I attended the IBDNetwork‘s Under the Radar Mobility Conference at the Microsoft Conference Center in Mountain View yesterday. Being rather new to the mobile technology space, it was an informative and enlightening experience for me, helping me better appreciate the challenges in creating successful mobile products and services. And although the presentations were informative, relatively few were impassioned or inspiring … helping me better appreciate the passion of the presenters — and the direction of the coaches — in similar events sponsored by the Northwest Entrepreneur Network, my alma mater from my own startup experience.
I’d earlier written about entrepreneurial passion and discipline — and more recently about passion and professionalism in a research context — and I was a bit surprised that discipline and professionalism seemed to be so much more prevalent (or at least evident) than passion in most of the presentations given yesterday. I don’t know [yet] how much to attribute this emphasis to the mobile industry, the northern California culture, the sponsoring organization or the nature of the event. As N=1 at this point (in my experience of all of those dimensions), perhaps it’s too early to generalize.
Focusing more on the content of the presentations, most presenters highlighted one or more of the technical challenges involved in creating a new mobile product or service: the plethora of mobile devices (I heard several references to supporting "400+" devices), the multiplicity of platforms (Symbian, Windows Mobile, Linux, and all their variations and versions), and the differences among wireless networks and operators … the latter offering political challenges that in some cases are at least as daunting as the technical issues.
Each of the sessions had a panel of judges, all of whom represented potential investors — either venture funding companies or large telecommunications / technology companies. The audience was encouraged to vote (via an SMS service provided by Mozes) for their favorites. Judges were also polled for their favorites … and although there was some disagreement between the winners selected by each group, there was little divergence of opinions.
Media Sharing (Session 1, Track 1):
PixPulse: Jimmy Lan (Intel), presenting in lieu of of David Xue (CEO), who was at another meeting that was related to raising revenue, described PixPulse as "a media publishing platform for enterprises to build private label social networks and deliver media". One of the judges on the panel asked a question repeated often throughout the day: is this a feature or a company? Answers to nearly all questions were [understandably] deferred to the [disappointingly] absent CEO.
PixSense (audience favorite): Faraz Hoodbhoy (CEO) described PixSense as "offering mobile carriers the infrastructure for monetizing user generated content". In addition to providing some of the most interesting and helpful background information about the target market — e.g., 79 billion camerphone photos were taken in 2005, 227 billion are expected to be taken in 2009, 95% of cameraphone photos never leave the handset — Faraz also offered what I consider to be the most compelling competitive advantage of any company presenting yesterday: PixSense’s Bio-Compression Technology, that achieves 60-80% compression of image, video and audio files on the handset. The value proposition for the user is lower cost (money and/or time) for transferring high quality multimedia files; the value proposition for the carriers is a resulting increased inclination by users to transmit such files using underutilized data services.
Sharpcast (judges’ favorite): Gibu Thomas (Founder and CEO) described "a platform that allows any application to be a service", managing data across desktop/web/mobile, and online/offline, careating a Blackberry-like experience for consumer media. Gibu had one of the catchiest phrases of the day — syncing without thinking — and emphasized the value of convenience (I’ve always thought that if necessity is the mother of invention, convenience is the father). The key question, of course, is [how much] will consumers pay for that convenience. Toward the end of the Q&A session, Gibu shared some interesting thoughts about important characteristics for a successful entrepreneur: tenacity, scrappiness and humility (the latter reminding me of Bill Buxton’s recent point about the risk of "precious" ideas).
TinyPictures: John Poisson (Founder and CEO), described Radar (no relation to "under the radar"), a service to enable people to "instantly share pictures from your cameraphone with people you choose". John showed three ways that chosen friends can view and interact with shared photos — channels view, list view, comments view — that are available on both a desktop client and mobile client. What I enjoyed most about John’s presentation was the strong emphasis on the human (vs. technology) side of the equation. He emphasized that Radar offers "an ongoing visual conversation between you and your friends" and provided specific examples of daily usage: a 19 year old who posts 2-7 photos per day, views 60-90 photos, leaves 6-8 comments on friends’ photos, and checks in 25 times per day (18 via desktop, 7 via mobile client), and his 45 year old mother, who posts 5-7 photos, views 10-20, leaves 1-2 comments, and checks in 6-8 times per day.
