Xellular Identity - All About Mobile Content & Marketing

You're Invited!

Hi everyone,

I'm very happy to share a huge project that took a lot of my time for the last couple of months, and is ready for the premiere!

You're all invited to participate in our upcoming Comverse's Fun Dial Marketing Seminar at the Wyndham Miami Beach Spa & Resort in Florida on April 18-19, 2007. The one and a half day event will kick-off at 11:00 AM Wednesday and wrap up following lunch on Thursday.

The program has been designed to specifically address marketing issues faced by operators in regard to their Ring Back Tone services. Over the course of two days we will review Ringback Tones and content market trends, exchange global marketing best practices, focus on how to achieve high potential service growth and discuss 3rd party content providers management. In addition, we are excited to bring you speakers from Orange UK, Jamba, T-Mobile, Sony BMG, M:metrics and the esteemed Professor Brian Uzzi who will bring a wealth of knowledge to share.

As space is limited, please register for this event online to reserve a place until April 5th.

We believe this seminar will be of real professional value and provide an opportunity to exchange idea and information with colleagues from around the world.

Here is a preliminary seminar agenda for your review.

Carnival of Mobilists at All About Symbian

The Carnival of Mobilists is back in town with a blast of the best mobile writing of the week. Rafe Blandford of All About Symbian has done a great job putting all together so head over! :)

Celebrating Early Steps of Openness to 3rd Parties

One of the most promising strategies to increase mobile subscribers’ exposure and awareness to the ringback tones service is opening it to the content off-deck market; i.e. to enable 3rd party retailers and content providers to offer ringback tones content at their portals. This way, there will be more places for users to acquire ringback tones, they could buy them both at operators’ portals and at the content aggregators’ own websites.

Telenor just launched a few days ago its new ringback tone service called Ventetoner which has been enabled for roll out by Telenor’s 12 operating companies across Europe and Asia. The novelty in the current launch is the new technology which lets third parties sell ringback tones that work on the Telenor network. As far as I know (and feel free to comment and correct me if I'm wrong), the precedent of this kind of cooperation belongs to Jamba, a mobile content aggregator, which started a few months ago to promote T-mobile’s and Vodafone’s ringback tones in its German website; but still, at this early stage, every mobile operator that aquires the technology to enable 3rd parties promoting ringback tones is a cause for celebration.

If you're curious to now just how powerful this strategy is and how it helped Jamba and T-mobile to increase their penetration numbers, both T-mobile and Jamba are going to present their success stories at the upcoming Ringback Tones Marketing Seminar in Miami at the 18-19th of April. For online registration to the Seminar, follow the link. Also you can contact me for more information and agenda.

John White: Mobile Messaging Futures (Part IV)

Welcome to the third part of the mobile messaging coverage. Today, John White of Portio Research Ltd will be visiting here. If you missed the previous parts you can follow these links: Part I, Part II and Part III.

Let's welcome John:
Hi John. Thank you for coming back, how are you? :)
Hi Xen, thanks a lot, I’m doing great thanks.
Today, you're going to share some more insights about the mobile messaging futures
Yes! Here’s what Portio Research has to say about it:

Why has growth been so slow for mobile email?

Once we understand this argument, we can put mobile email into perspective. Set against an installed base of 2 billion plus SMS-capable handsets, mobile email has only just got off the starting blocks. RIM’s BlackBerry is widely accepted as the market leading device of choice for corporate executives who need reliable mobile email, yet after years of pushing these excellent devices into the market, the installed base of BlackBerry subscribers, worldwide, in mid-2006, reached only a little over 6 million. Taken alone, 6 million or more is a great success for RIM, but compared to the 2 billion souls around the world with SMS in the palm of their hands, it’s just a drop in the ocean.

