alone in the industry in wishing Jim and his family, great and long health and a wonderful, richly deserved retirement. Many thanks for all your many contributions.
You may contact Mark directly at MDesautels@ctia.org. You may contact RCR Wireless News at rcrwebhelp@crain.com.
