Reader Forum: Smartphones and mobile identity

Editor’s Note: Welcome to our weekly Reader Forum section. In an attempt to broaden our interaction with our readers we have created this forum for those with something meaningful to say to the wireless industry. We want to keep this as open as possible, but maintain some editorial control so as to keep it free of commercials or attacks. Please send along submissions for this section to our editors at: dmeyer@ardenmediaco.com.
Smartphone platforms and the future of mobile identity
Morgan Gillis, Executive Director. LiMo Foundation
The mobile marketplace has gone through a dramatic and rapid transformation over the past few years, but as they say – the more things change, the more things stay the same. There has always been healthy tension between operators and handset manufacturers over the customer relationship – particularly outside North America where early support for GSM meant that consumers have long been able to purchase unlocked handsets from strong manufacturer brands with direct retail channels such as Nokia. In today’s marketplace, the competition has expanded to include new participants – particularly emerging smartphone platform providers – and is ultimately focused on ownership and commercialization of the user’s mobile identity.
What is mobile identity? Back at the turn of the century one’s mobile identity was inherently tied to the device – through the form of your subscriber number, or your IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) number, or perhaps your SIM card. These were mechanisms that operators used to recognize the mobile subscriber in order to provision basic voice and data services. For many people, their mobile phone number is actually one of the longest-standing pieces of identity information that they’ve had over the years – landlines change, e-mail and physical addresses change, but mobile phone numbers tend to be a constant.
Over the past 3-5 years, several important innovations have taken place in the mobile marketplace. For starters, devices have become faster and smarter – with diverse functionality, bigger screens, advanced Web browsers, and vastly improved data consumption. In addition, number portability has allowed a greater number of mobile subscribers to change operators more freely. Concurrent to these advances, Web 2.0 technologies and social networks hit the fixed Internet and drastically changed the way that consumers accessed information and also how they interacted with their coworkers, family and friends. In addition, new federated authentication technologies like OpenID allowed consumers to more seamlessly have a common identity or persona across social media sites like Facebook, Flickr, LinkedIn, and DIGG.
These separate streams in mobile device advancement, Web 2.0 and federated authentication have now converged into a single pool of innovation and competition for stewardship of a consumer’s mobile identity. Mobile identity today is best reflected by the user experience provided in some of today’s leading devices – the latest Palm, Android and LiMo devices all have contact-centric interfaces with easy access to mobile services, including ties to popular social media services from the top social networks as well as new services that come from the platform providers. This seamless access is facilitated by the user’s authenticated mobile identity.
Managing a consumer’s mobile identity is a privilege that must be earned through a variety of factors that collectively will provide the consumer with a highly compelling and trusted mobile experience. Key ingredients in this equation include: 1) unfettered access to the mobile Internet and to popular / staple mobile services; 2) a pre-existing, trusted commercial relationship, and 3) differentiated mobile applications and services.
When one looks at today’s emerging smartphone platforms it is plain to see where business and/or technology conflicts may prevent at least one of these three ingredients from being delivered. Despite all of its initial success, Apple’s refusal to support Flash and its arbitrary rejection of apps that compete with core Apple services are hindering innovation and the mobile Internet on the iPod. Other smartphone platforms or mobile service platforms from companies like RIM, Microsoft or Motorola are lacking the trusted commercial relationship to gain long term mass trust. Lastly – and perhaps more significantly – many of these emerging platforms inherently place the platform provider in competition with mobile operators for the management of the customer relationship and customer identity.
Much of today’s focus and media buzz is around emerging smart phone platforms and devices – with great hoopla and excitement on a release-by-release and device-by-device basis. But if the Holy Grail ultimately is to manage the consumer’s mobile identity it is important not to overlook the critical role and opportunity for the mobile operator.
Mobile operators hold a trusted position with subscribers that has been developed over years – creating both a rich history of customer knowledge as well as a well-entrenched commercial relationship. In addition, operators have unique technical and network assets that they can expose to developers in order to create highly differentiated services that leverage concepts such as location, relevance and history.
The sum of these factors makes the mobile operator uniquely well positioned to continue to be the center point for a consumer’s mobile identity. But with so much at stake, operators will naturally be wary of basing their consumer identity strategy on a platform that is owned or driven by a company that has (or may evolve to have) conflicting business interests. What is required instead is a truly independent platform that is developed by the mobile industry, for the mobile industry – with room for operators or OEMs to innovate and compete in providing a compelling and trusted mobile user experience.
In conclusion, while it is easy to get excited by new handset launches it is important to delineate between an operator’s short-term device strategy and their longer-term mobile service strategy, which is inherently tied to the trusted stewardship of a consumer’s mobile identity and which must rest upon an independent smart phone platform.
Morgan Gillis is executive director of LiMo Foundation (http://www.limofoundation.org), a non-profit industry consortium dedicated to creating the first truly open, hardware-independent, Linux-based operating system for mobile devices.