Looking forward perhaps 10 or 15 years, we should see a future where email becomes the unchallenged #1 most popular form of non-verbal communication on the planet. With billions of people connected to the Internet, wired and wireless, email will surely be the messaging format that most people use, but this is unlikely to be a conscious decision on the part of the consumer. By this time, how an individual is connected to the Internet, and which messaging platform they are using won’t matter - and the user will neither know nor care how it all works. Messages - text or images, moving or still, with or without attachments, sound, colour, etc - will be sent and received by any device, any time, any place, with or without wires, and telecommunications service providers, if they are smart, will not burden consumers by even trying to explain how it all works.

But getting us to that vision of the future from where we are now will take some time, and there will doubtless be some barriers to cross along the way. To move towards a point where mobile email becomes the mass market messaging format of choice will require absolutely seamless integration of competing technological standards, in an industry that so far has a poor track record on standardisation. For mobile email to start reaching deep into the mass market we need widespread penetration of email-enabled devices, we need to see simple, transparent pricing and we clearly need effortless interoperability between telecoms operators, not only mobile network operators but also wireline operators and the broader Internet community as a whole.

So it may be a while before consumers all use mobile email, but what about the enterprise sector?

In the short term, mobile email solutions such as BlackBerry will remain popular tools with company executives, and many operators around the world are promoting their own email solutions, and this should slowly help the sector to grow. But as we learned from MMS, it takes a long time for handset penetration to build a critical mass of users, and a long time for a service to penetrate the consumer masses who are more price-sensitive than corporate users.

Further hampering the take up of mobile email in the enterprise environment, corporate IT departments are unclear about how to integrate mobility in the broader world of the corporate IT infrastructure. Should mobility be bought with other IT and telecom services from long standing, trusted suppliers, or separately, directly from the network? Should corporations equip large sections of the workforce with mobile devices, possibly costing a hefty slice of the IT budget, or can companies tap into the devices these individuals already own? If using their own devices, who should pay the bill and how does the corporation control network security? Corporations are understandably concerned about making these decisions, and so far no clear precedent has been set.

Again this presents an opportunity for SMS, and a problem for mobile email. While big companies can afford complete mobility solutions, for many small and medium sized enterprises that simply is not an option. In mature markets such as Europe and North America, the vast majority of employees already have an SMS-enabled device in their pockets. Solutions are available to offer some email functionality to SMS, such as copy, back-up, archive, forward, auto-divert, out-of-office reply and so on. If enterprises could buy into these solutions from network operators at a fraction of the cost of replacing all those handsets, many SMEs might find that SMS has an affordable place in the corporate communications infrastructure, at least for a few years while the industry hammers out the technical barriers to cheap, widespread mobile email for all.

So mobile email has a strong future, but it would be a mistake to expect it to replace SMS for many years yet, probably the best part of a decade. Mobile email will continue to grow year-on-year and big corporations will start deploying large scale mobile email solutions as time goes by, but mobile email for the consumer mass market remains some years away. Hundreds of millions of email-enabled devices need to penetrate the market first, alongside cheap and easy-to-use services, and technical issues around standardisation need to be ironed out before they have a chance to put people off. Remember ‘you never get a second chance to make a good first impression’. 

And where does that leave mobile IM?

Yet again we find it’s pretty much the same story for mobile IM, plus or minus a few subtle differences. Again mobile IM requires market maturity to make a big impression on the messaging industry globally. Hundreds of millions of IM-enabled handsets need to penetrate the market, interoperability agreements need to be in place and operators need to work together to ensure standardisation and the removal of technical barriers. Much of the promise around mobile IM lies in the argument that hundreds of millions of individuals already use IM services on their PCs, and these people are likely to switch effortlessly to using IM on their mobile handsets instead.

