Under the Radar - Mobility

Posted on November 15, 2007
Filed Under Innovation |

Swung down to the UTR event on mobility today. I missed the morning session because I had to go to traffic court ($122, no traffic school option), so I missed the search and discovery session that featured two of my recent favorite companies, Boopsie and Buzzwire, and the publishing platform session featuring Mobio.

Here in the messaging/sharing session are Heysan!, Trutap, Utterz, and yoMedia. One thing that strikes me about most of these services is that they abstract and provide alternative access to 3rd party services like Twitter, Facebook, and Wordpress. I’m not entirely buying this because the asset they are building is, hopefully, a customer base as opposed to a new process model, master data store, or transaction model.

This may be a little abstract in itself but if your company’s value is by making something else incrementally better as opposed to recasting it, then you are at the mercy of the service in question and their ability to do it themselves. Everyone talks about a social dimension that supposedly creates meaningful value through the archive of interaction and behavior data, but what is the product or data service that is created as a result of having an archive. If the archive of interactions and behaviors isn’t exposed then what is the point?

Specific to the mobile market, many of these companies suggest that because there are so many mobile phones in existence that the opportunities are limitless. I would consider that assumption very carefully because the vast majority of the market takes advantage of just one aspect of the cell phone in their pocket, they make phone calls.

yoMedia is a mobile content community that caught my attention. What I especially liked about their approach is that it is not dependent on endpoint user adoption but private label offerings for organizations. The appeal for organizations working with yoMedia is that they accomplish a concrete objective, such as increasing interaction with customers at a ski resort through fixed cameras and embedded advertising. In the case of Media Mountain the enhancement of customer experience is significant and evident. I really liked this company but acknowledge that they could have a slower ramp because they are dependent on business entities adopting their platform.

Quattro Wireless is a mobile web ad platform. Quite honestly I find the notion of advertising being delivered to my mobile phone to be discouraging. The user experience for mobile web apps is already so bad that adding ads to it surely won’t be an enhancing factor. More to the point, why do advertisers persist in an ideology that is about delivering a message through some ad payload as opposed to a function that not only delivers the ad but also provides some utility for me?

For example, Covergirl is a Quattro client. Instead of delivering a banner to a mobile phone user, why not allow them to take a picture of themselves, upload it and then have a Covergirl service to “retouch” the photo and deliver via text message a shopping list of products.

Vringo is a pretty interesting service, basically it allows you to select a video ringtone and push it forward of a friend you choose. It’s video ring forward. I don’t know what technical requirements you have to meet in order to use this but they did make a point of saying that it works on 2.5G networks, which I assume to mean EDGE.

For more coverage see WebWare’s posts on UTR.

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