It’s no secret that a stroll through the offerings on carrier decks is enough to give you carpal tunnel syndrome.
A recent study of four U.S. wireless services providers by Strategy Analytics found that a simple music download from a carrier portal required anywhere from 18 to 39 clicks to complete. The “best in class” mobile portal demanded 17 clicks to purchase a mobile game. And-astoundingly-no participating consumer in the study was able to locate the MobiTV service on AT&T Mobility’s portal without assistance.
All those hoops are costly, of course. Not only do conversion rates for content sales drop off with every required click, network latencies can turn what should be a simple one-off purchase into a time-consuming and infuriating shopping trip. And with every extra second, the chance increases that a potential sale will be interrupted when the user’s subway arrives, for instance, or the phone rings.
So it’s not surprising that developers are working overtime to make the excursion easier for consumers. And many of them are looking to on-device portals to do it.
An on-device portal, or ODP, is a layer of middleware that can serve as a kind of stripped-down carrier deck. The application can store a limited amount of cached information, allowing carriers to offer a menu of a few ringtones, games, news headlines and other goodies. Users can access the top layer of information and content offerings with a single click, launching a browsing session only if they decide they want more news or to purchase a download.
“What an on-device portal is that I don’t get the hourglass (while waiting for WAP pages) until I know exactly what I want,” said Tracy Allard, regional VP of North America for SurfKitchen, a U.K.-based developer of on-device portals. “It can replace the top five or six levels of navigation on the device very easily.”
Like competing developer UIEvolution, Surf-Kitchen launched as a developer of user interfaces before morphing into the ODP space. The company’s carrier customers include Telenor, Australia’s Telstra and the Spanish operator Telfonica, and Orange is using SurfKitchen’s technology to power its download portal in the United Kingdom and France.
The software is sold as a white-label offering and allows carriers to send updates to the phone to overhaul the portal’s interface, update headlines, deliver advertisements and offer timely content.
An operator “might choose to have an event-based client that provides information about March Madness, then, in the fall, about the SEC” for college football fans, Allard said. “We can make the background green on St. Patrick’s Day or do a scrolling ticker. The device talks to the server over the HTTP network, which is a lower-cost network to operate, and it doesn’t have some of the allocation issues SS7 has.”
Others are jumping on the ODP bandwagon as well. Alltel Wireless’ Celltop, Yahoo Go and the iPhone are all ODPs to one degree or another. Nellymoser Inc. has joined the field, and the application developer and distributor Handmark Inc. uses an ODP as a kind of storefront on the deck of Sprint Nextel Corp. Even Google Inc. is said to be eying the ODP space.
Targeting media companies
But while SurfKitchen and others are targeting operators with their technology, Action Engine Corp. is gaining ground with a decidedly different strategy. The Seattle-area developer-and longtime player on the on-device portal field-found that approaching most U.S. carriers with an ODP solution was futile, so it began targeting media companies looking to bring their content to wireless users.
“When we looked at the progress we were making in the marketplace (with network operators), we realized the sales cycles were very long; that carriers were very conservative buyers,” said Scott Silk, Action Engine’s CEO. “You could eat up round after round of V.C. funding waiting for a Vodafone or a Verizon to make a decision.”
The company hopes to use its third-party ODPs as a way to showcase its technology to carriers, eventually striking deals with operators. It has scored deals with MSNBC.com and TiVo, and the company said more customer announcements are in the offing.
“We’re not saying you shouldn’t work with the operator, but what makes it easier is having that big brand with you,” explained Anne Baker, VP of marketing for Action Engine. “We think the operator still has a crucial role to play from a distribution and marketing perspective.”
The long-term outlook for on-device portal developers is unclear, however. Network operators are constantly working to simplify their decks, and handset makers are increasingly using both hard and soft keys to minimize the number of clicks required to find content both on and off decks. And speech-recognition developers seem to be gaining considerable ground by allowing users to talk their way through content offerings rather than clicking.
Given the claustrophobic constraints of the mobile phone, though, it appears likely on-device portals will continue to attract attention-especially as wireless content moves beyond ringtones into a broad swath of offerings for mass-market users.
“If the WAP portal is the mall, you walk in and it’s three stories high,” SurfKitchen’s Allard explained. “There’s a ton of information. The client is the little information guide you get at the first information kiosk you come to.”