While this may eventually happen, this theory relies on a number of factors. For one, maybe these people use IM on their PCs because they sit in front of a PC all day anyway, so that’s unlikely to change. Secondly, IM on the mobile handset needs to be a perfect replica of the desktop experience, or better, in order to attract users away from a cheap wireline broadband connection to a more expensive wireless connection. Facilitating this experience will mean network operators, handset vendors and IM heavyweights such as AOL, Yahoo and MSN working closely together to ensure standardisation of handset display configuration and so on. Finally, true IM requires presence awareness in order to function as it does in the desktop environment. For operators worldwide to deploy fully IMPS (Instant Messaging and Presence Services) compliant IM services and have those service fully interoperable around the globe will take some time, and until that happens, without presence awareness, IM offers little more utility to end users than good old SMS, which everyone already has and already knows how to use.

As markets move forwards mobile IM is likely to gain increasing popularity in certain countries, such as the US and some big Asian nations, where desktop IM is already popular. For hardcore users IM is likely to be cheaper than SMS, but in strong SMS markets, such as Europe, operators will keep SMS prices low and IM prices less competitive. Cannibalisation will inevitably happen at some stage, once all-IP based networks penetrate the mass market and IMPS improves the functionality of IM, but until then SMS is likely to continue to wear the crown.

Thank you John for this interview, it was VERY insightful! :)

Tune in next Sunday for the my next visitor!

Pulse Mobile's 3D Mobile Avatars

Pulse Mobile, a San Francisco company that lets you send mobile messages with an animated avatar, has raised $7 million in a second round of financing according to PEHub.

Since last December, Cingular users can use Pulse Mobile’s “Veepers” in order to create an animated avatar and send it to friend's mobile phone or email address. Users can upload a portrait photo or pick an image from the gallery. Then, the image turns into an image with 3D animated qualities. Users can direct their avatar to nod, shake or wink and choose what kind of accent the avatar speaks the message when it is delivered to friends. Finally, friends will receive a fully animated personality delivering the chosen message with voice by MMS. To get a sense of how Veepers works click here

Little by little, we see more players populating the mobile avatars arena. The fact that investors believe in the avatars market and are putting the $$$ in it - is very good news for the entire world of avatars! GO avatars!

Music Discovery Channels and The $1M Question

The first five items in the “top ten list” of mobile music downloads usually represent about 40% of all downloads. This outstanding figure raises two paramount questions asked by all players in the music industry: how do people discover new music and how can the players help people discover more and more? For the players in the music industry, discovering more music means consuming more. So how do we really get exposed to new music?

One of the main channels for exposure to new information as well as to new music is the mass media. In other words, who hasn’t listened to the radio while driving and got to hear the new single released by the most popular artist? Another channel of exposure is recommendations. Everyone has a "broker" in his social network, who is someone that really knows music and recommends new music and music worth listening to. Brokers are regarded as unbiased, authentic and reliable. Brokers are people that you trust and like their taste and they can be friends, broadcasters, or even music critics...

So heading to the million dollar question, how can these channels be leveraged to promote more mobile music? The first example of leveraging mass media to discover music comes from South Korea. Korean operators invested in new technologies in order to create a more convenient user experience for buying ringback tones. Both KTF and SKT use QR codes. QR codes are 2D codes which are published in newspapers, bus stops, billboards etc’ and contain information which is captured with a cameraphone (like in the illustration above). The cameraphone reads the information stored in the QR code and the user gets his\her new ringback tone (for a commercial of QR codes follow this link to Youtube). The second example is using video clips on a music channel. While the clip is playing, a bubble of information appears on the screen offering the viewers to get this song as their new ringback tone by sending a short code via SMS. Both examples leverage existing user behavior as well as impulsive buying.

A more “techie” channel of exposure is through several web based applications. These applications are actually the technological equivalent of the recommendation mechanism mentioned above. By this I refer to many cool companies like Pandora and Musicovery that developed web tools to discover new music based on tagging, categorizing (Pandora’s music genome project is really worthy of note) and community’s recommendations (usually done by ranking). Musicovey took it a step further with links to iTunes and Amazon.

