Moses Kagan's Aurora Borealis

The NY Times has Verizon opening up its network to non-Verizon devices by the end of 2008. Customers will have the opportunity to purchase any (approved) device and hook it up to the web using the Verizon network, presumably for a monthly fee.

Expect a wave of newly smart devices hooked up to the web. For example: Your car sat nav is going to communicate with your email address book, Yelp and Google, so that you won't need to enter an address or run into a known traffic jam ever again.

Welcome to the wireless world.

Labels: mobile, Verizon

This is my mobile internet manifesto:

1. Three successful business models have emerged on the internet: advertising (Yahoo & Google) / subscription (Match.com) / transaction fees (eBay)

2. This was b/c of the payment problem – it was impossible to charge customers small amounts, b/c credit card companies didn’t want the business and internet service providers a. didn’t understand it and b. used variable IP addresses and so lacked a perfectly straightforward manner of determining who had purchased what

3. Meanwhile, WAP emerged – crap technology, bad hardware, slow speeds, etc

4. But, the mobile networks, with their long history of billing for premium rate phone lines, slowly worked out a creaky, painful, but ultimately workable way to bill subscribers for purchases on their phone bills

5. More recently – emergence of WiFi and high-speed mobile data connections, flat rate data contracts

6. Launch of the iPhone and competitive gadgets

7. There will be a huge audience of (affluent) people with: high quality mobile internet devices, fast connections, and the ability to buy goods and services priced at $0.10 / $0.20 / $0.50, etc. – admittedly, the mobile networks still charge far too much for their service but this will change

8. Over the next 2-3 years, new business models will emerge that have the potential to re-shape the way we think about internet businesses

Labels: billing, internet, mobile

Orange released its new Digital Media Index recently. Approximately 2m of Orange's 15m UK subscribers have visited the Orange WAP portal in the past month. If we assume that another 1-2m have used off portal services but not visited the portal, 20-27% of Orange customers are using the mobile internet.

The question is: How does this compare to the internet to internet penetration? According to Harris Interactive (http://blogs.zdnet.com/ITFacts/?p=10998), the US had internet usage rates of crossed the 30% threshold during 1996-7. Those years also marked the emergence of the first wave of successful non-porn internet companies.

Are we approaching lift-off for successful, non porn mobile internet companies?

Labels: mobile, Orange, wap, Yahoo

Am going to be working on a consulting project for one of the UK's most admired newspapers. Will be working with them to increase revenue from mobile / internet. It's an interesting space - one which clearly offers considerable opportunity and also considerable risk. I'm excited to get started.

Among the specific issues we'll be discussing:
- Search optimisation
- Direct relationships with online retail
- Re-purposing of content
- Incorporation of interactivity in the print editions using mobile phones

I'd be interested in hearing from others regarding their experiences with newspaper companies moving online. Thoughts?

Labels: comparison shopping, mobile, newspapers

Just met with Ben Turner-Brown, Sales Director at Pitch, the recently (November 2006) launched, London-based, mobile social network. By advertising on MTV and other youth-oriented TV channels, Pitch has managed to get 40k users to opt in to its service. Pitch allows all of the usual social networking functionality, plus access to a large catalogue of mobile content, including ringtones, wallpapers, etc. Users are monetised via sale of their attention to brands in the form of advertising in various formats. [Note - this theme of the value of attention is one to which I'll return later.]

So far, Pitch is serving 700k impressions per month to the 40k users - meaning 17.5 impressions per user per month. Since Pitch messages all users roughly 3x per week (12x per month) and counts those as impressions, the actual number of 'active impressions' (where the user actually goes to Pitch) is only 5.5 impressions per user per month.

The questions, as always, comes down to how many of those 40k users are generating 'active impressions' - and how valuable those active users are to brands.

Still, it's a great start, one that bodes well for the mobile content space.

Labels: advertising, content, mobile, social-networking

To Kettners on Romilly Street in Soho with Rob Willis of 4th Republic to discuss opportunities in the mobile content and mobile direct to consumer areas.

Rob is very clued-up on opportunities to syndicate premium content to publishers on operator portals around the world. 4th Republic is selling white-labeled content in more than 20 countries. They're also doing some experiments with D2C business models promoted via a variety of channels.

We're considering using Guerilla, 4th Republic's parent company, to make some TV ads for our direct to consumer proposition. Their experience in the area sets them apart from the competition and we're excited about the opportunity to work together.

Labels: 4th Republic, mobile, tv

Just read this article about Yahoo launching a mobile advertising network: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/27/technology/27mobile.html

Call me skeptical, but I’m not a buyer of Yahoo traffic for the direct-to-consumer mobile video service we've set up for a client.

The quality of the traffic we’ve seen from every mobile advertising platform we’ve trialled in the UK, with the exception of Google search, has been awful. Over the last three months, we’ve run banner ad campaigns across several of the more established mobile advertising networks. The conversion rate on the traffic has been around 0%, with the basket size coming in at around 0 items.

For now, the strategy is: bid up those Google keywords.

Labels: advertising, Google, mobile, Yahoo