Marketing / Advertising (Session 2, Track 1)
Admob: Omar Hamoui (Founder and CEO) presented the world’s largest online marketplace for mobile web advertising. Admob’s pay-per-click text ads have had over 300M views in the 11 months they have been operating, through 6 channels: communities, contextual search, downloads, entertainment, news and information, and portals. A do-it-yourself interface enables advertisers to target text ads based on location/carriers, platforms, phone capabilities and/or manufacturers, and a bidding process is used to determine placement.
Cascada Mobile: Neil Closner (President) presented a pair of applications that facilitate word-of-mouth referrals for mobile applications (primarily, if not solely, games) delivered to friends’ phones. The Cascada Tag Engine enables developers to integrate cross-carrier, cross-handset referral capabilities into applications; Cascada Tag Marketer is a customizable, branded, on device portal for mobile content distribution and advertising. Neil claimed that they have a 25% acceptance rate — I find it hard to believe that 25% of the people who have received referrals from friends have clicked through to buy the games … maybe to try the games, although even then, I wonder what the sample population size is.
GreyStripe (audience and judges’ favorite): Michael Chang (CEO) presented the first and only fully ad-supported mobile game distribution service (GameJump.com), with over 100K users, and over 10K game plays per day in a market that is $300B. The service inserts ads before and after gameplay (via their AdWrap web service). Michael said that "free" fixes the biggest problem for mobile gaming: education & awareness, and suggested that advertising in mobile games is additive to "for pay content" — it helps offer gameplaying further down the long tail of prospective gamers. They currently target ads by game genre and/or gamer demographic (location, time of day, handset model / manufacturer).
Mobileplay: James Ryan (CEO) presented an ad-supported mobile content aggregator and community portal, with a large publisher network and a number of large customers. I was surprised to learn that they can fetch $35-50 CPM rates for banner ads (5 times what James claims is the typical rates on the web).
Social Messaging (Session 3, Track 1):
EQO: Bill Tam (CEO) presented "mobile communications for the social web", with a potential market of 875M IM users across 400 networks. Their goal is to extend the social web, IM, and VOIP to the mobile phone. The service was launched 8 months ago, with 27 handsets; they now handle 400+ handsets, 260 carrier networks, and 10 languages. Their mantra is "take your buddies with you".
Flurry: Sean Byrnes (Co-Founder and CEO) offered a similar message: "It’s your world. Take it with you". His goal is to make mobile data service features (e.g., email, news and RSS subscriptions) avaialble to non-technical users. They launched in January, and now support 400+ models, 6600 email providers, 700+ carriers, 200+ countries. One of the panelists suggested that their primary sustainable advantage is their tool for rapid porting.
Loopt (audience and judges’ favorite): Mark Jacobstein (EVP Corporate Development, and self-described "grey hair and mentor-in-chief") presented the first social mapping service for mobile phones. Mark noted that the most common instant message in the world is "where are you?"; Loopt provides an answer: showing where your friends are on a map. The service currently uses GPS, but can also use other location finding capabilities (cell-ID, TDOA, etc.), and enables users to send proximity based broadcast messages to friends and get alerts when a friend becomes, well, proximate. In the future, they plan to offer the capability to tag places, create events (Evite on your phone) and offer local search. The target demographic is 18-34 year old urban folk. These ideas have been around for years, but Mark claimed that changes in the infrastructure (location APIs, support for mobile 911), along with Loopt’s careful and conservative approach to providing safety, security and privacy will result in a fundamental change of behavior (e.g., user acceptance). He noted that once a user experiences the "enhanced serendipity" once, they will never want to be without the service. They soft launched 7 weeks ago with Boost (part of Sprint/Nextel, targeting the younger crowd with a tag line of "Where you at?"); they already have 40K users, and will be doing a major launch in December (at which point the application will be pre-installed on all Boost phones). Thus far, they have experienced viral growth, with the average customer inviting 6 new friends, resulting in 5K users / week, with subscriptions priced at $2.99/month ("freemium"). They will be rolling out a "Yelp on a phone" service on Monday. Managing privacy issues will be crucial to their success; Mark said everything is opt-in, requiring an explicit invitation, acceptance, and activation, and it only works if you know someone’s phone number.
Renzoo: Denis Kotlar (CEO) presented an application that enables users to get email and voicemail, anwhere, anytime, from any account, including skype, using any mobile device without requiring any download. Renzoo enables full atachment viewing (MS office & PDF), as well as ringtones, mp3 and video.
Unfortunately, I had to leave early, and so did not hear any presentations during the fourth session, nor the wrapup on "The Mobile Playbook", but it was certainly an enlightening experience to hear about all the challenges and approaches to succeeding in the mobile arena from an entrepreneurial perspective.