In the mobile arena, one of the pioneers is MyStrands which just launched its Social Player last week. MyStrands offers a “music player for mobile devices (Symbian Series 60, 3rd edition) with two main characteristics: it is a music discovery tool and a strong community builder”. As a music discovery tool, it provides real-time recommendations of songs that are similar to the currently-playing song. Also, 30′ clips of the recommended songs can be streamed to the mobile device, and users can always learn more about the songs on MyStrands mobile website. To watch MyStrands' demo and more just follow this link.

Hopefully, in the future we will see more of these discovery applications in the mobile arena. If operators and content aggregators would enter this field, we could enjoy a wide range of new services. Imagine getting exposed to new music through the mobile and then being able to set it as a ringback tone in just one click…

Carnival of the Mobilists at Golden Swamp

The Carnival of Mobilists is back in town with a blast of the best mobile writing of the week. Judy Breck of the Golden Swamp has done a great job putting all together so head over! :)

John White: Mobile Messaging Futures

Welcome to the third part of the mobile messaging coverage. Today, John White of Portio Research Ltd will be visiting here. If you missed the previous parts you can follow these links: Part I and  Part II.

Let's welcome John:

Hi John. Thank you for coming back, how are you? :)
Hi Xen, thanks a lot, I’m doing great thanks.

Today, you're going to share some insights about the mobile messaging futures
Yes! Here’s what Portio Research has to say about it:

Many in the mobile industry feel that MMS, mobile email and mobile IM have somehow failed as messaging platforms and that SMS, though it seems to pain people to admit it, is the only truly successful mass market messaging format. However, this is not the case, while SMS is a truly staggering mass market phenomenon, these other messaging formats have not failed, they have simply failed to match up to the runaway success of SMS.

For some reason SMS has become a ‘dirty word’ for some people, analysts don’t like to talk about it, mobile operators don’t like to focus on it, and no-one treats SMS like it’s sexy any more. It’s as though SMS is “old” technology, as if it no longer deserves any credit, it should be consigned to the history books. This is crazy. Worldwide, SMS still accounts for approximately 75 to 80% of all non-voice service revenues, SMS traffic volumes are still growing at a breath taking pace and as worldwide subscriber numbers climb from 2.5 Bn to 4.5 Bn over the next 5 or 6 years, SMS is the only non-voice service likely to gain widespread acceptance among the majority of these new mobile users.

Worldwide, SMS traffic hit 1 trillion messages in 2005, and that figure is set to reach over 3 trillion by the end of 2011. Set against that backdrop, of course other messaging formats look small. But MMS has not failed; worldwide MMS traffic touched 14 billion messages in 2005 and is forecast to pass 115 billion by the end of 2011. These are not small numbers, and while they are only a fraction of the volume that SMS has achieved, MMS should still be seen as a great success.

So if MMS is a success, why has it not replaced SMS?

MMS has not failed; the industry had totally unrealistic expectations of MMS in the first place. MMS was hyped as the natural replacement for SMS, but that shows a misunderstanding of SMS and the reasons why SMS has been such a big hit worldwide. SMS owes its success to its simplicity. It is the quickest, easiest and cheapest way for two people to communicate a short and simple message and as such it serves as an extremely useful communications option that is affordable universally, even among some of the lowest income groups of society.

MMS, on the other hand, has been misunderstood from the start. MMS should be seen more as a mobile entertainment service than as a messaging service. MMS is more complex and expensive than SMS, so consumers are unlikely to use MMS to communicate a simple message, when SMS does the job so quickly and easily and costs so little. MMS will always look like a failure when compared alongside SMS, yet when you consider MMS in its own right, as an entertainment application and content delivery tool, then MMS can be seen as a very popular and successful service.

Why has growth been so slow?

MMS struggled to gain ground between 2002 and 2004 primarily because the service was not fully supported and the necessary equipment was not in widespread circulation. At the time of launch, MMS-enabled handsets, with GPRS support, colour screen and camera included, were comparatively expensive, and many networks launched services amid an array of complex tariffs. MMS was often charged according to the size of the message (per-KB) which left end-users confused about costs and created the perception that picture messaging was expensive.

Further problems were caused by a lack of standardisation among handset vendors, leaving screen display for MMS messages unreliable, and a lack of signed interoperability agreements between network operators further hampered the potential growth of MMS services. Add all this together and throw in a complex user interface and it is hardly surprising MMS got off to such a slow start. The industry failed to understand that until the penetration level of MMS-capable handsets reached a certain critical mass, widespread use of the service was never going to happen.

Only now is MMS growing in popularity since all networks are fully interoperable, colour-screen cameraphones are in widespread circulation and MMS tariffs are now cheap and transparent. Compare this to SMS: worldwide there are approximately 2 BILLION SMS enabled handsets in operation, it’s cheap and easy to use, widely supported in almost every corner of the mobile world and there are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of services and applications that utilise SMS as a communication medium. That is why SMS is so popular, and why MMS has taken so long to take off.

Thank you John for this interview. Wanna read more about mobile email and mobile IM?? Tune in next Sunday! :)

New: Klonies Predefined

Hi everyone,
As I was getting some emails asking about the Klonies and how things are going with them, I decided to dedicate a few of my posts to this ever so interesting phenomenon, and to the ‘making of Klonies’ in particular.  I began with the content, how do we know what people would like etc’ and followed with an illustrated description of the process of the design and draw.

If some of you have missed the previous posts, here’s a quick reminder about what Klonies is: Klonies are a new service of personalized Avatars by the mobile solutions provider Comverse, that enables the creation of Avatars from a big content library of body types, eyes, hairstyles, hats, glasses, moods, clothes, branded accessories, etc., which can be used in traditional Web forums, as well as to extend this experience to the mobile arena. Comverse has created a mobile Caller ID service, by which a user can create his Klonie either on the Web or on his mobile handset. Klonies let youth segment do something they could never even dream of doing before: create expressive avatars that represent them on other people’s phones. Klonies give the users extended means for self expression: they define how they are seen by their friends, on their phones.

Today, I wanted to share some good news: Klonies has a new type of content - the ‘predefined pictures’. Showing around the Klonies at many sales meetings and conferences brought up a lot of reactions; many people love the process of selecting body, hairstyle, clothes, backgrounds etc’ while others want to keep pictures we made for the demonstration as they are (“can I keep it?”). This made us think… Some people want to have the full experience of selecting and making while others just want a ready to use picture and would love to adopt something predefined, so why don’t we offer both kinds???

And thinking about it a little longer brought the following idea: if users select from a predefined library of pics, why should we limit them only to our Klonie, Klone or Klonster? We can offer a vast variety of other cool picture as well.

With this thought in mind, our designers hit the designing board and started to draw some sketches. After a few shots, this 3 types of content are the first to be brought to you:

Psycho Pets

Urban junkies

A selections of babes

Check it out Klonies at Skype. After selecting a body, press the red tab called ‘Picture’ to see the entire library of content. Let me know what you think of it!

Tell Me Where You Are With Your Ringback Tone!

Usually, when you think of ringback tones you think of music played while waiting for the other side to pick up the phone and answer the call. But there's more to ringback tones than that! I have already covered in the past some study cases of operators who took the ringback tone to the next level with very creative types of content which are not necessarily music. What I haven’t thought of before is using the ringback tone to let your caller know your location!

The Broadband in India blog brings the following story of the Telecom Regulatory Authority of India (TRAI) which “has also told the mobile companies to provide a special ring back tone to the calling party when a person is on roaming. This would benefit them as the caller would realize that the person he/she is calling is not in his hometown. TRAI said in its statement: “Mobile users can activate this facility before going abroad. This will enable minimizing calls when on international roaming, if the calling party exercises restraint.”"

[via Broadband in India : India Broadband and Telecom Blog]

I really hope to see more creative ways to leverage ringback tones to provide better services for the ringback tones users. Nice work!

Carnival of Mobilists at M-trends

This week a dear friend and mobilist, Rudy De Waele of M-trends, is hosting the Carnival of the Mobilists. Rudy has done a great job mastering so many interesting posts, you really don't want to miss it! Enjoy! :)

John White on MMS (Part II)

Welcome to the second part of the mobile messaging coverage. Today, John White of Portio Research Ltd will be visiting here and covering the MMS. If you missed the previous part you can follow the link.

Well John, the stage is all yours! :)

What is the value of MMS?
MMS generated approximately $15 Bn USD in full-year 2006, and our new “Mobile Messaging Futures 2007-2012” forecasts this rising to almost $34 Bn USD by the end of 2012.
Market size estimates Worldwide, MMS traffic volumes in 2006 reached a little over 27 Bn messages, which demonstrates remarkable growth of over 90% form the year before…when we recorded total SMS traffic at 14 bn messages worldwide for the full-year 2005.

How big is the market for MMS?
We forecast this market to continue growing healthily for several years to come, contrary to some reports than “MMS is all-but-dead”, we disagree and we see MS traffic volumes growing to reach over 131 Bn messages worldwide by the end of 2012.

When will MMS penetrate the mass consumer market?
We believe that the entire mobile industry has misunderstood MMS from the start, including most of the operators who have been working hard to drive higher adoption. MMS was sold from the start as this great successor to SMS, but that shows a complete misunderstanding of what MMS ad what has made SMS such a popular service. As explained previously, SMS owes its success to it’s utility and simplicity, it is useful, cheap, easy, quick and almost effortless. MMS is entirely different, it offers little additional utility over SMS, costs several times as much and is more time consuming and complicated to use. If anything, that makes MMS LESS useful than SMS, as a service, so why would consumers want to pay MORE to use it? We believe MMS should be seen in its own right as an entertainment service and as a premium content delivery mechanism, not as a messaging tool. SMS is all the messaging many people need, and what MMS offers is something else, something fun, the chance to send pictures to your friends…this is nice, but it is rarely an essential activity, the way many SMS messages are. As long as everyone keeps expecting MMS to follow the success of SMS, they will continue to be disappointed, but once the mobile community stops linking the two together and looks as MMS as a separate service, we can that it is a highly successful application.   

What should operators do to overcome barriers to users’ adoption?
Reduce prices, drastically. SMS is priced, in “most” markets at a price level that most people don’t have to think about. Most people just keep sending SMS messages without thinking about the cost. Once MMS can be priced at a level that people can exchange several picture messages per day without giving the cost a thought, then traffic will grow, rapidly.

Thank you John for this interview. Don't forget to tune in next Sunday for some more talkin' about mobile messaging  :)

The Making of Klonies - the Design and Draw

Last week, Ronen Ventura and Tali Perel shared some insights about research, styling and analyzing usage as preliminary stages of creating the Klonies content. Today, continuing with 'The Making of Klonies', I want to review the process of (actually) making Klonies content - the design and draw.

Deciding on a subject, theme or style (events, seasons, local culture, age group), was the first stage described in the previous post. Then, the Design and Graphics Team, which includes Ronen Ventura, Oryan Ventura and Al Toiber, take the lead. First, the team gets together for some brainstorming. After throwing ideas to the air and discussing them, each one takes a few items and hits the designing board.

To better explain the process, I’ll demonstrate using some Klonster sketches made by Al.

A. Theme - Klonies special for Halloween.

B. Item - an outfit (entire body and not only a shirt or only bottoms) of a Dracula costume.      

C. Al begins with a Klonster skeleton that looks like this (see figure 1a):

[Figure 1a]

D. First, Al makes a preliminary sketch for approval of concept (see figure 1b):

[Figure 1b]

D.1. After getting an approval, the next step is drawing a preliminary design (see figure 2a):

[Figure 2a]

D.2. The preliminary design receives more detailed comments (see figure 2b]

[figure 2b]

E. Last step is the implementation of the given comments, some corrections and final touches (see figure 3):

[Figure 3]

And here's the Klonster, all dressed up and ready to go (see figure 4):

[Figure 4]

And that's how a Klonies outfit is being made! Next time you'll browse the Klonies collection at Skype you will be able to evaluate the process that lies behind each item! :)

A Jump Into the Future - Multimedia Ringback Tones

Hi everyone,

Today I wanted to share with you a new and sexy service that according to one of the Product Managers at Comverse will be the natural evolution of the ringback tones. To do things right, I'll begin at the top :)

Once, there was no choice but to hear a dull ‘ring ring’ when you waited for your friend to answer the phone. Now, follow this carefully: Tomorrow, you place a video call to your friend. Suddenly the amazing top hit by the new hip-hop group The Beatz will fill your mobile screen. You are enjoying a great top 10 video clip until your friend answers the phone. Wouldn't that be a better way to wait?

The Multimedia ringback tone takes the very popular musical ringback tone service to a whole different dimension, from the audio space to the visual video clip arena. It allows you to enjoy watching a video clip while placing calls, as well as to entertain your callers with video clips to watch while calling you.

Sounds great? I haven't said the final word yet, which is content. There are 3 types of optional content:

• Users' content - music clips, Klonies customizable avatars, self generated content, corporate content... All depending on the segment.
• Operator content - branding (logo), promotion info, operator prompts.
• Advertisement - advertisers fund phone bills in return to placing ads at the multimedia ringback tones space. Less desirable for the callers, but it's an option.

We all know that personalization is a key growth engine to mobile services and applications and it will probably keep being a key factor in the future. Having said that, the multimedia ringback tone leverages the ringback tones' success and promotes the video arena\ tusage of 3G. It harnesses the human need to self express and provides a new and creative outlet for that. Smart!

What are your reactions?

John White on Mobile Messaging

I'm happy to welcome John White from Portio Research Ltd to review the market of mobile messaging here.

John White is Business Development Director for Portio Research and has over 17 years experience in the technical publishing industry. Working in the IT sector previously and in the telecoms industry for the last 9 or 10 years, John has extensive experience in the mobile sector.

Hi John. Thank you for visiting Xellular Identity :) How are you?
Hi Xen, thanks a lot, I’m doing great thanks :)

How big is the market for mobile messaging? What are the forecasts for the mobile messaging market?
Mobile messaging is massive, the total mobile messaging market today is worth approximately $80 Bn USD and in 2007 we will see well over 2.2 trillion messages sent back and forth worldwide between mobile devices. SMS is by far the biggest player in this space, with worldwide SMS traffic volumes exceeding 1,662 billion messages in full-year 2006, generating revenues in excess of $47 Bn USD.

As if these figures are not impressive enough, we see SMS growing for some years to reach staggering worldwide traffic volumes of more than 3.7 trillion in 2012, generating a whopping $67 Bn USD in total revenues.

What are the key country markets?
The Philippines have long been regarded as the “SMS capital of the world” and this still holds true, in fact more than ever as recent changes to SMS pricing on the islands has seen traffic roaring through the roof. Elsewhere in Asia Singapore, Malaysia, Australia and China are all hot SMS markets, and of course China takes the crown as the worlds biggest SMS market due to the sheer size of the market overall. The USA is a very hot SMS market and still growing, and in Europe Denmark, the UK and Spain are all aggressive SMS markets. In Latin America, Venezuela enjoys very high usage levels and Mexico and Argentina are strong markets too.

Who are the leading operators in this market?
In the Philippines – all of them! Elsewhere, Maxis in Malaysia stand out, Telecom Personal in Argentina, O2 in Ireland and the UK and Netcom in Norway all enjoy way-above-average traffic volumes when measures on a per-subscriber-per-month basis.

How do you explain the dominant position of SMS as the worlds leading messaging technology?
It’s simple, it’s all about utility, price and simplicity. We have been saying this and printing this in our reports for some time now – SMS is useful, it serves a purpose, it can communicate a simple message from A to B quickly and efficiently at times when a voice call is not so convenient. SMS is easy, cheap, quick and many people think sending an SMS is fun. It is discreet, private, effortless and only takes a few seconds. There is no “downside” to SMS, it serves a purpose, it does the job well and it is quick, cheap and easy – what’s not to like?

How significant contributor to the overall revenue is the mobile messaging expected to be in the future?
We have not specifically forecast ‘messaging-as-a-percentage-of-ARPU’ going forward so I can’t give you exact numbers, but I firmly believe messaging will continue to be the biggest contributor to non-voice service revenues for some years to come. Currently, worldwide, voice accounts for approximately 80% of total mobile service revenues across the globe and messaging accounts for approximately 80% of all non-voice service revenues contributing to that total. AS other services grow then messaging’s dominant position will decline, but we only imagine that happening at a rate of 1 or 2 percentage points per year for the next few years, then perhaps faster once 3G becomes ubiquitous in the mass market.

What promises to sell in the future?
Mobile email, in the long term, but that’s still a good few years away for consumer mass markets.

John White will be here next Sunday for more talkin' about mobile messaging. Thank you John and see you next week! :)

Carnival of Mobilists at TomSoft

This week David Beers is hosting the Carnival of the Mobilists after a short break.  David has done such a great job, you really don't want to miss it! Head over and enjoy! :)

Content Is King - The making of Klonies

Lately, I keep getting readers emails saying that I haven’t written about the Klonies for a while now… So I decided to give you a peak of the Klonies backstage. I’ll start with the Klonies content and continue with the making of in my next post.

We all know that when it comes to mobile, content is the king. You can have a cool sharing app or community but if you don’t have attractive or compelling enough content - you’re doomed.

Just a quick note - Klonies, for those who don’t know, are a new service of personalized Avatars by the mobile solutions provider Comverse, that enables the creation of Avatars from a big content library of body types, eyes, hairstyles, hats, glasses, moods, clothes, branded accessories, etc., which can be used in traditional Web forums, as well as to extend this experience to the mobile arena. Comverse has created a mobile Caller ID service, by which a user can create his Klonie either on the Web or on his mobile handset. Klonies let youth segment do something they could never even dream of doing before: create expressive avatars that represent them on other people’s phones. Klonies give the users extended means for self expression: they define how they are seen by their friends, on their phones.

To be able to cover the Klonies content I met Ronen Ventura, the Klonies Chief Graphic Designer and Tali Perel, the Klonies Styling Adviser. Here’s what they told me:

Usually we start with a meeting of the designers, Styling Adviser and Marketing for a brain storming, to raise upcoming events (Valentines, Halloween, spring break etc’), topics, characters and that sort of leads. For example, when we launched the Klonies on Skype last year, we offered a wide collection of Football Mania clothing as it was only a few days before the world cup.

Other lead is analyzing users downloads; we can share with you that we were amazed to find out that men and women are very different in their preferences:

Most women want to be either bad or cool:

We see a lot of laid-back men:

As for dressing up:

Also, sport is the strongest theme amongst males, which nonexistent with the ladies. So, by analyzing downloads we get to learn a lot about tastes and trends. Also this is a great pointer of which areas to need to be broadened.

Apart form events, locals fashion also inspires the Klonies content. Our styling adviser explores fashion and teen magazines to get the sense and taste of specific audiences. Klonies sales people usually buy local magazines as part of their tasks when flying on business trips.

And you'll have to tune in later on for the second part of 'The Making of Klonies' :)